One of the things I really like about affiliate marketing is that there are a lot of ways you can go about it. Some of them require you to spend money like pay per click whilst others are totally free …like article marketing.
Article Marketing is the process of writing articles and submitting them to article directories. In each article you add links to a product or service that you want to promote. When a reader of your article clicks on the link they are taken to the merchants website. If they buy something from that website then you get a commission.
It’s a simple process and doesn’t require any outlay of money. It does however require that you have some sort of writing skill but you don’t need to be a professional author by any means. If you have written an essay or report in school then you can write an article suitable for the internet.
How Does it Work?
The first step is to choose a product to promote. You don’t have to actually buy stock yourself. Instead you promote someone elses product. The best place for this is Clickbank. This site acts as the middleman between you and the merchant. The products in Clickbank are mostly digitable downloadable products like eBooks and memberships.
Once you have chosen a product in Clickbank you can then write an article based on that product. For instance, if you have chosen an ebook to promote on improving your golf swing then your article might be titled – “3 Tips for Improving Your Golf Swing”.
Once you have written the article, which by the way only has to be about 300-500 words, then you add a byline at the end of the article and in that byline you add your affiliate link. You get the affiliate link (or hoplink) from Clickbank once you have registered with them. The affiliate link is just a piece of code that links to the merchants website.
Once you have that all in place you submit the article to an article directory like Ezine Articles, Goarticles, Squidoo or Hubpages. Bear in mind that Ezine Articles no longer allows affiliate links so you may need to create a landing page using Blogger or WordPress.
Now the trick with all of this is that you need to choose keywords to use in your article that are not very competitive. In other words, you want to be able to rank on the first page of Google for your article. This is where you need to do a bit of research using one of the free keyword tools like Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Research Tool.
For our golfing example for instance we would head on over to Wordtracker and type in the keywords ‘golf swing’. From the list that is displayed we would then take each keyword and type it into Google using quotes eg. “golf swing tips”. If any of those keywords show less than 5000 competing websites then I would consider this a good keyword and I would base my article around that keyword.
If you really want to get serious about article marketing or similar techniques then we suggest learning from the best at Wealthy Affiliate University.
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The question I always have with article marketing post Panda is how effective is it? I think it is somewhat still and enjoy doing it. Though the software for building it out I have some issues with. I started with article marketing robot and while it does some of the sites you fail on a moajority for some reason. That would be a good one to review for your HQ site.
Charles R’s last post…Retaining wall quick fix
This article is quite old and a lot of changes have happened since we wrote this. This method is not so successful anymore mostly because of the latest Panda update which caused most article sites to lose their ranking. Also, these types of sites don’t really allow affiliate links in the articles anymore.
Paula’s last post…The Affiliate Marketers Cycle of Doom