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!

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.

Hello webmasters, as you know it’s very important to optimize your website for search engines in order to increase its traffic. It’s good to know when you are ranking well, but it’s even better to know the SEO results of your competitors on a certain keywords.

Introducing ExactFactor

That is possible with the help of ExactFactor, which lets you track your site ranking easily on the most used search engines: Google, Yahoo! and Live.

How can you use this tool? Well, basically ExactFactor provides a series of free tools that you can use to:

• Track your site promotion on Google, Yahoo! and Live
• Get progress reports directly to your email.
• Get an email alert when your site position is changed.
• Get an email alert when you overtake your competitor.
• Compare your site position to your competitors.

As you can see, these are some awesome features, particularly those ones related with email alerts, which you will get everything in your inbox without doing a single click. As a difference of the tracking and comparing tools, to use the tools related with email alerts you will need to register an user account. This way, you could stop being a guest, personalizing your email address to enjoy the rest of the features.

By comparing your site with your competitors you can make a SEO analysis and take certain actions in order to get a better ranking. Those certain actions, which can be a change of keywords, meta tags or may be a linkbaiting will help you out to rank higher than your competitors and get more traffic for especific keywords.

The following are some screenshots that let you see the user interface.

User Experience

User Alerts

Why to be satisfied with those screenshots? Don’t waste more time and go to ExtactFactor.com and configure your account to get your free reports!.

Yesterday, MediaWhiz released a new program which you can use to make money online called InLinks, or also better known as Text Link Ads 2.0. MediaWhiz also runs TLA, so if you want to register to InLinks but you are already part of TLA, you will need another email address, giving you an error of database etc etc…

How It Works?

First, let’s review the Advertiser‘s side. inLinks allows you to purchase links within the content area on web pages. You search for instances of your top keywords and replace those static keywords with a hyperlink back to your website. There simply is not a more natural paid link on the market. Once you bought a link, you will have editorial control over it.

That’s sounds pretty, similar than TLA.

Now let’s review the Blogger’s side.Once the advertiser buy a link in your website, you can either approve it or deny it, giving you full editorial control. And like TLA, they have plugins for wordpress, moveable type and drupal, which you can activate in your blog and they will take care of the rest, being an automatized proccess.

The Bad

By reading the description of the program below, it seems exactly like text links ads, but there are a main and big difference.  There are two things:

• NoFollow Free: The sold links are nofollow free, which means that will be indexed by search engines.
• Not Relevancy: You are able to buy links on websites that are not even related with yours.

As you can see, there are two big problems. If you start accepting links that can be modified by the advertiser, you won’t have control at all over them. Due to these links will be free of nofollow attribute, they will affect your ranking on search engines and guess what? When Google finds that you are linking unrelated websites in yours, you will probably get slapped.

Of course, if you can approve or deny links you won’t be so stupid to accept irrelevant things, but what if the advertiser change their configuration after you accepted them?.

I don’t know, I don’t trust in that but that’s just my personal opinion, may be I’m wrong… What do you think?

Whenever we read or speak, we are thinking on keywords. Sometimes we forget an idea while we are speaking and then we remember it because of a word related with it. As you can imagine, keywords are everywhere, specially on Internet. Every blog, forum, social community or any other website has keywords which characterize it.

So what are keywords and how can I choose the correct ones?

Well my friend, keywords are basically that words with special significance, in particular any word used to reference something else. They link to other words or other information.

The term keyword in reference to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) usually refers to a word or keyword phrase (combination of words, such as ‘best paid advertising’) used to find relevant and useful web pages. Ok now you know what are the keywords, but how could you know which ones are the proper for your website?

Well first of all, you need to have in mind something. Internet is a big virtual world, and many people are competing at the same time for specific keywords, specially the short ones, i.e. diets, money, finance, music, etc…

I suggest you to have in mind the following 2 things when you are going to select your keywords:

1. The keywords should drive traffic: This means that they should be search on search engines in order to drive traffic. If you select keywords which nobody looks for you will be wasting your time.
2. The keywords should not be too targeted: This is a little obvious for someone who knows how this works, but it couldn’t be for a newbie. If you select highly-targeted keywords, it would be very difficult for you to rank for them.

Once you learned that you may have many questions, for example, how do you know when a keyword is highly-targeted? Everything will be asnwered in this post my friend, so be quiet and keep reading. Now, let’s review the procedure of selecting good keywords.

Selecting The Keywords

To start, make a list with the most basics things you have in your mind. What? Are you telling me that you don’t have anything in mind? Don’t worry, I’m going to help you with that. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my site about?
• What will I offer there?
• What kind of people will visit my blog?
• What are the keywords of my competitors?

Once you thought in those questions, you will have many keywords in mind. Write them in a paper or in a blank document because now we are going to explode and optimize them with some web tools.

Wordtracker GTrends

GTrends is a free tool which you can generate 100 keywords by entering just one, and get the estimate of search volume as well as the competition on Google. Let’s see how it looks:

Then you need to enter a keyword very related with your website and click on Hit Me.

I searched for “affiliate marketing” and I got 100 potential related keywords, the most searched on Google. At the left you will see the searches, and if you click in the icon of the right, you will see the competition of the selected keyword in Google.

It is recommendable to take keywords with a competition less than 50K. If you take one with more than 50,000 it will be hard for you to rank for it. Also if you get a keyword with less than 20K, you will probably rank in the first places of Google.

Also, there are other web services which you can use to fetch keywords, and they are the following ones:

• Traffic Travis: This is a good tool which you can take your market research, search engine optimization and PPC campaigns to a whole new level with this suite of tools. This software is available for windows, and it has 2 versions, a free -which let you fetch just 200 keywords- and a paid one, which let you fetch more than that.
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestion: This is a web based application of the DigitalPoint’s team.
• Google Keyword SandBox: You can also find this tool in your Adsense account under Tools > Keyword Tool. ith this you can generate a big list of keywords by giving a couple of them. It explores and gives you synonyms of the entered keywords.
• Google Sets: Another great tool of Google. You need to type some words and you will get a list of related keywords.
• Good Keywords: This is a simple and good Windows software to find the right keywords for your web pages.

Using Google Keyword Tool

By entering some keywords you will get hundreds of them by using synonyms. You can fetch keywords by Descriptive words/phrases or by Website content (this last one works to “steal” other people’s keywords).

Then you will get a list of 100 keywords or more, with detailed information such as competition, search volume and others. In the last screenshot you can see how these result looks like, the green bars are the competitions which as you can see, there are keywords more targeted than others…

What next? Export all the keywords to a .txt file and then go to the tool called Traffic Estimator. Then, open the .txt and copy-paste all the keywords into the box. It is very important to set the maximum CPC for ever keyword, which is $100. By doing this you will get the highest priority for the keywords that you are looking for.

Then you need to process that and export them the results as .cvs. Then, I invite you to check this video made by John Cow to learn how to use a program called KeywordCorral, which is free and will help you to choose the right keywords for your website. The video of Cow is oriented to Blog Titles, but it is perfectly applicable to website keywords.

Recommendations

Short keywords are really hard to rank for, and you should look for another alternatives. I suggest you to use Long Tail keywords, which are those ones formed by two or more words, i.e. lose weight fast, bes affiliate networks, climbing everest mountain, etc… Nowadays, these kind of keywords are much better for everything, because they are more specific and they have less competition.

Note: Remember to get keywords with less than 50k competitors.

Nowadays, almost every time you read a blog article you can find links pointing to other articles of the same blog. Internal linking is one of the most common strategies used by bloggers in their posts due to several reasons, which I’m going to explain in this post in order to let you know the secret behind this behavior.

Have you asked to yourself what happens with your old posts? And when I say “old” I want to refer to the posts you have published months ago… Well, let’s say that your visitors use to share your posts through social media networks, getting that post a good exposure and being a boom for some days. A week after, that post won’t be read with the same frequency which people read it in its first days with. Of course, if you do a good SEO you will attract visitors to that post through search engines, but it won’t be the same.

So there are other strategy which you can use in order to enhance the traffic of your posts, and that strategy is called Internal Linking.

The Advantages

What do you win by linking past posts? A lot! and I’m going to explain you why. If someone visits your blog for first time, you would like to make it subscribe to your blog right? Many times happens that people visit your blog and if they don’t like the first content they read, they just leave without reading anymore. If you link other related articles inside your posts, people will click all those links and this way, they will read more content of your blog.

Tip: is very important to use the attribute target=”_blank” in order to force that links to open in a new tab/window of the browser.

The problem is when you link many posts inside other ones, because the user will click all of them and then they won’t know what to read first. Sometimes that happens to me, I end with 4 or 5 articles of the same blog opened in my firefox and it could be hard to find a chronological order.

So once you learned that, let’s review the main advantages of internal linking:

• Promote your other posts.
• Make your visitors stick to your blog.
• Increase the possibility of getting new subscribers.
• Increase the number of backlinks pointing to your blog.
• Increase your ranks (pagerank, alexa…) because of the backlinks.

The Disadvantages

I think there are no disadvantages on this topic. Well yes, it is very important to remember that you should not bombard the users with plenty of internal links in your posts. As I said before, they could get bored or they couldn’t find an order among the posts you are linking, and this could end with a confused user closing all those posts that you linked. This way, you could get the opposite effect that you wanted to get which was the catch of a new subscriber…

Conclusion

Certainly linking other own articles in your posts can be a good idea to make your readers stick to your blog. Something you need to remember is to don’t bother them with several links, I suggest you to link 1 may be 2 posts and not more than that. More than 2 posts could result a negative reaction, and you don’t want to frighten your visitors . Any suggestions? Feel free to leave your comment and help this community to grow up!