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!

Many Internet Marketing gurus say it’s easy to succeed at this business, or at least they make us think it. I think everything is easy when you already learned how to do it, for example to walk. We learned to walk when we were childs, but for a just born baby it could be an impossible thing aka nightmare.

The other day I talk about The Secrets Behing Finding Niche Markets where I gave you details about finding niche markets. Today I’m going to give you some tips to help to take part in this business. Many people when join to affiliate networks think they could start promoting the first thing they see, or may be the hottest thing. Well, that’s not so easy because if it were, everybody should be sucessful and rich.

Recommendations for Choosing an Affiliate Product

Be familiar with the product: The reason why I’m giving you this advice at first instance is because this is the key to suceed. You should look for a product you are familiar with, a product which you know and will enjoy promoting it. This way, you won’t need to research before promoting it because you have the knowledge to talk about it.

Also, it’s not good to promote something you don’t believe in. This is like blogging, if you blog just because of the money you can earn, you will end failing. So to resume this first advice, pick a product you know and you think it worth.

Be interested in the product: You can be familiar with the product because everyday you hear about it, but if you are not interested in it you will lose your time. At the beginning you can do it fine, but then when you need to work hardly writing many articles about the product and submit it in article directories, it will be a pain in the ass!.

Almost every week I see people promoting Herbalife products in my community, but for any reason I would promote them.

Check its landing page: When you think you got a good product, check its landing page, email creative or whatever is supposed to convince people for buying the product. The landing page needs to be easy to navigate, and it should call to action.

When you see the html email or visit the landing page, think as you were a costumer near from buying the product. If YOU are persuaded, it means your costumers will too. In the other hand, if you don’t feel motivated or persuaded, probably you should look for another product with a better catching interface.

Check if it converts: Talk with your affiliate manager and ask him about the conversion rates of the product you want. In other words, the conversion rate tell you if the product makes sells or not, 3 or more sales per day is ok. Conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.

I talked with my manager of NeverblueAds and he told me some good conversion rates related with different offers:

• Email submit = about 25 – 35%
• Free trial offer = about 2% – 3%
• Dating offer (short for submit) = about 10%
• True sale offer = about 2 – 5%

Those numbers are relative, so talk with your manager to assure.

Stay with the winners: What I want to mean with this, is to promote those things that are working. Promote popular/hot products, promote that things you know other people are making money with. Why, won’t be harder because of the competition? If you try to promote those products that are not converting well, you will lose money and time promoting it.

What you need to do is to effort promoting it, that’s it. I will talk more about promoting your affiliate products in other article, as well as how to find keywords and how to find these products that are making the people richer, using Affiliate Espionage.

Money back guarantee: This is not always available but if so, it would be better for you. Money back guarantee programs inspire peace and trust, your consumers will feel safe of blackhat tricks or scammy programs.

As I said, this is a plus. The good thing is most of the U.S. and Canadian offers have this policy, but if you find a great product without it don’t worry!.

Which are your tactics?

The other day I read something that recommends the opposite of me about the popular products. I read it is better to get an unsaturated market, this way you could sell “better” than if you take a saturated one, such as making money online for example…

What do you think about it? What about the wasted money until you discover the trick of the product?

If you are promoting a product I would love to know how did you choose it, teach me!

Nowadays you can see more and more young people recognizing opportunities and innovating with new  kind of businesses,  introducing new products or services to internet. This young entrepreneurs, like Mark Zuckerberg creator of Facebook, are innovating with their ideas and making loads of money online.

As you may know, is very difficult to find entrepreneurs in your community. An entrepreneur is a person who has the skills and initiative to establish its own business, who assumes the financial risk of the initiation, operation, and management of its business. That is exactly the definition of Michael Dunlop – a young and talented entrepreneur founder of Retireat21.com, a leading showcase for other young entrepreneurs to show their talents and share their stories.

Many of us have heard about millionaire entrepreneurs, like the founders of Youtube or Facebook, but who are they? How they reached their goal? That’s the reason number 1 why I visit Retireat21, because is a great place to meet the stories behind successful young entrepreneurs, to know how they succeed!.

Because of that, I highly recommend you to take a tour for the Interviews’ Section, a place where you can find loads of good advices from interviews of many entrepreneurs like Matthew Mullenweg (founder of WordPress), Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) or Aaron Wall (founder of SEOBook.com).

So as you can see, Retireat21 is a great website where entrepreneurs can be met, but how to interact with them? Don’t you think it would be great to share thoughts with them? The answer to both questions is YES!.

By participating on the Young Entrepreneur Forums you can exchange ideas and meet the strategies of many successful people with common interests in Internet Businesses, Blogging, Website Promotion Techniques or either topic related with entrepreneurship. These forums are a great opportunity where you can take advantage from, this way you can learn about the mistakes they committed before achieving their goals, avoiding them and going directly to your success!.

What if you disagree with the experiences and information of the forums? You can still learning at Retireat21′s Blog, where many tips focused on entrepreneurship are shared. SEO, viral marketing, social networking or making money online, are some of the topics dealt on the blog.

To conclude…

Retireat21.com is a great website where you can learn about entrepreneurship, learning techniques that will help you to succeed and make money online. Its interviews and forums are excellent resources of priceless tips, so you won’t want to miss them! And that’s not all,  if you are under 22 and you make money online I invite you to sign up for the top young bloggers list.

To Your Success

I know you have something in mind, a great idea, a great business that will give you thousands of dollars a month. The problem starts when you have plenty of ideas – referred to the same project – and you don’t know what you should do first.

Well first of all, it’s fairly obvious that you should plan your project, but sometimes when the ideas are very big, it’s complicated to plan everything before start developing something, don’t you think? That’s why I’m writing this post, because developing a project can be a difficult task when it has many details, for example: an internet business…

The Rhythm of Working

Most of the times, when we think in something big, we look for partners to work with in order to divide the different tasks of the project. That’s a normal thing, many people does it, including entrepreneurs, bloggers and even companies… Working with other people have things that you have to deal with. Every person is different, you and your coworkers can have different rhythms of working and to succeed when you work in team, it’s essential to set a rhythm of working among other things…

I detached this “rhythms” in 5 types:

• 100/0 Rhythm: This is a good rhythm when the project is relative small, something that you can do by yourself. With this rhythm, you start developing the project once you have it 100% planned.
• 80/20 Rhythm: I have worked many times based on this rhythm, and sometimes it’s because I am a person who needs to see the progress of the things to stay motivated. With this rhythm you start developing the project when you have it 80% developed and 20% undeveloped. 80% is quite enough in order to start developing what you are planning, and the other 20% could be something non-relevant, something which your project do not depend of it.
• 50/50 Rhythm: I have also worked under this one . This is a little dangerous because when you don’t have everything planned and defined in a project, no matter how much you have done of it that you can get stuck and probably you could end dropping the idea. This rhythm works with a project 50% developed and other 50% undeveloped, classic of moments when you work under pressure.
• 20/80 Rhythm: You are very impulsive. How can you work with 80% of the project undeveloped? May be you have everything in your head and you don’t want to “waste” time planning and defining everything about your project but dude, I recommend you to take it easy and keep planning before taking actions.
• 0/100 Rhythm: Ok this is impossible, nothing good can emerge here. How can you make a real serious project without planning anything about it? If you really want to make something good, first of all you should thing at least a little about what you want!.

Remember that no matter what you want to develop, if it’s big or small, I highly recommend you to plan everything before getting your hands dirty. It’s good to work with a 80/20 rhythm but it’s even better to work with 100/0. Remember that once you have everything defined with details, anything can’t result wrong.

In order to learn more about project’s planning, I invite you to check my post Do You Plan Your Projects?.

Branding is almost everything when you are running a company. No matter if you promote it offline or online, the important thing is to understand what is your objective as a company, and what should you do once you are established in the market.

But that thing of branding is not just for companies. Who else should be interesting on promoting a brand? Well not to go so far, let’s take as example the Bloggers. When you want to start a blog, you should think about something remarkable that people note and can remember easily. As bloggers, it’s very important to create a sense of loyalty between the readers and us, and that is only possible through a brand.

Also there are many people who can be interested on branding, people like entrepreneurs, web designers or may be book editors need to create a brand in order to have that magic thing capable of moving masses, imposing new behaviors to groups of people.

Once you are established, It’s possible to ruin your brand?

Absolutely yes. In this post I deal with some details that could look insignificant, but they cause great impact on the market, frighten away your followers. Of course, you won’t want to lose them! So the objective of this post is to teach you what NOT to do, in order to let grow and to conserve your brand identity.

1. Break your code of honor: What you do with your brand, is to spread away your philosophy. Because of that philosophy many people follow you, paying attention when you talk or when you launch a new product… That’s how people see those 2 hours-commercials of Apple! What a better way to ruin your Branding that breaking your code of honor? So if you start violating those things that you were promoting and spreading by years, have in mind that you will ruin all that hard work!.
2. Lie: Lying is a typical resource used by marketers in order to catch clients. What they don’t know is that they are losing clients instead catching them. Possibly, they can catch them the first time, but what do you think will happen when they feel scammed? Ohh yeah! They won’t buy anything else from that marketer or company. Instead, if you are sincere with the customers you will create a sense of loyalty, buying the first, second and the next products you launch.
   
3. Badly treat your competitors: Branding is all about market. In addition of you, there will be another people promoting the same stuff that you. Either better or worst, there will be many people offering the same product in different ways trying to catch the most of the people. Competition or potential partners? Think about the possible future partnerships between you and those competitors because sometimes is not a good idea to break relations with them, and even more if you insult them or give them a bad treat.
   
4. Lower the quality of your products/services: Have you thought why people are stuck to you? You can be 100% sure that they are with you because they like what you offer them, because they feel comfortable with it. Either a service, product or just another different stuff, if you start lowering the quality of what you offer, the people will start leaving you and start looking for another companies that offer the same thing. Personally, I think that if you are going to do something bad, it’s better not to do it.
5. Ignore what they want: Times change and people too. Sometimes the people want something because it’s a fashion thing, something like a boom or just because that thing improve their experience as customers. That’s something you need to know, studying the market – how it’s evolving – and learning what the people want. This last thing includes studying your competitors,  they can be offering something better than you to get more customers… So if you know that your clients are demanding something, for your good, you should give it to them.

As you could note, that 5 appointments are pretty important if you want to keep your customers. In this case, by following them, you and your brand will broke forever and ever! Well it’s not so dramatic, you could lower the quality of a service but if you note that and make something to compasate that problem, you will be fine.

I aimed this to companies, or people who sale products or services, but this is perfectly applicable to bloggers. Instead lowering the quality of a service, you could lower the quality of your posts, which will make you lose subscribers!… If you think about all of them, they are perfectly applicable in blogs, websites and even forums…

Conclusion

That 5 tips were good, but you can be sure that they are not the only things you can do to ruin your brand. There should be another tiny things, just be sure to make the right movements by following the philosophy and concepts of your brand. Only them can guarantee the success of your work!