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!

Hi guys,

It’s fridaaaay! So as I won’t blog this weekend (theorically, I have scheduled posts ) and as I won’t give you all my affiliate marketing information at once, I’m going to take a breath today respecting AM and I’m going to share with you my incomes report of the first month of 2009:

• Private Sales: $129.5
• TLA: $21.16
• Affiliate Commissions: $215.5

Total: $366.16

The other months I was earning about $400, so you could appreciate a little drop during the last month but algo note I didn’t make any Web Design jobs, which ussually gives me at least $100.

So what do you think about them? With all this posts about affiliate marketing I’m very inspired and working in a couple of affiliate campaigns which will increase my earnings by hundred dollars – or at least I hope so.

This post is a little delayed, but however I wanted to share with you my earnings of the last month! If you compare it with my earnings of November, you could see that I earned pretty much the same…

• Private Sales: $117.25
• Text Link Ads commission: $16.69
• OIOPublisher commission: $47
• Web Design Projects: $100
• Commission Junction: $190

Total :  $470.94

From december, I learned that I work very well with Commission Junction, and althrough I don’t have request my first payment they seem to be very responsable.

In the next months, I will start working with Market Leverage, sharing all my tips and experiences with you. Also, I have planned to create a couple of landing pages that convert and give them to you FOR FREE. So stay tunned, you won’t want to miss this!

To your success. Mr Javo

What a week! With all the changes of the new theme I have had a very shaken week. Some minors bugs were reported by many of you and I want to thank you for every comment you sent me through the new contact form.

This week I found excellent post everywhere, I have added like 20 posts to my spreading love series of this week but we know that is hard to read 20 posts at once. So, I reduced that list, and now I will give you the most useful:

• The Visual Design of 2.7 by Jane on WordPress Blog.
• Who Will Control Your Data in the Web 3.0 World? by Lidija on ReadWriteWeb.
• Too Much Effort and No Progress? Something Is Wrong There by Daniel on DailyBlogTips.
• How To Get Sponsors: Leveraging Current Sponsors To Get Even More Sponsors by Mattaw on MoneyBites.
• The 3 Strategies of Link Building – Why & How You Build Links by Gyutae on WinningTheWeb.
• Do You Have the Balls to Make Money Doing What You Love? by Paul on InspiredMoneyMaker.com.
• Introduction To Offline Affiliate Marketing by Josh on Affiliate Famous.

Other Interesting things:

• Reader Challenge #1 by Dot Com Dud on DotComDud.
• Flip A Site Contest – Part 1 by Bryan on Site Flip U.
• My Firefox Addons by Stephan on StephanMiller.com.

As you may know, WordPress 2.7 is almost ready for public beta, so in the first article you could see how it will look. And talking about wordpress and blogging, I recommend you to check the post of Stephan, who talks about his interest firefox addons which help him in his blogging work… I hope you liked this round of posts!

Yesterday I had updated my twitter profile! I have upgraded the background image to give it a touch of coolness . Also, I added a poll on the sidebar of the blog, asking if you like the new theme or not… I invite you to give me your vote!.

Now I want to take advantage of this post to remind you to participate in my 2.0 give away! Now it has almost $2500 in prizes and daily I continue receiving emails from more and more sponsors!

PS: Did you noticed that all these posts have long titles? What a weird thing…

Many times, when you think about making money online, the phrase Affiliate Marketing crosses your mind, may be because we associate the word marketing with money. Is not a secret that you can make hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month with affiliate marketing but that is not too easy as many people say on Internet.

Myth #1 – It’s easy to make money

So if I’m telling you that is not too easy, you may be wondered why. Many people lie to take advantage of, that’s a fact! Let’s be honest, when someone says that it is easy to make money with X affiliate network and it shows you checks of thousands of dollars, is because it wants you to register on that network under its name, this way it could get commissions for what you make.

Of course, it is easy to make money when you have an army of referrals behind you.

Myth #2 – Low capital required

Remember that everything has a cost, if you want to make thousands of dollars you will have to spend thousand of dollars. Is fairly impossible to make thousands by investing lower amounts, remember that affiliate marketing is mainly based on traffic, so if you want to drive many people to your website you need to invest on PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords.

In addition of that, if you are promoting a campaign with 3% of conversion rate it means that 3 of each 100 visitors will (or could) buy the product. Of course that a good web design helps but that’s basically what it means.

You need to make your plans to compensate the invested (and wasted) capital for driving the other 97 persons to your website.

Myth #3 – You will get money fast

This is the most false myth ever. Before you start making real money and not a few bucks, you will need to try many different things in order to optimize your promotion. You will need to be changing the theme of your landing page, changing its keywords, its title and redistributing the things on your website. After then, you will find what is converting for you! So how much you will need to wait until the first check? That’s up to you, it depends of your work.

Myth #4 – Work just 2 hours a day

Huh? another false myth. Affiliate marketing is mostly carried out by entrepreneurs, people who like to experiment and look for new ways to meet their goals. It is completely false to say that working 2 hours per day you could get thousands of dollars. Well, may be after many years when you have all your campaigns already optimized, you could stop working if you want, but that’s not true. Internet changes and people too, so you need to be constantly changing your promotion and keywords too!

Setting up a website with marketing purposes could take you many time, you will fall asleep after midnight trying to do your best, checking you traffic statistics and optimizing what you have done.

My Personal Recommendations

In order to make your affiliate’s life easier and avoid to be consumed by it, I suggest you to put in practice the following things:

• Make backup plans: Is something is not working for me, I try to put in practice another concept in order to improve the performance of my work. Always is good to have backup plans, when something is going wrong that kind of special plans could safe you! And I’m not telling you this just for affiliate marketing, you should apply this for everything in your life.
• Set goals: May be the most important thing. If you don’t know your goals you will be doing things without sense.
• Set a schedule: Take a calendar and fix your hours of work, this way you could take off the shackles and do another activities beside working on your promotions.
• Be patient: Remember that money won’t flow through your account immediately, and it will take days, weeks or may be months to see real money in your accounts.

In my eBook The Affiliate’s Start Guide I talk about all the basics things to create a website and make money with it, so I invite you to sign up for my newsletter and get your copy for free now!

Hello bloggers, some weeks ago I signed up to Motive Interactive Advent but I didn’t use it until now because they were upgrading their platform. My affiliate manager recommended me to wait because the new changes would be awesome, improving the platform and making it much better.

In spite of his recommendation, I entered to my publisher panel in order to meet the platform and to check the available campagins. Basically, I entered just to take a look around, and I have to admit that I found a really slow platform.

The platform was easy to use but its slowness was terrible. I have for you a screenshot of the old interface:

What is new on Advent 2.0?

Loading times have been reduced! The platform is based on AJAX, which means everything load on the same page. Before continuing, let’s see a screenshot of it:

They have optimized the platform, reordering the left sidebars to make easier for the publisher to navigate and explore the campagins. If you see the first screenshot you will see a picture of my manager (with his contact information) in the second leftbar. In the new theme they have moved the picture to the top-right and in the second leftbar you can see an Offer Spotlight.

The Campaigns

You can explore the different campaigns by offer types, distribution types, categories and payouts. I have tested this to find some specific offers and it works very fine, it’s very accurate.

As other affiliate networks, Motive covers several categories which you can work with in order to make money. I saw some well-known campaigns there which you can see in other networks, but also I saw another ones which looks great.

Something I really liked about Motive is that you can preview any campaign in order to know how will it looks when the people click the banner. In other networks I couldn’t do this with the campaigns because most of them are restricted to US. So if you are not from US (as my case) it doesn’t matter, you could check the campaign and see how it looks!.

Other thing I liked which is related with the campaigns is the navigation. It is very user-friendly and if you click on one of them, a detailed description of the offer will roll-over, as you can see in the following screenshot:

The Statistics

Sometimes we don’t like to see statistics for some reasons, either they could be difficult to understand or may be they could NOT be friendly or just because they show something that we were not expecting . Whichever the case, it won’t apply this time. The statistics provided by Motive are very detailed and friendly, giving you information about the impressions, clicks, ECPM, ECPC, revenew and the most important, coversion rates and payouts .

Affiliate Commission Rewards Program

With the affiliate commission rewards program you will get extra commission rewards a month, whose payout starts at 1% then increases to 2% the higher the tier. Here’s the current structure:

• $1,000 – $10
• $2,500 – $25
• $5,000 – $50
• $10,000 – $100
• $15,000 – $150
• $20,000 – $200
• $25,000 – $250
• $30,000 – $300
• $50,000 – $500
• $100,000 – $1,250
• $150,000 – $2,000
• $200,000 – $3,000
• $500,000 – $10,000
• $1,000,000 – $20,000
• $1,250,000 – $25,000

The Highest Affiliate Referral Commission

The Motive Network offers 5.5% of lifetimes referral earnings for those you refer, making them the network with the highest referral commission!. But the good things have a catch too: ‘The referred publisher must continue to generate commissions without a lapse of twelve (12) calendar months in order for the referrer to continue receiving the 5.5% commission from that publisher each month‘, which means that you will only get extra commissions for active affiliates.

Conclusion

Motive Interactive Advent have improved the platform to make it more comfortable and easy to use. Now it is really easy to use and loading times are really short, it has everything preloaded and ready to display whatever you click.

The feature of SIDs and AIDs tracking are really important for every publisher, as well as the advanced tracking and reporting!

I encourage you to try Motive Interactive Advent and check out what it has for us.