I know what it sounds like, when I first heard about this I didn’t take it too seriously, but unique content is a way to get free traffic to your website for years to come.

How does simply writing or continually outputting new and unique content provide free traffic for life? It’s simply because search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing absolutely love fresh unique content to help them provide valuable information to their billions of users.

What’s the easiest way to get fresh content out to the worldwide web? You’re looking at it. If you don’t own your own website that provides quality content for search engines, then a blog is your next bet. If you’re not sure on which blogging software to use then take a look at the two most recommended blogging software phenomena.

Of course I wish everything could be without recourse, but when you write your content you have to kind of think like a search engine in a way. The simplest way to do this is to think to yourself, “What would someone type into the search engine if they were looking for answers on this particular subject?” The site you write your content on must also be search engine friendly and follow the most basic principles of search engine optimization.

Here are some SEO tips:

• The use of at least one h1 tag for main header and h2 tags for all other headers.
• Make sure you have a unique title, description, and keywords for each page.
• Make sure you have a sitemap to submit to search engines.
• Make sure you’re linking properly, link keywords, not things like click here, etc…
• Make sure to name URLs properly so that they describe what’s on the page.
• Make sure your site is well organized, keep javascript code in a separate .js file use divs and not tables when possible, but this really isn’t that big of a deal.
• Make sure each page specifies a canonical link to let search engines know your desired link for each page. 301 redirects is another solution for this.
• Keep the linking of pages on your site consistent. Linking mysite.com/index.php and mysite.com/ are two separate pages according to the search engines, but the same page to us.
• Try to have at least one link pointing back to your site and outgoing links on each page. This way all your pages will be connected.

Anyway, that’s enough about that. Just think about it though. Every new page of content you create is like bringing in hundreds even thousands of visitors to your website over a lifetime. This can only happen if you follow the above search engine friendly principles mentioned above.

It is also good to mention that if your content is really good content, then other people will link to you. This will help you get even more free traffic back to your website.

So what do should you remember from all of this? Continuously add good, quality content to your website and you will see a return on your investment.

I’m excited to announce that the Sign Up and Make Money Forum is now complete and running in full swing. The Forum software I’m using isn’t  just any Forum software, it’s a Simple Machines Forum. SMF is one of the coolest open source Forum software providers out there. I love the speed, features, and look of their Forums.

With all good things there are always downfalls. Simple Machines Forum isn’t the best when it comes to Search Engine Optimization though. This is why I had to go in a tweak the code to make the Forum more SEO friendly.

If you’re interested in tackling a Simple Machines Forum yourself, here’s some of the things I needed to do to make the site more SEO friendly:

• Had to update my urls with the Pretty URLs module.
• I went into the code and changed all important headings to h1 and h2 tags.
• I made a sitemap manually for the Forum with regular pages, boards, and topics. The mod that you can download from SMF didn’t work for me. Then submitted it to the search engines.
• I made a simple if and else statement to provide a canonical link for the home page, plus a unique description and keywords. All other pages I kept the same.
• I added Google Analytics code to track my traffic.
• This also removed the annoying – index behind the title on the main page.
• I also went in on links that ended in /index.php for home page and changed them to /.

The description and keywords aren’t as important on regular pages. That’s why I added h1 and h2 tags because search engines pretty much take from the text on the page and look for a heading.

Anyway, feel free to sign up for a free account at the Forum and post your link. Forums are a great way to build back links to your websites. Simply put, it’s a free way to get traffic back to your websites for life, so sign up and enjoy!

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t write an article about 1 Cent Emails if I didn’t think it had some good free money making potential and not a complete scam. For the most part, 1 Cent Emails looks pretty legit for a paid to read e-mail site with a $5.00 sign up bonus. But if you learn anything from me at all, remember this, always check the advertiser section of a website to make sure every looks like it adds up properly.

What do I mean by this? Well, if an advertising website’s advertising prices look a little funky, then it’s questionable how long the advertising website will be in business. Take a look at 1 Cent Email’s advertising prices as of July 15th, 2009.

Do you see how the 1 cent paid email to all members for $15.00 is just one example of risk by the owners of 1 Cent Emails? 1 Cent Emails has over 20,000 members. They are betting, and this is a pretty good bet, that over 80% of their members aren’t even going to open the paid advert. $15.00 divided by 1 cent = 1,500 members or less are expected to open the paid advert.

What happens if 1 Cent Email’s advertising plan backfires and over 10,000 members open up that e-mail? 10,000 x 1 cent = $100.00. That means 1 Cent Email could potentially lose money on advertising bought by their own advertisers. This is never a good sign, but the likely hood of few members actually being active in the paid to read e-mail site is a high chance anyway. So I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.

Anyway, it never hurts to give the advertising site a try. I mean, it is free to sign up. I just wouldn’t invest any money or hard promotion and effort into the sign up bonus site.  Take a look at some more paid to read e-mail sign up bonus sites and let me know what you think of them.

**Disclaimer – Affiliate links are used on this post.