Article Marketing

Of all the ways to make money online, article marketing is one of the easiest. 

But you do need to understand some basic principles to ensure your articles are accepted and generate cash for you. Read on, and all will be revealed! 

So what is article marketing? 

Basically, it involves writing short articles (typically 400–800 words) and publishing them on article directories. These are websites that publish articles free of charge as long as they meet their particular requirements. 

The directories won't pay you, but they will make your articles available to other people for use in their own newsletters and websites. 

What's the advantage of this to you? Well, every article includes a resource box, which will contain your name and website URL and any other information you wish to include (within the rules of the directory concerned). 

People are only allowed to republish your article on condition that they include the information in your resource box too, usually at the end of the article. 

By this means, your website details can be rapidly syndicated across the web, bringing more visitors (and potential clients) to your website and boosting its search-engine rankings. 

Some of the most popular article directories are: 

EzineArticles 

Go Articles 

Article Dashboard 

Articles Base 

Article World 

A large (though by no means complete) list of article directories can be viewed here.

Article directories normally provide some means of checking how many times your articles have been viewed, downloaded or emailed to others. These stats can be very useful for researching the most popular topics among readers and website publishers. Once you know what they are, you can write more articles on these subjects. 

Article marketing is great for bringing extra visitors to a blog or website – but what if you don't yet have one, or you just want a quick, no-fuss way of making some extra cash? 

Article marketing can do this for you too, by generating affiliate sales. 

Clean up with bum marketing! 

This approach is sometimes referred to as bum marketing. 

The term was coined by US internet marketing expert Travis Sago. It refers to the fact that you can make money this way even if you have barely a cent to your name – like a bum or hobo, in other words. 

The basic method can be set out in four steps: 

(1) Choose a popular product with an affiliate programme.
(2) Find keywords relevant to this product to target in your article. 
(3) Write your article including these keywords and phrases.
(4) Include either an affiliate link to the merchant whose offer you are promoting or a link to a forwarding site. 

Let's look at each of these steps in more detail... 

1. Choose a product 

There's no lack of choice here. You could start by signing up as an affiliate at the popular ClickBank online marketplace. There are literally thousands of downloadable and online products available for promoting here, and affiliates earn up to 75% of the sale price. 

A lesser-known affiliate network that has hundreds of downloadable and other products available for affiliates to sell is The WCCL Network. 

Other affiliate networks also worth checking out include Commission Junction, Shareasale, MoreNiche (mainly health products) and Affiliate Window. 

Look for products that are selling well right now. On ClickBank, focus on products with a gravity of at least 30 (gravity is a figure quoted by ClickBank indicating how popular a product is and how many other affiliates are selling it). 

Aim to choose products with a strong, persuasive sales page you can send prospects to. And, obviously, look for high commission rates to make the returns worth your while. 

2. Find relevant keywords

Your aim here is to attract people who are searching for the type of product you are promoting. 

This should tie in closely with step 1. In other words, when you are looking for suitable products to promote, pick ones that have keywords and phrases associated with them that could be used to drive potential buyers to the website in question. 

When you find suitable candidates, use the Google Adwords Keywords Suggestion Tool to check the popularity and competition of that word or phrase. Typically, if it is searched for 1000 to 12000 times a month, it should be fairly easy to rank on page one with. 

Keywords that are searched for less than this do not have sufficient traffic-generating potential, while those with more are likely to be too competitive to achieve good rankings without spending money on advertising. 

3. Write your article

Now it's time to sit down and write your article. 

If you're aiming to promote a particular product or service, one good approach is to start by explaining the problem it solves. The article should then lead the reader toward the solution, which of course will be the product or service you are affiliated with. 

Don't be too promotional, as no one likes to be hard sold (and this may also result in your article being rejected by article directories). Ideally, choose a product you have tried out yourself and like. 

Aim to incorporate the keyword/s you are targeting naturally in the body of the article, and use your main keyword (at least) in the title as well. 

4. Publish your articles 

Publish your articles on free article directories such as those listed earlier. 

At the end of each article you will be allowed a promotional link. Ideally you would put your affiliate link here, but there are two potential problems with this. 

One is that if you publish a 'naked' affiliate link at the end of your article, some people will recognise what it is and be put off buying (don't ask me why). If they are affiliate marketers themselves, they may even change the link code to their own and steal the commission you should rightfully be getting! 

A further problem is that some article directories don't allow affiliate links, even in resource boxes. Ezine Articles are particularly strict in this regard. 

There are various ways around this. One is to buy a relevant domain name (HINT: .info names are cheap and readily available) somewhere like GoDaddy and in the control panel set up a 'domain redirect' that goes to the site of the merchant you are promoting via your affiliate link. 

For those who are new to online marketing, this article explains the procedure in a bit more detail, but it's really quite straightforward. 

You then put a link to your domain name in your article's resource box, and anyone clicking on this will be forwarded seamlessly to the merchant's sales page. 

Even Ezine Articles are happy with this! 

The other option is to create a web page of your own with affiliate links to the merchant, and in your article resource box simply link to this. Many affiliates use posts on free blogging platforms such as Blogger for this purpose. 

Another possibility is to create a Squidoo lens or HubPages site, as both of these do generally allow affiliate links (with some limited restrictions). Creating your own site has the advantage that in time it should generate some search-engine traffic in its own right. On the other hand, it means anyone reading your article has to go through a two-stage process before they finally arrive at the merchant's sales page. Both methods can work well, though. 

Finally, to ensure your article is ranked well on Google and other search engines, you should create links to it from other websites. 

A simple way to do this is to write more articles using the same keywords and place links in each one back to your main article. This will help the article concerned rank higher in the search engines for those keywords and attract more traffic. 

You can also boost your article's rankings by linking to it on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and social bookmarking sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon.

And that's pretty much all there is to this method of making money from article writing. It's simple and straightforward, and many marketers have made a lot of money from it.