Archive for March, 2008:
Article Marketing Strategy
There is no loner established, and better tested, method for driving traffic than article marketing. Anyone who is looking to drive traffic to affiliate campaigns, or to the sites where they are selling their own products, should be looking to implement an article marketing strategy. It is not difficult to do some research into the Alexa rank and page rank of different directories. This will not be a definitive answer as to their effectiveness, but will be a valuable guide. As ever, only testing will bring the definitive answer.
Article directories do very considerably in the amount of traffic they can drive. Find a good one, and you can keep using it for a long time. You can never have too many quality articles out on the web promoting your websites. If these articles manage to get picked up by the search engines, and ranked on the first page for searched for keyword phrases, they can continue to drive traffic for a long time. Articles can also be picked up and used by established sites, who must keep your link as a condition for using the article. This can lead to very welcome traffic spikes.
The duplicate content penalty remains a contentious issue, and none of us really know exactly what the search engine algorithms are. What is clear is that if you can submit a rewritten version to each directory, you will gain better results. There is now software which can rewrite articles to some degree, and if you are going to submit a lot of articles to different directories, this is worth looking into.
The most important part of your article is the resource box at the bottom. There is absolutely no point in giving the reader a good read if they are then not motivated to click through to your site. Make the resource box a call to action, and make sure there are two links to your site, one with the actual URL, and the other with keyword anchor text. The anchor text will help your search engine ranking, and using your URL as a link ensures that if someone copies and pastes your article without the links remaining clickable, the reader still has an opportunity to visit your site. Producing a good resource box is the most critical part of your article marketing strategy.
Tags: article marketing strategy, article marketing, making money online
Affiliate Marketing Resources
Affiliate marketing is an easy business to get into, but not an easy one to succeed at. Because of the ease of getting started, the competition is fierce, and you always have to face the fact that the big hitters will already have blasted any new release to their large lists. Having said this, affiliate marketing does have huge advantages, and the greatest of all affiliate marketing resources are the affiliate networks which allow you to choose from thousands of different products to promote. The ability to switch campaigns so easily is vital. Compare this to a product developer who has to spend a lot of money, or hours of time, developing each product.
With affiliate marketing, it is easy to abandon unprofitable campaigns, and move on. The most important factor is to have your own website, where you have total control over the content. Don’t try to use the lazy way of sending visitors to a landing page. You need your own website to maintain a reasonable quality score if you are using pay per click campaigns, and you also need it to submit articles to the best directories. Article marketing is one of the most long standing, proven methods of driving traffic to your campaigns.
Article marketing is really a must if you want to succeed as an affiliate. Even if you don’t want to write the articles yourself, you will find that dollars spent hiring a quality ghost writer to do the job for you are likely to produce a better return than dollars spent on any other form of advertising. More valuable resources for affiliate marketers are the discussion forums. These forums are the perfect place to find people that you know will be interested in your subject. Again, you should have your own website, as many forums won’t allow the blatant promotion of affiliate links.
The final resource is also free to create, and can be very effective. If you use a free PDF creator, you can create a free ebook to give away, which will contain your affiliate links. The main consideration here is to choose an established product, because you can’t change the links in an ebook you have already given away, as you can on your own website. These viral ebooks can be making money for you with no effort on your part once you have given them out, and they can become one of your most valuable affiliate marketing resources.
Tags: affiliate marketing resources, affiliate marketing, make money online
