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.

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!

Internet Marketing is a very deep topic which you can spend your entire life talking about. The basics of this kind of marketing are known by almost all the people who deal with online businesses:

From Wikipedia – Internet Marketing, also referred to as web marketing, online marketing, or eMarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet. Basically, internet marketers affiliate with networks in order to promote their products and earn money.

That sounds quite simple, but for mysterious reasons you may feel that you don’t know anything about it, no matter how much you read about the topic. Which is the secret formula used by gurus? First of all, I need to clarify that I’m not a guru in this topic but however I have learned many tricks with the passing of time, committing mistakes, testing and testing again!.

I know what internet marketing is but I don’t know how to get involved – Help me!

That’s not a crime so don’t worry! In this topic I’m going to teach you a couple of tricks in order to help you getting started. Great! So let’s take it easy and think about the very first thing you need in order to start digging into this goldmine… Skipping either a domain or an affiliate network, the very first thing you need to have is a Niche Market.

From Wikipedia – A niche market is a focused targetable portion of a market. A distinct niche market usually evolves when a potential demand for a product or service is not met by any supply, or when a new demand arises due to changes in society, technology, or the general environment.

Once you understood what a niche market is, how do you get one? There are many websites which provide this kind of information, so what I’m going to do now is to review and study a couple of them:

Google Zeigeist

“Zeitgeist” means “the spirit of the times”, and Google reveals this spirit through the aggregation of millions of search queries they receive every day. Zeigeist is not a Google tool at all, it is more a place where you can find the Google tools that make the dirty job, and among them we have four, but just mainly 2: Google Trends and Insights for Search.

By combining both tools you can get very accurate data about what people is looking for. Personally I really love Google Insights because you can see the evolution of a term with the passing of time since the service was launched – 2004 I think.

Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz is a great service launched the last year which you can see the most active topics on Internet. In addition, top searches are broken down into actors, movies, sports, etc., with constantly updated short articles to the right of the top search chart. This is a great place to get information about the most popular searches in relatively real-time.

AOL Hot Searches

AOL Hot Searches is something similar to Buzz when we talk about diversification, because there you will find the top 10 searches by categories. I read it updates every 12 seconds, so I guess it should be very accurate. By checking the sidebar you could see the Year’s Top Searches – 2008 in this case. With this another section you can see what was hot throughout the last year!.

Amazon BestSellers

Being Amazon a big place where everybody buys, its Bestsellers section is perfect to know what the people is interested on, and what they are buying. You can take advantage by knowing what kind of products are making great sales.

Lycos 50

Lycos is one of the most classic websites since the internet started. At Lycos 50, you can find the most 50 active searches during a week. Perfect to get new and fresh ideas.

Ask Top Searches

As you may know, Ask.com’s innovative search technologies deliver fast and relevant information for millions of people every day. Ask makes cuts of the searches, displaying the top searches for the week ending a date.

Bloglines

Bloglines is a feed reader, but besides that it offers a section with the most popular blog feeds. This is a great resource to know what bloggers/networkers are talking about!.

Technorati

Technorati is a blog search engine and may be the most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, indexing more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content. By looking at the popular searches you can know the hottest things about what bloggers are talking about.

DogPile

Dog what? Dogpile is on a mission to help rescue pets. They call it our Search & Rescue program. When you search the Web on Dogpile, a portion of revenue generated will be donated to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA®). However, it shows in real-time what the world is searching for.

Ok I know where to find niches, then what?

Once you find a niche market, then you need to search affiliates in order to have something to promote. Finding a niche was only the first step and then after finding affiliates, you need to find good keywords, establish the affiliate campagin model among other many aspects, which I will dealing with in the next days.

What about you? Where do you find niche markets?

For online businesses, everybody wants to be the first on search engines in order to have more exposure than anyone. So far, no matter how much SEO work you do on your website, it never seems to be enough. Among other things, we all know that search engines rankings are related with numbers of backlinks, which are links pointing back to your website.

There are many seo services that let you increase the number of backlinks of your website, but one of the most commons consist in something called directory submission, which you can submit your site to website directories. The good thing is, that you will get many backlinks pointing to your website, helping to improve your search engine rankings… The bad side of many website directories are the super-slow process, which makes you wait months until get reviewed and approved by the directories, and that’s a terrible problem when you want almost immediate results.

After continuing with this article, let’s explain what’s a website directory:

A website directory is usually defined as an alphabetical list of names and addresses for example Yellow Pages, other types of telephone directories and address books.  The online directories contain the names of websites and their URL’s.

Introducing Fast Approval

Fast Approval is a fast and easy way to get a fast review of your directory submission, within 7 days or less. This service is divided in two: Directory Owners and Directory Submitters.

Directory owners can earn cash for each submission made to their directory! Each submission will need to be reviewed by each owner within 7 days for you, in order to earn the submission fee. It’s really important to remark that if you (as owner) don’t approve a listing after 7 days, any fees will be refunded to the original website submitter.

It also offers to automatically post the new listings for you, by uploading the ResellerGo API file straight to your directory. Afraid of using its API? Don’t worry, you will always have complete control to what is published in each of your directories.

Directory submitters can use the ResellerGO control panel to get their website reviewed within 7 days! They provide reports within your account that displays the status of your submissions and also the link to each listing after it has been approved. Keep in mind there is a minimal one time fee for fast approval that is less than what most directories charge for a fast review. Remember that if you haven’t been reviewed within 7 days, your fee will be refunded automatically in the system.

How much it cost?

That’s a good question. May be you should be thinking that it’s fairly expensive because of its effectiveness but it’s not, you need to pay as low as $0.5 per approved listing!.

How long does it take to get listed on a directory?

Certain directories allow you to get your website listed almost immediately. Other directories take much more time but generally few directories take longer than 4 weeks before your website gets the necessary approval to be listed.

Screenshots of Fast Approval

Fast Approval

Fast Approval for Submitter

Submission Center

URL Submission Panel

As you can appreciate in the screenshots, this service is very easy to use, allowing you to do something tedious in very simple steps, just with a few clicks!.

Benefits of using Fast Approval

As you can notice, it’s not a common url submission service. It’s called fast approval because you can submit your website to about a 1000 directories in 30 minutes. Generally the free services are much slower than the paid ones…

As you may know, the higher the PR the higher the ranking. WIth this tool you can easily submit your website to a directory with a specific Page Rank, PR range or alternatively a mix of PR ranges, It all depends on your preferences.

So if you feel an urgency of improving your search engine rankings quickly, you can try this service to achieve that goal – It has different packages and surely you will find something that fit your necessities.

The fact is that many people use this kind of marketing just to send unwanted emails, or commonly called as spam. In the last years, the number of spam messages in people’s inboxes have considerably increased. In a year, more than 3 trillions of emails are sent, of which an average of 70% of them are spam. For our luck, email service’s providers are constantly improving their algorithms to filter the good messages of the bad ones .

What should you know to run an email marketing campaign?

Well like everything related with marketing, creating a good campaign can take you more time than you expect. Obviously, the first thing you need to do is create a newsletter. You can do this by using Aweber, a service which you can send scheduled emails, broadcasts and configure autoresponders… And as every service of this nature, it lets you send bulk emails to your mailing lists.

Once you have ordered your email marketing service, you can start creating email lists and promoting your campaigns! On now, , let’s start with reviewing the things you need to have in mind to create and run with success an email campaign:

Respecting the Subject

• Keep it short: Make your subject as short as possible, with a maximum of 50 characters including spaces. This way, the message will be direct and concise.
• Keep it simple, don’t overdo it: Avoid using capital letters in all the words, as well as using punctuation like exclamation marks. In the case of the capital letters, they will be directly filtered by spam protectors, but if you want you could use exclamation marks, is not so bad but sometimes it could be misinterpret.
• Don’t forget your brand: Include your brand, i.e. the name of the company, product or service in the subject line. It helps the subscriber to recognize you.
• Create a sense of urgency: You can include time-depending words in order to encourage your subscribers to read the newsletter as soon as possible. Phrases like now, this week, for limited time, exclusive offer and similar can be use it to create this sensation.
• Motive the subscribers, entice it: You can let the reader know about the benefits it will get by reading the newsletter. Things like get free… or get a discount for… can work.
• Be honest: I think I have been a good broadcaster of that phrase. Being honest with the subscribers will create a sense of loyalty between you and they. You won’t get anything by deceiving them.

Respecting the From

• Don’t forget your brand: Your brand should appear either in the subject or the from fields.
• Use your website tags: This is something relatively optional, you can choose between adding or not the tags of your website, i.e. Mr Javo dot Com – Blogging and Internet Marketing Tips. This can give you good or bad results, it depends of its length. In my case, it’s fairly long to include my tags in the From field. If your tag is too long, I recommend you not to use it.

Respecting the Message

This is may be the most important aspect of email marketing because here will be displayed the information you want to promote. So let’s see the guidelines for this field:

• Provide relevant content: What would you feel if I send you through my newsletter something related with Food, Cars or Deports? Exactly, you could find it surprising and annoying! If you signed up to receive blogging and internet marketing tips why are you getting information related with other niches? So with this I want to tell you that it’s really important to match your content with your audience. You will get better click-through rates if you send relevant content.
• Emphasize your brand: Including logos and URLs related to your business will boost your click-throught rates and at the same time, you will be imposing your authority.
• Send copies in both HTML and Plain Text: It is very recommendable to send the newsletter in both HTML and Plain Text formats. The reason of this is because there are people who don’t allow HTML code in their email inbox. If the subscriber don’t allow HTML code the text plain version will be shown instead.
• Include a link to unsubscribe: Is a really important thing to include a link which the subscribers could use to unsubscribe for your newsletter whenever they want. By doing this, they won’t be moored to you if they don’t want to!.
• Provide a RSS link: If you constantly update the content of your website, as the case of blogs, you could include a link of your RSS feed encouraging the people to subscribe. Remember to tell them the benefits, i.e. a little message explaining them that they will get (quicker) updates of your site…
• Include your contact information: Is a must to include your personal information, like your company’s street address, phone number and contact email. Some services ask for this in their policy.

Ok these were the recommended things that you need to do in order to run an email marketing campaign successfully. Another great tip is to set a Follow-up message in order to give them a welcome when they sign up for your newsletter. This create a good relationship between you and them, and helps you to estimulate the sense of loyalty. For this message, you can include a kind of coupon or offer of your product/service to estimulate a sell.

To conclude this post, remember to tell to your visitors the advantages of subscribing to your newsletter or how do you expect to attract subscribers if you don’t tell them what will they win? Keep in mind NOT to send spam, and send emails only to people who are willing to receive them.

By the way, if you are not in my newsletter yet, I invite you to take part in to receive my very best tips, exclusive offers and mailings, in addition of a free copy of my ebook The Affiliate’s Start Guide .