OK boys and girls. Today we're having a pop quiz.

I heard that groan. Don't worry. This will be over in a matter of seconds.

Q1: "__________" is King.

Q2: Link "____________" and link "____________" matter oodles to Google.

The answers are provided in following...

Are you hearing a lot of talk from marketers about writing and submitting artic|es to art:cle directories and other ezine publishers? I knew you were. There's been a glut of articles on writing articles. For good reason.

Now I haven't been actively writing and submitting articles until just recently, but effects have been noticeable. So, what have I noticed?

In last 4 weeks, I submitted three artic|es to a broad network of article directories and announcement groups. Yes, I did take one week off. So call me a slacker. The three article titles that I submitted were:

"How to Put Your Bookmark on Top Every Time."

"When a Customer Has Done Everything to Get Your Goat"

"We'll fix that later..."

I'm going to report following numbers in real time as I'm writing this article. This relates to "Q2" above. You can do this too because I'll describe each step exactly. It's real simple.

1) Go to http://www.google.com 2) Type exact article title for each of following titles and put it inside of quotation marks. (The quotation marks force Google to look for exact phrase.) 3) Click "Google Search" button, and... 3) Be am@zed.

Google reports:

"How to Put Your Bookmark on Top Every Time" - Indexed on 5,820 pages

"When a Customer Has Done Everything to Get Your Goat" - Indexed on 62 pages

"We'll fix that later..." - Indexed on 554 pages

Now, am I going to tell you that in 3 weeks time I've managed to generate 6,436 inbound links to my website? Not. Submitting artic|es doesn't do those kinds of miracles, but my artic|es are definitely out there for other webmasters and ezine publishers to use.

Unique visitor count to GoThrive.com has double since starting my article submissions, and as artic|es get picked up and published, inbound links will continue to materialize with time. Not a bad investment of time since entire process of writing article and submitting it takes no more than one hour per week.

Inbound links pointing to your website are a very good thing to have. This is part 1 answer to question 2 above.

Link Popularity.

The second part of answer to question 2 above is equally important. You see, it's not just how many inbound links are out there voting for your site, but it's also important that they're voting for right thing.

Link Reputation.

A few weeks ago I touched on subject of getting other people to do your work for you. I want to cover this topic in a bit more detail as outsourcing is a superb way of saving yourself both time and money.

By way of example, let me start with a short story :-)

At 8.30pm one night last week, I started to wonder whether it would be possible to automate a particular part of one of my website design processes. At present I do this task semi-manually and it takes me about 4 hours to generate a multi-page website.

Anyway, by 8.45pm I had scratched out an outline of what I would need a new custom piece of software to do to automate this task and by 8.59pm 'project' was advertised on one of main freelance websites....

Within 2 minutes I had first bid from a programmer....

Within 15 minutes I had four more bids....

Within 45 minutes I had accepted a bid and programmer was working on project.

Two days and $75 later (and with less than an hours work required by me) and I had a brand new piece of custom software which can complete task in question in seconds rather than hours!

With several excellent freelance sites around nowadays, it is very easy to find a programmer/web designer/writer/whatever that will be happy to work with you and cost (as illustrated above) will often be far less than you might expect.

If you spend some time thinking about type of tasks you could outsource, I am sure you will soon come up with a fairly substantial list. The following are just a few ideas:

Website design Website maintenance Copywriting General writing - for example of an entire eBook! Software design/creation (for your own use or resale) Graphic design Script installation (and creation) Dealing with your support emails Finding new affiliates Finding new link exchange partners

And so list goes on....

Of course, as with anything, there are a few things to be aware of when outsourcing so here are my top tips for a successful project: