The trouble most people have when it comes to article marketing is how to do it and were they should start.  Let me first talk a little about how I personally view article marketing.

What is Article Marketing

Article marketing is the process of posting content onto another website other then your own.  When doing this you talk about a subject line that is similar to your website.  In the article or the resource box you place a link back to your website using the keyword anchor text you want your page to rank well for.

A good example of this would be a site that does “online computer repair”.  You would want to place links from your article back to your website that contain the basic keywords or long tail keywords you want to go after.  For this niche it could be “remote computer repair”, “computer repair”, “online PC Repair”, the list goes on and on for basically any keyword you want to rank for.

Why You Should Use Article Marketing

If you could not tell already it’s to gain a higher ranking in the search engines and also to pre-sale a customer.  A good example of this again would be to use our “Computer repair” site analogy.  Let’s say you write a very detailed article about how to remove a particular virus.  While your article is acurate many non technical people may not fully understand the virus removal process.  However they see the article is well written and there fore assume you know what the hell your talking about.

Because your article sounded good they are FAR more likely to click through to your link in the resource box.  By simply stating something like ” If you can not remove this threat yourself and require the help of an expert then check out our “Insert Keyword Anchor Text like (Remote Computer Repair)” site.  We offer a great virus removal service at a price that won’t break the bank.  People will tend to trust you more and when they click through they are now more likely to purchase your services.  What’s even better is you are now helping your site rank higher for that particular keyword you placed into the article that links back to your website.

Here are some real life examples for www.ezinearticles.com

Article 1.  Posted 2 years ago and it has 5,800 views and 1,146 clicks throughs to my site.  This is a 20% CTR.  If I were to of paid for this particular keyword phrase it would of cost my close to .50 cents a clicks.  Plus the lead would not of been that warm.  I have articles on ezine that have been viewed over 100,000 times and even have articles that get as high as 44% click through rates.  This is just off of a single article marketing website.  It should be said that ezinearticles.com is one of the biggest and best article marketing sites out there.  My average CTR is 17.3%. If you write your articles well you should be seeing some things close to this.

How to Use article Marketing.

There are hundreds of different strategies out there.  I have used close to 30 different services and software packages to distribute my articles all over the web.  The thing I want is for each article posted out there to be unique of close to it.  If you are just starting off then simply stick with Ezinearticles.com to start.  It’s free and works well.  You can google the article marketing websites out there.

My personal method uses a combination or services and software to get the job done.  I spend a good 300 bucks a month for blog networking services over at www.articlemarketingautomation.com and www.web2mayhem.com.  I’ve also just started to use http://www.articleranks.com.  These are blog article marketing services.  You can sign up for a monthly fee and publish your content to tens of thousands of websites.  The best part is you get to spin each sentence of your article to make the article nearly unique for any website you publish it on.  If you spend the time to write a well written article then you will be rewarded with a higher serp rankings.  The www.web2mayhem.com site has a few extra perks as well.  With this you also get social bookmarking and an article directory software package to distribute your content to as well.  They are all places worth looking into once you have some money coming in.

Article Marketting software

We already mentioned the blog networks and talked about www.web2mayhem.com having software that comes with the membership to help you distribute content out to other article directories but there are several other programs you can purchase as well for one time fees.  A few off the top of my head are

Article Post Robot: Decent.  Lets you spin your content but not all that easy to do so.  Works well overall

Article Submitter:  A free and paid for version here.  The paid version is by far better then the free one.

There are a few dozen article directory submission services out there as well.  One worth mentioning is from www.developer-hut.com

What ever route you go, if you put in the work you will get good results.  Do not expect instant results for article marketing.  Some times you will get them but other times they may not start coming in for a few months down the road.  The key is to develop a set method that works for you and stick with the method.  If it requires you to use the blog article network as well as other services like me then that is what you have to do.

At the end of the day it all pays off.

A new person into affiliate marketing that I helped to train was able to start generating around 100 dollars a month in come starting his first month out the door.  He invested around 7 hours in training with me and an aditional 40 hours that first month to generate that income.  The thing is he has done nothing after the frist motnh and is still generating that 100 a month.  If he actually kept going and kept up that 40 hours a month I am sure he would be making more and over the course of many years you can make a very nice living online.

Getting started is not hard and it takes little investment.  If you have money.  All the better because you can invest in some training and guides.  If you wanted to start a blog like this site is then the cost for a domain name is going to be 10 dollars each year and then you will have the cost of hosting which is around 10 dollars a month.  So a total out of pocket expense to you can be as low as 130 dollars a year.

A great quick guide that I recommend out can be downloade by following this link www.blogsavvy.net/uploads/plr_process_Rebranded.pdf .   While this is a very basic book, it’s filled with many of the things I do to generate a nice 6 figure income each year.

It can take years of work to generate a very good solid income online but like all things.  The more you do it the more you learn and the better you get at it.  When you first get started you will find that after a good 40 hours of work you may of only made a 1 that first month.  But the nice thing about affiliate marketting is as your sites start to age and you build up that traffic each and every month then you will start making more and more sales.  I made a total of 10 dollars my first month and I must of put in at least 100 hours.  Granted I had know idea what I was doing and most of that was reading everything I could get my hands on about how to make money online.  Now even if I do not put in a single hour of work I will still most likely make 300-700 for the day.  It all pays off in the long run.

When getting started I think the most important thing is to have a game plan in place as well as a goal.  In the next few weeks I am going to start to build up a FREE game plan for people and maybe will even hold a few conference calls with my readers.

As for the goal we can cover that part now.  I alsways recommend you start with a smaller goal that is still hard to achieve.  My goal was to pay for all my grocies each month.  Between my significant other, myself and my son the total is around 400 on food.  So my goal was to make 400 dollars.  It took close to 7 months for me to first hit that goal.  I have no idea how many man hours but it was a lot of late nights.  Of course I did not have a well thought out plan and it wasn’t untill that 6th month of doing things that I found out about the guys who wrote that book I recommended earlier.  These guys are the ones that got me on track and thanks to them I am now were I’m at today.

Stay tuned for some great info on exaclty what to do to get started.  I am going to be releasing all this info free of charge because I know what it’s like to be broke.

I have many different success stories I can go into but here are two very simple ones.

The first is for a young mand in Omaha who has started his own lawn care company.  He had a zero advertising budget so he could not take advantage of adwords but he did have a little cash and wanted not just a website built but SEO work so he would rank higher in the search engines and get him clients for free.  I took on the job charging next to nothing for him because I love to help out young business owners because I was only 19 when I started my first company and no one would give me the time of day.

Here he is 6 months later and he now has a nice list of clients.  He did no other advertising.  NO PHONE BOOK AD.  NO PAYING FOR ADVERTISEMENT AT ALL.  I spoke with him just this last week and he got a total of 6 calls over the weekend and booked 4 of those jobs.  I should also mention that 3 of them are now wanting him to mow every week for them.

Another great example is a man in Fort Collins CO.  After 20 years of carpet cleaning he started his own company.  Like most small business owners he had very little funds and no clients.  He spent a total of 700 dollars with me for a website and SEO work and now he brings in clients every week from his website.  That 700 was a one time fee.  It’s been nearly 8 months since I did anything for his website and he is still bringing in the cash.

When it comes to small local businesses who offer a service like the above it can often times be the best investment they will ever make to have a website built for them and SEO work done.  It is not too hard to have a company rank for their service if they only serve a local area.  Getting ranked high for omaha lawn mowing or carpet cleaning fort collins is far easier then most think.

So to sum it up yes a website is a must for small businesses.

Another great story comes out of this recession we are in.  A small horse tack supplier in a smaller city of 100,000 thousand people was seeing his company go under.  He worked hard but people just wasn’t spending money on horses.  After all for most people, having a horse costs a ton of money.

He turned to the internet for salvation.  He now makes most of his sales online and ships out product to places all over the world.  Sure it did cost him an up front investment of three thousand to fully set-up his website, SEO and training but he has already made his investment back and he swears that if he did not open a store online he would not have a company today.

For those super micro companies with no budget at all you can still get a website up and going for very little cash.  All you need to do is purchase a domain name at a place like godday.  Setup a hosting account some were like hostgator.  Then find someone who will build you out a site.  Many people can get a great looking site built for under 200 bucks.

When it comes to SEO work you can always find tips online for doing it yourself.  This site in fact has many guides on doing SEO to rank higher.

If you want a free consultation on your website I may be able to help.  Just post a comment bellow with your website and I will get back to you soon.

HOW CAN YOU MAKE MORE MONEY IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IS WORKING!!!!!!!

It just kind of hit me one day.  I was reading an article about how to increase conversion rates and the one thing they kept hitting on was to spilt test and track results.  The sky cleared and a big light just shined down on me.  Track the sale to know what page the sale is coming from and from what type of link.

While I don’t very few products there is one I like to use on all my blogs.  I use this tool for several reasons.  The first is it auto links to any keyword or keyword phrase on my blog while at the same time hiding my affiliate link.  I only hide the link  NOT CLOACK it.  This plug-in is a great check it out at  www.affiliatepro.com. Now this tool alone will track the clicks on blogs but will not track the sales.

Almost all affiliate programs out there will let you ad tracking ID’s to the link.  I normally track what site the link is one for example if it was on my personal website blogsavvy then I would name it Blogsavvy or a variation like BS.  Then I mark were the link is located ie.. Banner type or size, in-text, top.  Things like this.  Then you can name the page.  This way when a sale happens you know the website, the page of the site and the link location.

A great free tool you can use to hide or mask your affiliate link on static web pages or any page for that matter is http://www.ragepank.com/articles/hide-affiliate-links/.  You can even use this with the WP Affiliate PRO plug-in and that’s the way I have it setup.

As alwasy be sure and comment.  Do you have a tool you like to use ?  Do you have a better way of tracking and want to share?

There are millions of different niches out there.  It can be hard for many to find the right niche for them.  As an affiliate marketer finding a profitable niche is a must.  While many people offer guides to finding a niche I personally use a different method.

The first is to decide how your site will be monetized.  Yes deciding this before you even pick a niche.  Normally we just use affiliate products.  On about half of my sites I do not even use Adsense.  The many reason I do implement this is only after I am unable to convert a product into a sale.  While this is very rare I do sometimes pick a niche that I can not seem to convert anything on.  When this happens I drop the affiliate product or at least ad adsense to the pages as a major focus of the site.

Now that you decided on how you will monetize your site we need to focus in on a niche.  Many people do random keyword searches and the like.  Personally I start with the product.  Yes we don’t even know what we are selling yet.  I go through the many affiliate networks and just site back and browse till I find a product I would then like to promote.  Then I build up keywords around that product using the free Google keyword tool.  A Quick example would be a site I purchased today call transferfiles dot ORG.  I found a product called Laplink.  Then plugged in some generic terms like data transfer, file transfer and the like into the Google keyword tool.   I checked out many of the long tail keywords and found that I have many options for long tail keywords that I can write about and get some very good traffic coming into the site.

I know what your already asking.  So how do I know if this niche is profitable?  Well that answer goes back to the product we are selling.  On each sale of Laplink I should make 20+ dollars on average.  I love to sell software that has a profit of 15 bucks per sale.  At a CTR ( Click Through Rate) of 15% and a CR ( Convertion rate of 3 %) that would mean that for every 1K unqiue visitors I will make 4.5 sales.  Times that buy 20 bucks and I am making 90 dollars off of 1K unique visitors.  So if I build up traffic to the site using long tail keywords and properly optimize my site and get 1K of unique visitors a day I will be making 2,700 bucks a month off of this niche.  It should take me around 6 months to build that kind of traffic over time but once it is there that is 2.7K a month for a long time to come.  This is how I was able to build up my income to the level it is today selling affiliate products.  Now if your CR is less then 3% and it can be depending on the offer you will make far less.  For example if it’s only a 1% CR and your CTR is only 10% then you will be making 1 sale per 1K visitors which equals just 20 bucks a day.  This will sometimes happen and when it does you will need to switch some things around on your site until you get a better conversion rate.  If that fails then it may be time to implement adsense into the site.  You can see that tracking your visitors and sales is the most important factor in finding what products are more profitable.  Once you do this a few times you will start to discover other profitable niches that are related to the one you are already making good money off of.  For instance I am already in the data back niche and that has been converting very well for me.  Because Data back and data transfer are very similar it is safe for me to assume I should have close to the same results.

Hope this quick guide helped.  Be sure to add your comments, tricks and tools for what you do.

For those that are looking to develop some kind of service that does snot have a set name then often times you should find a domain that is brand able and easy to remember.

If you are an affiliate marketer like me then I have far more advice to offer.  First I stay away from any domain with a number unless that number is part of your keyword you are targeting.  I never purchase any domains with a dash in it.  While you can get away with just having one I still would not go this route.  The only extensions I consider are .com, .org, and .net.  All others can work but from a marketing point of view other extensions are not as trusted or known to visitors.

Once you know the niche you are entering I like to build a list of keywords that I will be targeting,  Use the free https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Tool.  Build up a list of names and be sure to check to broad search volume.  Identify a set of keywords that have a common keyword phrase.  A keyword pharse is normally 2 – 3 keywords.  For instance I just did a search on the following terms, data transfer, file transfer, transfer files.  These are some great keyword phrases for me to promote Laplink software.  So now I will use one of my favorite domain tools at http://www.domainsbot.com/. This is a 100% free to use tool and great to find domains that are not registered.  I plugged in the above keyword phrases one at a time and found out that transferfiles.org is not taken.  Now I can drill down on the transfer files keyword phrase and see if there are longer tail keyword phrases I can target.  I just did this and there are 100’s of great phrases I can target that have the keyword transfer files in it.  The domain is a keeper.

You will notice this is not hard at all and 100% free to do.  I always use a domain name that has the main target keyword in it.  This will give me a foot up over other domains and help me to rank higher a whole lot easier.

Post your questions and comments.  If you use any other free tools or paid tools post them.  If you have questions ask them.

While many niche bloggers can go out and find their own affiliate programs from smaller companies often times many brand names are affiliated with an Affiliate Network. Here is a listing of some of the prominent affiliate networks out there.

When searching for a good product or service to promote, be sure to check all the networks. You may find that same company on a different network offering a slightly hire commission rate. This is often times because different networks have different fee structures. Also many affiliate network programs out there offer a bonus like OneNetworkDirect from Digital River.

Onto the list of Affiliate Networks:

Google Adsense/Double Click: Google is on of the main sources of income for many bloggers and affiliates. With the acquisition of Double Click you can find plenty of products and services to promote. The is one of the best and easiest ways to monetize your blog and to supplement your income.

Commission Junction (www.cj.com): This company is one of the oldest out there and you are sure to find many top brand names. I have had my differences with this company and in some situations felt treated un fare but in no means am I going to stop working with them. With many top Brand names programs you are sure to find a few products to promote.

Click Bank (www.clickbank.com): I do not promote too many CB products. These are all 100% digital products. Many e-book and software companies. They often have very generous payout structures because it is in a digital format. As many people know this is a great way to sell your own digital product and gain affiliates with out trying too hard. As stated earlier I do not promote many of their products. Most to seem to be junk programs and I can’t bring my self to recommend them. That’s not to say you can’t find some real GEMS.

Share A Sale: (www.shareasale.com) This is a network that everyone needs to be apart of. Like CJ you will find thousands of products and service that can fit your niche and needs.

Link Share: (www.linkshare.com): Many of the world’s top products are offered on this ad network. Just like many of the above you need to be apart of it.

One Network Direct: (www.onenetworkdirect.com) This is another software site. This is a Digital River company. You can check out Digital River over at www.digitalriver.com. I use One Network Direct for the vast majority of all my software sales. I have many reasons like the fact that they offer only top name products and are very willing to work with me. Another is the bonus structure. While 1-3% extra in bonus may not sound like a whole lot at the end of the quarter it’s another grand in my pocket.

I know we have not covered all affiliate programs out there. If you have a favorite you use all the time and love be sure to post it for others. I only listed some of the main ones.

]]> http://www.blogsavvy.net/money/popular-affiliate-networks-481/feed/ http://www.blogsavvy.net/money/popular-affiliate-networks-481/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blogsavvynet/~3/zatvPYzjJ3U/ http://www.blogsavvy.net/business/blogs-a-must-for-some-companies-478/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:56:41 +0000 BlogSavvy http://www.blogsavvy.net/?p=478 We have discussed many great tips on setting up Blogs for businesses.  It’s a great way to relay current information to customers and in some cases it is an absolute must.

Today we are going to examine one such site.  The burl is http://www.destinationstationseries.com/. The company is Iron Fire publishing and they just finished their first children’s book called “The Greedy Race Car Driver”.  I my self ended up making an order because it is a rather unique product.  More on that later.

The reason we wanted to examine the site is because it’s 100% flash based.  That means that…

We have discussed many great tips on setting up Blogs for businesses.  It’s a great way to relay current information to customers and in some cases it is an absolute must.

Today we are going to examine one such site.  The burl is http://www.destinationstationseries.com/. The company is Iron Fire publishing and they just finished their first children’s book called “The Greedy Race Car Driver”.  I my self ended up making an order because it is a rather unique product.  More on that later.

The reason we wanted to examine the site is because it’s 100% flash based.  That means that the on page SEO factors (Search Engine Optimization) will be very limited.  They can still place in Meta tags like Description and Keywords as well as a title but that is it.

Situations like these require a blog.  Luckily they must of known this because they implemented one.  It is very important for all based flash sites to have an area of the site that can be used for on page SEO factors.  Search engines can not read flash pages and if your site is all flash they will not understand what your site is about and you will have to focus on off page SEO as well as other means of marketing to drive traffic to the site.

Having a blog will not only help them drive more traffic to the site but if you examine theirs you will see they are using it to relay information to their potent ional customers and make announcements about their first book.  This is the perfect example of a business that would require a Blog.

I do think they should implement a kind of newsletter that members could subscribe to.  This would enable fans who like the book being able to keep up to date with the next book in the series and it’s a great way to gain repeat customers.

Now I mentioned earlier that I purchased the book.  The reason was from the article I found on Ezine articles called Teaching Children Values Through Reading.  This book series is called a project book.  In a nut shell you not only get the book but a rather large wooden race car that goes with the book.  The car has to be assembled and thus the term project book.  I think this is a great way for me to spend time with my 7 years old and at the same time build the toy with him and read the book.  The book is about teaching a very important life lesson.  Read the Ezine review for a full review or just visit their site and see how it is built.

Think how much harder it would be to sell this book if they did not have a blog.

Be sure to post your comments.  I have already contacted the owner of this site so he should chime in soon as well.  I’m sure this publisher would love to hear your feedback.

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My goal is to reach below 80,000 by February 2009. At the rate I have watched my Alexa rank decrease (remember, lower is better), I figured that this type of goal was not only obtainable but I could easily do better.

Using the Sparky add-on for Firefox, when I visit my sites on a daily basis I watch to see how rank is improving or declining. This is vital information for me to know on all of my sites. Losing traffic and rank for me means I’m losing business. This isn’t good so I heavily monitor what’s happening with rank on all my sites.

Today, as I logged into my dashboard to see the comments left over night I noticed that my rank with Alexa has changed. More specifically today’s Alexa rank is 156,977.

Quick math tells you that in just 20 days, my Alexa rank has dropped by 9,709.

Logic says, what happened? We’ve got to repeat what happened on my blog in the last 20 days to reach the 100,000 goal by January.  And continuing the same steps, how can I drop to 90,000 or maybe even lower?

The best way for me to sum up what has happened in the last 20 days is to give you just one word:

Stumble

Yes, that’s right. StumbleUpon brought so many visitors in the last 5 days with two different blog posts. This is the only thing out of the ordinary for BlogSavvy.

To get specific, the post Race for Rank was stumbled several times which brought 617 visitors to my site directly from StumbleUpon.

If you’re keeping track, this means that in two days BlogSavvy had 968 visitors from StumbleUpon and that’s not counting residual traffic for either post on the same or different days.

The lesson learned is to write posts which will help you bring in traffic. You knew this, didn’t you? I mean, how many times exactly have we, as bloggers, heard Content is King. Aren’t you sick of it at this point?

However, the truth remains that while the saying sucks, it’s absolutely true. If your posts are on topics that people actually care about and you do the networking required to promote such posts, you’ll have traffic. Traffic is links, better Alexa rank, and in the long run, a better blog community.

A simple, simple post that explained I knew there was an update because I had pages on my blog, previously not ranked, showing PageRank.

Here’s the lesson of this post:

Pay attention to your ranks, know what they are if you want to make them better. Knowing where you’re at, what your ranking average is, and where you want to be will give you an idea of how to properly promote and network your blogs.

Next, make sure you have something that’s going to report real time statistics for your site. For example, I use and monitor daily my stats with the WordPress.com stats plugin. This has been vital to me.

I find it important to monitor my stats like this in real time because it lets me know where to spend time networking that day. It means if I’m getting heavy traffic from StumbleUpon, I need to head over to the site and spend time networking. It brings in more visitors. And the truth is, if you’re just getting a few visits from StumbleUpon, you can head over there and network to bring in more.

It doesn’t matter where your numbers are at, but on a day when you’re receiving a great deal of hits from one source, spend your time networking that day at that source.

In the end, I have proof now that having posts stumbled will indeed help me to lower my Alexa ranking.