With the launch of my ImportCSV pro file, I found lots of interest from people but some people just don’t get it or what they can use it for. So I had a bit of think while on the train yesterday seeing a client, and came up with 10 things a blogger could use a CSV file for.

Now admittedly, if you use Wordpress to run a static site you could still use this to add some real quality usable content on a drip feed basis. I have borrowed from other blogs but you get the idea for some of these and you could turn them into something original for your blog.

1. Affiliate Feed
This is one of biggies behind the script for lots of people as you can add a great deal of content quickly. Remember though you need to make the post itself unique in some way to differentiate it with all the other methods of using the merchant data feeds.

2. Directory
You could build a useful directory relevant to your blog. This could be websites, merchant, services or product related. Run a dog blog, why not build a CSV file with local vets or maybe even a dog breed directory.

3. Events Calendar
Why not create a CSV file with lots of different event relevant to your niche and maybe publish them as post two weeks before the event to give people time to check it out. If you are running that dog site, you could build a CSV file of dog shows - Build it with dates and have it time stamped to go two weeks before the event.

4. Useful Resources
Want to share other resources with your readers, why not make a post feature out of it. This could include affiliate products too that don’t come as part of a feed.

5. Site of the Day / Week / Month
Maybe you want to highlight some of your reader’s sites as a way of getting some community love! Get them to submit their sites using a form with some useful data and take a screen shot. Hey presto 52 posts!

6. Tip of the Day / Week / Month
Following on from the above, if you are blogging about something where you have lots of tips to share, why not break it all down into single posts. There are lots of 101 tips for this that and the other. Have a look at some of those and put your own spin on it. There’s a 100 posts!

7. Quote of the Week
Again, you see a theme here. Why not have inspiring quotes relevant to your website or even use quotes from news sources. There are lots of quotation databases online.

8. Uploading Keyword Article Content
You could use a article content spinner to create lots of relevant keyword content (BE CAREFUL) remember the old saying, crap in crap out!

9. Web Resources
Slightly different to number 2, you could build a category on web resources and use screenshots, text and links to build a useful section. Again if you like you could add this as a feature of the week and publish it on the same day each week.

10. Web Reviews
If you run a popular blog you may get lots of “reviewme” type requests or you could run an Amazon book review feature. Sit down write all the reviews for a few months and use the CSV file to import them all to your Wordpress site.

As you can see there are lots of ways to use CSV files to import lots of good quality content to your blog to make it a very rich resource for your readership. Spending a bit of time upfront as it were will allow you to concentrate on writing good quality posts and spend the time marketing your blog all the while your blog itself will grow automatically every day.

You can be as creative as you want with CSV Files, just have a think about the different methods above and change them to suit your blog and readership.

If you like the idea of using a CSV file but need an importer, you not check out my Pro version of ImportCSV

Article marketing is still one of the easiest, low cost ways to drive business, increase your exposure and increase your website or blog traffic.

Simply put, article marketing is a case of picking a topic and writing a 500 word or more article in an informative way – It is not a sales pitch! The idea is to provide the reader with information that they can use. If they like the way you write and like your style, then they are more likely to visit your website or blog and look at the other things you have to offer. Article marketing is the ultimate pre sell technique, give them something for nothing and let your article do the talking.

So, as an example you could write an article about making money using affiliate programmes. Once written and spell checked (most important) you can then start the process of getting this article published. Online, you can simply visit loads of article sites that will list and publish your article for free.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking more is better, there are services that will submit your article to 10,000 article sites. Now while this may seem like a good idea, it really is a waste of time and money. There is a list of the better article directories below and to be honest it is quick a small list.

Article directories offer you three main benefits:

1. They will attract direct traffic to them as the main ones are very popular.
2. They are used by other Webmasters looking for site content and they could use one of your articles on their site and to do this they will have to give you a link back to your main website.
3. Some of these article sites are so popular they rank very highly in Google and your article could feature on search results page very quickly. Also we have noticed that it certain industries (such as Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and the whole Work From Home thing), big portal sites will use these articles as is to share with their visitors either on site or via their email lists.

Article Directories

www.ezinearticles.com

www.articlealley.com

www.articledashboard.com

www.articlecity.com

www.goarticles.com

Here are a few more tips that we have used to really drive more people back to our website.

1. Write a useful article; don’t worry about making search engine friendly and worrying about number of keywords and all that. Make it useful and it will take of business for you.
2. You will be able to add a resource box on the article which is your chance to say who you are and what you do. A good way to drive traffic back to your site is if you have a long article, split it in two, post one part out the different places and tell people in your resource box that to get part two they have to visit your site.
3. Build your own Niche submission list. While we recommend the 5 site above, there could be other niche directories, websites or publications that accept article submissions. Try the publications that you receive each month. Do they accept submissions? Have a look in the offline press – do they accept freelance submissions? Getting your article in traditional print is a fantastic way to increase your “reputation”.
4. Be consistent – This is the tricky one as life and work usually kick in at some point. You need to try and establish a schedule to works. Will you send out one article per week, or one a month, whatever “your” schedule, try and stick with it.
5. Outsource – There are services which could prepare and submit articles on your behalf. You would just need to give them a list of topics each week or month and maybe even some quotes to drop into each one.

Article marketing is a good way for any business to drive leads, search rankings and traffic, and small business owners have a big advantage over the majority of current article writers in their space. They have experience, case studies and knowledge. Look around the article marketing sites currently and most articles are written by affiliates pushing products, not business owners, looking to build leads and drive online sales to earn commissions. They use it as it is low cost and works well for them.
Isn’t it about time you made the move to writing?

What do these 5 headlines have in common?

Half of UK consumers fear for their finances
Where there’s muck there’s … A £57 million bill
64% of Britons are considering carrying on working after retirement
Middle Britain house prices to drop £40,000 by Christmas
Home insurance leaves Britons £9billion out of pocket

They have all featured in the national press in the last few weeks and they are all relating to results obtained by running surveys.

So what does this have to do with me?

Using this technique, you can build press releases around surveys that you can carry out with your client base, or by running queries on your databases. Journalists love stats and the more unique and original the stats the better. You can even use these to produce a monthly report that gets sent out to local and national press.

For example, you could produce a monthly survey for sales of products via your affiliate links. You will see the products being sold. Just don’t mention the affiliate relationship – simply mention YOUR business!

Are you noticing an increase in the amount or volume of sales? Are your visitors spending more money this year than they did last year? Do you have more traffic this year than last year?

Try and find something that bucks the trend. With the press firmly entrenched in the credit crunch doom and gloom scenario. A good positive spin could be a welcome respite and is more likely to warrant some good coverage for your website.

There is a hidden goldmine of stats that you can use in your customer database to create useful press releases:

Demographics – Where are your clients?
Product based – What products are they applying for? How much for? What %age of clients who buy X go onto buy Y as well?

Remember, if using customer data to keep it generic and don’t mention customers on an individual basis. Do be prepared to be asked for a case study, so it is always useful to have a case study available. Having a case study in our experience gives you:

• More column inches
• More likelihood of use
• Greater future exposure – If you are easy to deal with, present info in a ready to use way and have case studies – you are a journalists dream!

Opinion based – use an actual online survey to garner results and scale up to a national level. Most surveys use a small number of responses and scale it up to create a national response.

So how do I build a survey that makes it easy to get quantifiable results?

The best way to build a survey is on a multiple choice basis. In this way it is easy to create statistics. Online you can use free tools such as Surveymonkey to create an online survey or poll which then allows you to login in and collect the results to use. You can use a free survey at surveymonkey.com which allows you to collect 100 responses which is a good number to work with.

How do I get people to fill it in?

You can email your existing customer base and offer them entry to a free prize draw for completing the survey. You can use it as a competition and submit it to competition sites such as loquax.co.uk, competitionsuk.net, and ukcompetitions.com.

For the cost of an Ipod Nano or something of similar value you can build a good amount of information.
Keep the survey short, to say five questions, and if used correctly, you can create a press release around each question. So that’s a press release every month for 5 months.

Okay so I have the release now what?

There are various methods for publishing press release but we will use two methods.

Firstly, you can email to the finance and insurance journalists. Go out and buy all of the weekend nationals and local papers and note who is writing the stories in the news sections. You can build a quick list of around 20 or 30 in this way.

Secondly, you can submit your release online. You can use a paid for service such as PRWeb or you can spend an hour or so submitting to a few main press release directory sites such as: dbusinessnews.com, seenation.com, google.com/base, pr-usa.net, openpr.com, i-newswire.com, prlog.com, przoom.com, and pressbox.co.uk.

Some of these sites are US based but it doesn’t matter, journalists can look at these resources to get ideas for stories. They also get featured in Google News which is another great source for research for journalists.

Press releases are a great way to get exposure for your websites both locally and nationally, online and offline so you should build in marketing time to add in this promotional tool to your arsenal. Press releases used and picked up online also provide your website with a boost in authority too. Having your story picked up and used by the BBC with a link back to your site, for example, can lift your website out of obscurity and improve it web rankings in the major search engines.

Next time I will share with you what I learned about survey marketing from L’oreal and there will be a science bit too!

You will notice, if you have stopped by before, that I have re badged the site. Hopefully you will find this version a lot more user friendly and easier to read. I have also decided to actually start posting more frequently to this blog and have also decided to focus this site around the core elements of my day job.

This allows me to share with you lots of useful tools and techniques that I use with my clients on a day to day basis. I also hope to share some case studies too.

So from today, this site will be less of a mish-mash of ramblings and I am going to create a useful resource for anyone looking at Content Creation, Affiliate or Internet Marketing.

I have been reading a lot of stuff over the last two days that has finally opened my eyes to the real benefits of this blog.

Thanks to :

Darren Rowse at Problogger
Yaro Starak at Entrepreneurs Journey
John Chow at John Chow

for providing great reading materials and helping me sort this blog out to make it a lot more informative and something you will want to revisit over and over again.

Cheesy as this may sound, its about sharing stuff and getting some of this stuff out of my head and onto the web where it can be applied by others. Hopefully you will try this stuff out in your niches and report back on your successes.

My company works in one of the more competitive niches of Finance and Insurance online. If you have every tried looking at this space, you will know it is dominated by big sites with big budgets, but there are some good things happening for the little guys and hopefully the stuff we will share, will help you dominate the less competitive niches.

Our main income earner is providing content to some of the bigger finance and insurance sites out there and also some of the smaller ones too! This content ranges from Articles and Guides on their sites, blog posts, news feeds, and even some article marketing too!

We also provide online press release services, so I will share with you, some great ways of creating press releases to build some good quality inbound links to your website.

I am hoping you are going to like the new site….

I was looking through one of my other corporate blogs today and noticed I had “forgotten” to install the plugins with it! No Related posts, no Share This, no sitemap plugin, no nothing! Dman, 3 months and I wondered why it wasn’t doing very well.

Sometimes it is easy to blame other things for your failings. Damned Google etc etc… But this time it was me, plain and simple. So next time something is not going as well as it should, check the little things first. You know the ones your in control or and that you should have done.

I have anywhere between 5 and 10 pet projects on the go at any one time. This causes all kinds of problems but in my brain it means I am working hard and thats a good thing right? Wrong!

I will be canning a lot of these ideas or committing them to the notepad for a while longer while I focus on the money earners and quick wins.

One thing I did want to share today which has helped me no end is my Proteus Mind Machine! Now this does seem a bit WooWoo to some then please don;t worry about reading any further. If however, you are a believer in Mediation but don’t get the time to fit it in then a Proteus will really help you out like it does me. I wear it for anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes every other day and it refreshes and recharges me. I swapped mine for some marketing services. Which was kinda cool. Anyway, Ivor at MeditationsUK let me know today that they have set up an affiliate programme and are looking for affiliates and trying to get more people interested.

You can sign up to the affiliate programme here:
http://meditations-uk.com/affiliate/affsignup.php?pid=666d85b7

If you want to check out the proteus then visit :