A brief post about article marketing.

Hey sports fans,
I was just checking the page impressions from yesterday and I noticed something interesting. I had a total of 25 page impressions and the majority of them were from this blog. Now that's pretty interesting considering that this blog is the one that I've done the least amount of advertising for. I've put the link at the bottom of a couple articles and told my mom about it and put out a bulletin on myspace but that's it. So what I'm figuring is that people are starting to visit here on a repeat basis. That's really neat because of the fact that this is the only blog of mine that I've consistently put whole-hearted effort into. Like I mentioned in a previous post, when you appreciate yourself and others they begin to appreciate you. I'm still not making much money from these blogs, but at least things are starting to pick up a bit of momentum.

Yesterday I talked a bit about affiliate marketing. I went over a couple of the better programmes and covered a bit of the basics. Now I want to give everyone a chance to get started immediately with absolutely no monetary investment. This techniques is great and opens up a lot of possibilities for those of you out there who are creative and willing to work.

I'll assume you've already set up you clickbank account (its the easiest and quickest way to start). Now you want to pick out a few products that you think will sell quite well. There's a few things to consider when choosing a product to promote. First of all I want all of you to realize that this is the most important step. If your product is garbage the majority of your sales will result in returns. No fun there.
So you need to go to clickbank and browse through the products. You'll want to arrange the list by "high gravity." Start off picking out the products that have a gravity between 30 and 70. This range ensures that the product has been successfully promoted by others but also that the market is not yet saturated. Get a list of 10-20 products within this range. Now, go look at their sales pages. A good sales page is crucial for selling. You'll want to look at the benefits offered, bonuses, discounts, basically any sort of added incentive is going to help the sales. Look for a sense of sincerity, a genuine value in the product. Ask yourself if you would buy it yourself. All this is going to narrow your list down a little bit, and you should end up with about 10 products on your short list. (NB about 80% of all internet purchases are made by women. Keep that in mind when choosing products. Recipe books and yoga manuals are good sellers. Not just because of the demographic but also because the information is usually pretty straight forward. A site that sells recipe books isn't making a bunch of promises that set off peoples "scam alarms.")
So once you have a short-list of products that you think are going to sell really well all you have to do is get your links out. There are a few different ways of doing this. A couple of free ones are blogs, and articles. You can set up a blog that deals with the same things your products do, put up a bunch of posts about this topic then throw in some recommendations or testimonials. This would certainly work if you are willing to put the time into it, but if you don't feel like maintaining all the work you can just write a few articles.

As far as articles are concerned there is literally endless possibilities for the creative marketer. The basics of article marketing, however, couldn't be simpler. Take a product, write an article from experience, or find out what other people say about it, then submit it to article publishers. Some people prefer to just submit the article to as many publishers as possible, others prefer to let the article get picked up by search engines. I'm still experimenting to see which method is more efficient, but it seems that either method has its advantages. I'll go into this in more detail in another post.

I think I'm going to cut it off right here for now. I'll come back later with more info. I'll be covering everything so don't worry about being left in the dark about anything, and, like always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.