A QUICK BLUEPRINT TO AFFILIATE MARKETING SUCCESS
Article Marketing

Article Marketing?, We do get asked regularly for that "instant fix" to make money and you may have well realised by now that there is no real quick fool proof method to making money very quickly using Internet Marketing. There is, however, one way that you can get set up very quickly to put a method in place - it does work - but you have to put some effort in and it can be quite boring. It's the way that many Affiliates started their careers but it involves some boring and repetitive work but once you've got it cracked it is one of the true "rinse and repeat" processes that work.
So what is it?? - well - you are going to find an affiliate programme that is converting well, write a few articles about it and a blog so you get some Google ranking - add some free traffic techniques and monitor the results - when this is up and running you find another product and repeat the whole process. Within 30 days or so you could be getting anything from $50 to $150 each day per product. So here goes....it's a relatively simple process.

Sourcing your Product

Start by going to www.clickbank.com/marketplace.html and browse any of the categories and arrange them by gravity - this is a measure of the popularity of the product. You need to select about 15 products where the gravity is between 10 and 90 - anything over that and the chances are that the Affiliate "experts" have already saturated that niche - below 10 - well forget it. Now go and have a look at the "sales pitch" letter that should be available with each product. Look for the professional looking ones - ones that draw you to them - have lots of benefits, testimonials and that create the desire to own that product and that you can't last another day without purchasing it!!. You should easily recognise the ones that interest you and have that "professional feel".

 We are now going to write an article with good keyword placement that will get you ranked in Google, which is where most of your traffic will come from - you will get some traffic from other SE's like MSN, Yahoo etc but we'll concentrate on Google for now.

Now you need to do some keyword research and find a list of keywords that are relevant to the product you are promoting. You'll know by now that I am a staunch supporter of Keyword Elite  and use it myself regularly. You can come up with a 2,000 keyword list very easily and quickly plus use some of it's research capabilities to establish profitable niches. You can also check out the Affiliate's page as they often supply a list of relevant keywords but remember that they're likely in use by other affiliates - go to competitors and see what keywords they're using - do a Google search - use the Google and Yahoo suggestion keyword tool - you'll soon have a list of about 100 keywords which we can filter later.  You must use the name of the product itself as one of the keywords as this is a super targetted keyword where customers are searching for that specific product, not information necessarily, and would likely be a qualified buyer and would help you to get good page ranking on Google as well.
It's going to be nigh on impossible to track our traffic and know exactly what keywords are working and those that are not attracting traffic. So we can do some some pre research to see what our competitors are doing and what keywords they're using -for instance - if there are any Adwords ads for our product or a similar product then see what keywords they're using and use them - chances are if they're up there and paying - it's profitable for them and we can ride on their coattails.  We really do need to try and get into the top 10 or 12 rankings,  at the very least - it's all about traffic at the end of the day.

Using the Overture suggestion tool we need to now filter out any keywords that have low search volume - we want a search vol of between 500 and 5,000 per month for each keyword. Go and have a look at the top ten pages on Google for our product keyword search and look at the competition - if they have page rank of  0 to 3 then that is a good sign - also look for Alexa ranking too - there's a Firefox plug in which will dispay the Alexa ranking in the bottom of the browser window - we're looking for ranking of less than 120,000 and more than 20,000. For that purpose it's important that we don't choose a product that is overly competitive like gambling, casinos, bingo etc  cos you'll never get on the first page at this stage.
A quick check of the titles of the top ten pages which quickly show if the keyword is in the title which probably means that the site has been well optimised with SEO techniques and difficult to rank above - but you will be surprised at the general lack of quality sites for some popular keywords.

Now we come to the article writing - this is a bone of contention with some people and millions of pages have been written about it - how to do it and not do it!!. I've tried all the Article writing software including the new spinners - and finally I've come to the conclusion that the easiest way is to write your own. Check out this relevant page Article Marketing for some good tips. Go and find some similar articles, cut and paste any relevant sections into a blank Notepad - then open another blank notepad and set them up side by side on the screen - read from the one on the left and then type in your take on it in the one in the left - I can generally write about 500 to 700 words in 40 mins from start to finish.. The only two important points are a. make it relevant and interesting - you want people to read it and b.keyword density - this is is important; this is classed as the amount of times that the keword appears in the text - ie. the keyword "how to make money online" appears once in a 100 word article then the density is 1% - we're aiming for 3% to 6% so that's 30 times in a 500 word article - sounds easy but it can be difficult. The keyword should appear in the first and last sentence as well.  Then you need to add a resource box which will contain your name and any credentials together with the link to your affiliate product. You should also add the "call to action" in getting people to click the link.  Look at what other people are doing - you don't have to re-invent the wheel - copy what is successful for others!!
If you really aren't happy writing articles then get someone else to do it for you  -go to http://www.elance.com/ and put it up as a project and check the bids that come in for it.

Ok - so to recap - you now have an article of about 500 to 700 words aboput an Affilaite product with a reasonable gravity,  that has a keyword density of about 5% and a list of good keywords for your affiliate product.

The next stage is to submit the article to an article directory. There are hundreds out there - just Google and see - but there are rules about duplicate content  - so we don't want to submit to hundreds of them - so pick the best three  - try these - www.ezinearticles.com, www.searchwarp.com and http://www.usfreeads.com/ are worth trying .
I also use www.articlesbase.com and pay them a couple of bucks to submit to more directories and it works quite well - they send you a monthly report of when it was published - how many views, it's ranking and any comments so you can see what exposure you're getting.

That's it really -after about 20 to 30 days you should start to see some activity - but it's no good waiting - start the whole process all over again and just keep writing and submitting.
It's good experience for you and if you keep to similar niches there's no reason why you couldn't build a mini site with affiliate links to all the products you're selling together with any other relevant links to courses, books and similar products etc etc and point all the articles to that site as well.
It's a good idea to cloak all your links as well to stop other Affiliates stealing them and grabbing sales - yes - it does happen - there's a number of different ways to do it and there's a few products available that will do it for you. There's one on our FREE STUFF page - grab it and use it -it'll save you some grief!!!
Go for it and good luck - it's not particularly exciting stuff to do but IT DOES WORK and it's a really good introduction to Internet Marketing as it introduces new methods and hones your skills.