There are many business strategies you can use to promote your affiliate products, and a very interesting way to do it is with Article Marketing.

Article Marketing is nothing more than a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business’ credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.

Source: Wikipedia

So what’s the strategy? How can I boost my sales by writing articles?

The strategy is not so hard to do, but actually it is if you have difficulties to be consistent, but we are going to see how to deal with that.

What do you do when you want to buy something? I bet you search on google everything you can: videos, reviews, scam alerts, comparison articles etc etc. That’s why you need to write articles of the products you sale!

People used to investigate before taking actions and you need to take advantage of this situation by promoting your marketing products with articles. Articles of every type, but specially you need to write articles that review the product, articles that talk about the pro/cons of the product and things like that.

By writing many articles and using the proper keywords you could rank high in most search engines, or at least Google. Is not so hard, you just need to find keywords that sell.

The basic strategy is to redirect the people who read your articles to your landing page or another website where they can buy the product. This way you will get a commission per sale.

NOTE: You cannot use hyperlinks in affiliate marketing, so how do you redirect them? Using the little bio box at the end of the article, where you can place hyperlinks.

How to write articles that sell

Write from experience: When you write from experience your articles will be much convincing, and that’s what you want. This relates the thing I was talking the other day about choosing products that you are interested in. If you are not interested in a product how could you write “from experience”? It’s kinda impossible… Also, many times you won’t need to pay just for getting the product and then write a review about it. In most cases you can contact the advertiser and explain it the situation, asking for a free copy of the product in order to test it and promote it.

It’s kinda usual to get free copies of what you want to promote.

Be precise: Don’t write things neither too long or too short, just be precise. Hit the nail and that’s it, don’t waste lines talking and talking about nothing. Give the information you want to bring to your potential customers and that’s it!

Write what they want to read: This may sound unfair or non-ethic but this is how marketing works. Study the people you are targeting, their likes, their ages etc etc… So then, when you really know the people you will target, write the articles based on that statistics and give them what they expect to read when they search for a product on Google. Of course you will need to write several articles in order to cover a wider espectrum of possibilities. FYI, you can try QuanCast to know demographic stats of people specificing a page.

Use outside sources to validate your article: This is a fact, people like to read “as seen on CNN” and things like that. When possible, use outside sources that help you to validate the things you are talking about in the article. Try to find a special article from a magazine, news channel or something where users can read and makes them believe in you.

Hopefully if you follow these guidelines, you will boost your sales promotions in a targeted market.

Where to write these Articles?

Great question, I was talking about article marketing and I didn’t tell you where you can publish them. The following is a list of websites where you can do it, most of them could be well known by you:

• EzineArticles
• BestEzines
• AssociatedContent
• WebSource
• Freesticky
• Amazines
• IdeaMarketers

Those are the main websites, but you can find more by looking into the tag called Articles of my Delicious account.

Your Ideas About Article Marketing

Well in other posts I will talk more about other promotional marketing methods beside this one. For now I’m done, but I would love to read your thoughts or experiences in this matter in order to learn more from you, I don’t know everything!

Hey buddies, some days ago I received an email from the team of OIOPublisher plugin notifying me the new percentage of commission for affiliates. Well, during January they will be giving 90% commission to any affiliates!.

You should know that this commission apply for everyone, no matter if you are or not an affiliate yet, you can enjoy of this offer by signing up and getting your copy of OIOPublisher now! It only costs $47, it means that you will earn $42.3 for every referrer during January!.

About OIOPublisher

I have made a couple of reviews about this product, but however I will talk about the basics:

OIOpublisher is an ad platform with a focus on performance, control and ease of use. Serve advertising on your blog or website and keep 100% of the revenue you bring in.

What bloggers say?

It’s worth every penny. You should make it all back and more with your first sale.

John Chow
JohnChow.com

OIOpublisher has proven to be a versatile plugin; even a necessity.

Ian Fernando
IanFernando.com

OIOpublisher consistently generates me about $2000 – $3000 a month.

Jon Waraas
JonWaraas.com

A must have WordPress plugin for any serious blogger.

Mattaw, USA
Moneybites.com

Buying OIO is the best investment I have ever made as a blogger.

Mark Fulton
DotSauce.com

What I say?

That plugin really worth the investment, the first month I got the inversion back and even more selling some ads and links… And certainly the best of it is the automatization, you don’t have to worry about anything.

Get your copy of OIOPublisher and start making money online!

Many people think that creating a website and placing ads on it is an easy way to make money online. The only thing they are right with is that certainly, displaying advertising on your website or blog is a good way to make money online, but it’s deeper than they think.

Placing banner ads is like an art, depending of your website you will have more success in certain positions than in others, so you need to try and see what works for you. For our luck, the act of displaying advertising is not a new thing and there are some strategies which you can follow in order to have a start mark.

Before start displaying ads in your website you need to ask yourself some questions:

• What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
• What do they do when viewing a particular page?
• Where is their attention likely to be focused?
• How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users’ way?
• How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?

Remember that is very important make the visitors feel comfortable in your site. If you place banners everywhere, they will not find content to read and they will automatically leave. So where should you place your ads? Let’s analyze the following heat map:

 

In this heat map you can see that some locations tend to be more efficient than others. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance), which normally are those  placed bellow the fold – banners, i.e. when you need to scroll down to see the banners.

A banner near from rich content tends to be clicked because the reader has its eyes focused in that area. Also those banners which are in the bottom of the content are clicked for the same reason. At the end of the content many websites have bookmark buttons, which make that area a good point to display a horizontal banner.

Talking  about the sidebars, you can see that people tend to watch the left sidebar more than the right one. The reason of this is simple, the most of the languages are read from left to right and unconsciously, the eyes catch better the banners of the left more than the banners of the right.

Remember that is really important to try different positions and banner sizes in order to know what works for your website. Depending of the structure and layout this heat map may not be applicable. In the case of blogs, in almost all of them you can see a sidebar on the right, but in absence of a left bar and due to the blog’s nature the people tend to watch the right sidebar.

So be creative and remember to not disturb your visitors with plenty of banners.

Today I was talking with my sister about my blog. She is very wondered about what I’m doing here, and how I’m doing it. She asked me many things related to the monetization, because she never imagined that you could make money online.

As she, I’m pretty sure that many people is wondered about the topic, so in this post I’m going to tell you how it is possible.

There are many ways which I make money with my blog: by displaying advertising, by reviewing services provided by other websites and by selling private advertising. I’m going to focus in the last one, the private sales.

What can you sell in your blog?

In your website, you are able to sell whatever you want. This includes banners (125×125, 468×60….), text links, reviews, packages, ebooks, a kind of membership or anything else you want to sell. In fact, there is a plugin for wordpress called WP Auctions, which you can sell whatever you want though bids. Of course, that’s if you are using wordpress to manage your blog, but as you see, there are no restrictions to sell on your website.

How to motivate the people to buy in your blog?

This is something very interesting, and a doubt which many people have. This is not an easy task, in fact this is pretty hard, and sometimes it can be impossible. You need to do your best to get people buying stuff in your blog:

• By taking part in social media networks: Being an active member of many social communities, you will get credibility though a wide audience, making your blog a potential marketplace to advertise on.
• By having many subscribers: Let’s face it, nobody will buy a banner on your blog if the only person who visit your blog is your mom. If you have just a couple of subscribers (I’m talking about 20), will be very hard to sell a banner, for example. The most subscribers you have, the most banners you will sell because this is an indicative of your popularity and brand in the web. But to get many subscribers, you need to be good on what you do.
• By having good traffic: The most expensive advertising is these which is in a highly visited website. And this is something obvious, you can’t sell a banner at the same prize of JohnChow (who gets thousand visits a day) if you get only 100 visits a day. To learn how to increase your traffic, check the category Improving Traffic.
• By having good rankings: This relates the preview point. If you have highest rankings, will be best for you because this suggest that you have a defined presence in the web. This mean that many people knows about you, visiting your blog several times a month. To learn how to increase your rankings, check the category Improving Rank.
• By displaying ads on your site: If you are selling ads, you don’t want to show a hole of empty slots. If you do this, you are saying that nobody is interested on your blog, and you are not having success with your sales. This is psychology, if the people see that you are selling banners, the customers around your blog will feel motivated to reserve a slot for them.
• By promoting your stuff: Well this is an obvious point. If you want to sell something, you need to let the people know you are selling something! So a page or section of “Advertising” would be great on your site, this way the people will know that you are selling something.

By following the tips mentioned above, you should start to sell some banners, text links or another stuff in your blog, and start to make some money from your home.

This business is all about socializing and imagination. If you have a great idea never revealed before, make sure to materialize it and if the idea is enough good, you will get a lot of money from it.

Happy Selling

Hey people, for those who follow me through my feed via email, probably noticed at the end of each post a line talking about my birthday contest. This is possible thanks a wordpress plugin called RSS Footer, which let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, but you can edit this with any html code:

How this plugin will help you to monetize your blog?

This plugin is very useful to add a copyright to your feed, also may be to do a contest, you only need to use your imagination to find the way to use it. Thinking on all the possibilities, I found it useful to monetize your blog. How? well you could sell a line at the end of your RSS Feed promoting a website or service by a low cost. Despite the fact that too many people ( all your subscribers ) will read this promotion on every post from your feed, this is something that can’t be expensive for 3 reasons:

1. Is not visible for everyone: unless you be John Chow or Darren Rowse, a handful of your readers will see the promotion instead the totality of your visitors. In my case, about 100 persons will see it daily vs 15k or 40k of Chow and Rowse respectively.
2. It’s just a line: this is a little text backlinking to other website, you can’t charge a lot for it. Unless you place a horizontal banner, you can’t charge more than a text link in your blog.
3. There’s no reason three, it’s just cheap!

Ok once you know how to monetize your blog with an RSS feed line, you need the plugin right? To install it, just download the plugin zip file, unzip it and upload the rss-footer.php file to your plugins folder. Then, go to the plugins panel and enable it, it’s quite simple and it has no complications.

Some days ago I was talking with Mark from 45n5.com and he invite me to check him new project called Showyouadhere. I visited the site and the first I notice was the professionalism, it’s very simple but dynamic.

What will you find by joining to this program ?

Ok Showyouradhere is a service to buy and sell banners, I really like the platform and how is it presented.As you can see in the image beside this text, you can place in your blog/site all the kind of banners with multiple sizes:

Horizontal, Vertical and Square. In addition, you can place widgets:

The superior widget its “125x125RecentVisitors” and as you can see, with it you can earn money by showing a banner at the same time you are showing your visitors from this community, sexy hug?

The other widget it’s called “125x125Blogroll” and you can show an 125×125 ad in addition of a list with your favorite blogs. Noticed that you can only show 6 links, but what if you have more links?? don’t worry about that because you can show up to 6 blogs chosen randomly from your blogroll list.

All the payments are made with paypal, and you can buy a spot for 7, 14, 21 or 28 days, you don’t need to pay the complete month if you don’t want it.

Affiliate Program

Ok the problem is that there are too many publishers and few advertisers. Mark found the solution for that, with the affiliate program you will earn 10% of your affiliated advertisers! yes, if you refer an advertiser you will get 10% of what he spend, this mean that if he earn $10 you will earn $1, imagine if you refer an advertiser and he spend $1000 per month on ads, you will earn $100 per month!

Sign up to ShowYourAdHere right now!