======== Pages Reported ======== Yahoo = Google = MSN = Pub Date Article 1 . . . 610 . . . 320 . . . . 436 . . May 19th Article 2 . . . 253 . . . 246 . . . . 269 . . June 1st Article 3 . . 2060 . . .1000 . . . .239 . . June 14th

. . Total . . .2923 . . .1566 . . . .944

That's a lot of pages. Now, some of those won't have any live link. Yes, it does happen even though it really shouldn't. A lot of sites it's on won't have much or any page rank and probably quite a few sites are not relevant. People aren't always careful about selecting relevant articles. Some will be on pages that won't pass rank. However, what's left are relevant incoming one-way links - some of which will be from sites with at least some authority. Say even 20% of links are relevant and/or from sites with some rank. That's a minimum (I believe I'm being pretty conservative with 20% figure) of over 1000 useful incoming links based on relevant content.

I was astonished. And then I felt really stupid - I knew this, but I really didn't GET it or I would have been writing and distributing from day 1. You're looking at truth behind power of articles and article distribution. No tricks, no fancy high powered tools, no big expensive anything at all.

Are you telling yourself you can't write articles? I'm telling you that you can. If you can talk, you can write. If you need help, there are lots of resources about how to write - some very good ones are free, some are quite inexpensive. Other tools are more expensive.

Ghostwriters are another alternative. A little tricky and possibly slightly expensive for really high quality work, but there's also a lot of information available on how to do it right.

My advice here is - whatever it takes, start publishing your own original content on your website and start distributing it now. For building long term success, there's very little you can do that will have anywhere near same results.

The best way to stay on top of this type of information is to keep your finger on pulse of industry. One way to do this is by using RSS feeds and Google's news alerts (except for last one of course, for which you can just check vendor's website). For example, if you're selling weather stations, you might set up an RSS feed or Google news alert for "Davis Weather Stations" and you'll receive press releases, industry reports, and other news about that subject matter.

Once a site is up and generating revenue, it's tempting to place it in auto-pilot and move on to something else. Move on to something else, yes, but it's best to keep building on a successful going concern