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!

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?

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!

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