You’ve probably heard about article marketing and maybe you’ve even used it a time or two to drive traffic to your website. Article marketing is the practice of publishing articles on article directories and other websites to promote your business. It’s a great way to drive traffic and boost credibility. However, did you know you can earn money through article marketing? You can! Here’s how:
#1 Use Article Marketing to Promote Affiliate Products or Services
If you’re an affiliate marketer you may want to look into article marketing as a tool to boost your commissions. Articles are a wonderful way to pre-sell products and services. You can write reviews, comparison articles, or simply informative or “how to” articles.
Some article directories allow embedded links in your article content. Others don’t. Take care to find directories that help you meet your goals. If you’re not allowed to embed links, make sure to link to your website or include an affiliate link in your author box.
#2 Use Article Marketing to Promote Your Own Products or Services
Just like you can use article marketing to promote affiliate products, you can use it to promote your own products as well. Take care, when writing, to not write a sales page. You want to provide informative content and to establish your credibility and authority. Link to your relevant products or services in the content to drive traffic to your sales page. Use your content to presell the product by providing information or a solution to your prospect.
#3 Use Article Marketing to Build Your Opt-In List
An opt-in list is where you transform visitors into prospects. Each prospect then has the potential to turn into a customer. Therefore, the larger your opt-in list, the more potential you have for sales and profits.
You can use article marketing to build your opt-in list. Create helpful and informative content. Motivate people to visit your website or send them to an opt-in form or squeeze page. Provide valuable content, content that solves a problem and offers a solution, and your prospects will be hungry for more. They’ll sign up for your list without hesitation and you’ll be raking in the dough.
Article marketing is a fantastic tool to build your business and increase your bottom line. Choose your article marketing sites wisely. Make sure they support your goals and objectives. Then write great content and watch your profits grow.
Resources:
Article Marketing 365
7 Minute Article Secrets
Many people are making a living from affiliate marketing online. I am one of them. 10% of my current income comes from affiliate marketing and constantly trying to increase that percentage. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online because with a little bit of hard work upfront you can have a nice stream of passive income.
With any method of making money online, there are cons and pros. In my opinion the pros outweigh the cons in affiliate marketing. Here are some pros as to why you should be including affiliate marketing in your online business.
- Low or no start up costs. All you really need to begin affiliate marketing is a website. You don’t necessarily have to set up a new website, you can use relevant affiliate programs to optimize your income from websites you already have. Affiliate marketing is easy to incorporate in an existing website or blog.
- No need to become an expert copywriter. Many of the tools you need will be provided for you. Most affiliate programs provide you with tools to promote their products with such as banner ads, text ads, emails promos, articles, sales copy, and blog posts.
- Low overhead. By promoting someone else’s product rather than creating your own you have no inventory to look after, no orders to process and no customer service function to provide.
- Passive income. This is my favorite part. This means you stop trading hours for dollars. You can review a product once, place the review on your website and that review can potentially make you money over and over again. This is passive income and affiliate marketing is one of the best businesses to get into for anyone who likes the idea of passive income.
Affiliate marketing offers many benefits and one of the best parts is that you can fit it into just about any niche. If your passion is country music for example, you can create an affiliate website about country singers in the Grand Ole Opry. You can then earn money promoting products from those country singers. There’s something very appealing about making money doing something you’re passionate about.
Do you want to start making money with affiliate marketing? Join me live on November 4, 2010 for an Introduction to Affiliate Marketing Workshop where I will teach you how you can start making online by promoting other people’s products.
Courtney Chowning is a Christian entrepreneur, business coach, and webs designer who loves helping people make money online.
The FTC recently added bloggers to its guidelines about endorsements and testimonials in advertising. For bloggers this means any product review or endorsement that contains affiliate links must be treated with full disclosure.
Full disclosure is nothing more than transparency about the fact that a click on a link could potentially earn the blogger some money. It’s a simple process to provide the needed transparency, either in plain text or with a bit of information placed in the HTML for the link.
Plain text
A sentence or two at the beginning or the end of an article containing affiliate links will be satisfactory. This would do: The links to the product reviewed in this article are affiliate links. If you buy this product after clicking one of my links, I’ll make a small amount of money.
It wouldn’t hurt to add another sentence saying that the possibility of earning something from the affiliate link has not influenced the objectivity of the review and that your opinions are honestly offered.
It’s also a good idea to have a full out disclosure policy somewhere on your blog that explains how you get products, if you keep the product or return it after reviewing it, if you get paid for the review in some way other than by the affiliate link and anything else that might be relevant. You can add a link to this longer disclosure statement to each individual review you write.
In the link code
Use an HTML title attribute in the link to create a tooltip that the user will see when using the link. For example, say you were linking to a book at Amazon.com. You could add the title attribute to the link, like this:
<a href="somewhere.html" title="affiliate link to Amazon">Book Title</a>
If the link is an image of the product, say an image of a book cover, mention the affiliate link in both the image’s alt text and with a title attribute. Here’s how:
<img src="image.jpg" alt="affiliate link to Amazon" title="affiliate link to Amazon">
With the plain text disclosure statements and the link tooltip, you cover everything in a blanket of transparency that satisfies all the FTC requirements.
About the author: Virginia DeBolt blogs at Web Teacher about web design education, web standards, accessibility, and general technology topics.
There is a lot of talk about making money with the Amazon affiliate program: some people (like Paula and Wanda, who make $10K each month) love working with Amazon and promoting physical products, while others complain that because the cookie is so short, there is no way to make good money.
Which camp are you in? Have your efforts failed to produce the income you wanted? Or are you successful in your efforts to make money with amazon?
I’ve been promoting physical products from Amazon.com for a few years, and never made more than $10/month until last year when I bought Info Product Killer (also known as IPK).
Last year I created a few sites following part of the IPK model, and have had some limited success (limited because I didn’t really follow the rules), but this year I’ve been working on my sites and I expect to have a very good fourth quarter. I am already seeing improvement over last year, and my sites are climbing nicely in the SERPs.
I’ve made some mistakes along the way, and I’ll list them here, so you can avoid them:
- went after niches that were way too tight, so traffic was not enough to make a huge difference
- promoted items that were too expensive (while you want to promote items over $100, going for luxury watches, for example, you won’t see too much activity).
- got into too many micro-niches, spreading myself too thin. It’s a lot easier to promote one or two niches, as opposed or 10 or 15.
Now, here are some of the things that will help you succeed in promoting physical products form Amazon.com:
- choose products that are $100 or more
- make sure the products you want to promote have at least 10-15 good reviews: social proof will help you sell more
- write a detailed review, rather than copying the short description from the product page
- sprinkle some customer reviews in your review
There is a lot more detail that you can put into promoting with the Amazon affiliate program. My best recommendation would be the Amazonian Profit Plan, but if you can’t afford that, IPK comes is a very close second.
Now here is a small bribe fore you: if you decide to buy either one through the links above, I’ll do keyword research for your first niche for free. Just post below your receipt number, and I’ll contact you right away. Free keyword research available to the first 5 people only.
How do you determine the best affiliate products to promote? First, you want to pick a niche, which will help you decide which products to promote.
Consider going with a topic that has a variety of affiliate products being offered. That way, if one of them doesn’t sell well, you can choose another one and try that.
Once you’ve found the right niche, you then need to determine which product you should promote. A great method for doing this would be to do a search in Google and seeing which products are being promoted via pay per click.
Look for the ones being sold by affiliates. This is very important. If it’s the product creator themselves that is promoting it, they might be making money on the back end and losing money on the front end. As an affiliate, most of the time you only get the front-end money, so the back end is meaningless.
Look for the products that come up again and again. For instance, if there is one program that is being promoted for all of the main keywords in your niche, this is a better option than something that’s there for only one.
How should you test it?
Once you’ve chosen three to five products based on the above method, you will need to see how well they convert. This will give you a good idea of their money making potential.
One option is to throw up a quick pay-per-click campaign. Set a limited budget and test those three to five products on the same keywords, getting the same number of clicks to each. Then see which performs the best. This will be the one you promote.
The reality is that there’s only so much you can tell from reading the sales page. A certain product might appear to have the most convincing sales copy, but the only way you can know for sure is by testing it yourself.
Pick something you believe in.
This is obvious but worth mentioning anyway. Remember: you are probably going to be writing a review for this product and putting a lot of time into promoting it. Do you really want to put in a lot of effort selling a product you can’t get behind?
The bottom line is that testing is extremely important. This is because the best converting affiliate products are often ones you would have never guessed on your own.
If you want to learn more about how to pick the right affiliate products to promote, check out the Super Affiliate Handbook.
