What is the best resource investment for my online home business?

by Rick Carbone

With money being really tight these days, where is the best place to allocate your time and money? I’ve given this a lot of thought and my recommendation is to write articles and submit them to as many directories as possible. Writing articles takes time but doesn’t cost anything. The top article directories are free to post to and you don’t need anything fancy to write them.

There are different types of software that will make it easier to do such as an article submitter, but you don’t even need that to get started.

Use a good word processor such as MS Word or Atlantis, (you can try it for free for 30 days) a lower cost product with high end features. The reason you should use a reasonably good word processor is for grammar and spelling. You want to implement an automatic spellcheck when you are writing so that you can pick up typos immediately.

The second reason is want the option of submitting plain text and rich text formats. Most of the top article directories have text editors so it’s pretty easy to type directly into the editor, but I prefer to type it first in my own wp and then cut and paste the final into the editor. It’s more of a "belt and suspenders" thing, I’m overly cautious.

This article is not about software it’s about utilizing the most cost effective resources in a tough market. Article marketing makes sense because it’s low cost but requires some work on your part. Not everyone is a wordsmith, I’m certainly not one, but anyone can write an article because we have at least one thing that we know really well and can share that expertise with others. Still, if you find writing more of a chore there are alternatives.

The first alternative is using private label resale or PLR articles for your article directory multi-submissions. This is okay but it requires you edit the articles for grammar and spelling, as well as content. Many PLR articles that are given away as bonuses are either the product of robotic article software or are done in other parts of the world where English is not the main language. With both types you need to be careful because some articles just wind up making no sense. Readers get turned off and won’t even bother to finish the article and dismiss it as junk. The problem being is you want the reader to get to the author’s box to get to your url.

One way of using PLR articles is as an inspiration. The PLR article gives you an outline of what to write. This still requires work on your part though. One way to get around this, with PLR, is to use what I call article modification or enhancement software. This is different than article writing software in that it requires your input into the actual development of the article. Once you build a template for the PLR article you can "spin" it dozens or hundreds of times creating wholly unique articles. This is very important because with each article directory submission you are sending fresh content and not submitting the same article over and over. Search engines pick up on the duplicate content and penalize your article submission.

Try the above technique to get the biggest bang for the buck.

Rick Carbone is the owner-editor of Home Business Research a top Home Business website focused solely on online home business development and management since 1998. For additional information see the Home Business Research Blog on Artticle Modification .