Who has the best article marketing course?

Why buy a product?

Article Marketing itself, should actually be a fairly easy concept to wrap your head around, right?

Content ---->Traffic------->Offer------->$$$$$$$

The actual work comes in for the most part in the beginning. Without a solid foundation and understanding, you could find yourself spinning your wheels, getting frustrated, and ultimately giving up. So, let's take a look at some of the initial steps....

Keywords - You will hear all kinds of people telling you to look for keywords with a certain number of competitionin quotes etc. Tell those people to shut up. Even if there are only 10 results in quotation marks, if they are all major players and either have a better understanding of SEO or just implament it better than you, you're pretty much screwed.

What you want to pay attention to is the actual sites that are ranking on the first page and maybe even the results on the second page if you want to take it a step further. Pay really close attention to the sites in the first 5 spots on the first page though and ask yourself these questions.

1. What kind of sites are they? - Are they article directories and web2.0 sites or are they true authority sites?
2. How many backlinks do the ACTUAL PAGES HAVE?
3. How many backlinks does the root domain have?
4. What is the keyword density on those pages?

But, what does all that tell us?

If the results in the first 5 spots contain any article directories or web2.0 then it is a good kewyord for you, regardless of how many actual competitors there are. Save the keyword.

If the results in the first 5 are solid authority sites - Skip it.

You pay attention to the number of backlinks to the ACTUAL PAGE to get an idea of just how hardcore the person is promoting the page. if the page is showing 0 backlinks or a handful, then more than likely the page ranked simply because the Search Engines consider the directory or 2.0 some sort of authority. In many cases, this happens simply because of the large quanity of content that marketers such as you and I submit to the particular site.

The keyword density is just something you should keep a mental note on - It's really not that important, but something I look at anyway

Understand when you start the process that keyword tools will only give you a decent estimate - sometimes the estimate isn't even decent so, I like to go with my gut when deciding which keywords to do more research on. One way that I like to guage the actual search volume is by doing one of the following things.

1. Setting up a dummy adwords campaign with the keywords to see how many impressions it gets over a 6 hour period and then just multiply it by 4.

2. If some sort of directory or 2.0 is high on the first page, look at how many views the content has received.

Picking A Niche - this part of the process should be about as easy as it gets. You'll find that many people will tell you to stick to the niches that you are passionate about. Me on the other hand, would like to see everybody get passionate about niches that will put money in their pocket. Just about anything that you'll run across out there. There are people that are not only looking for it, but would be willing to pay money for it. I have no interest whatsoever in reverse cell phone lookups, criminal background checks, e-mail tracing, diet pills, anxiety, credit repair, loan modifications, or burning video games. However, even with the lack of interest on my part, each and every last one of those niches listed has brought me a substantial amount of money in the affiliate marketing realm.

So, my advice to you would be to simply find something that people are willing to pay for, which is just about anything, and to promote it. If you yourself can't be passionate enough to write about it, hire somebody that will.


Traffic Plan - There are two trains of thought here. Ultimately though, your traffic plan should really depend on the niche and landing pages that you are promoting. Here is what I like to do though....

When I first start a campaign, i don't want to waste my time setting up a site if the offer itself isn't going to convert. So, I will pick up a domain name and set up a redirect so that whenever someone clicks on a resource box, they go right to the sales page. In many cases, thousands and thousands of dollars have been spent to make sure that those pages convert. Unfortunately, most of the people that get involved in article marketing are not trained in copy writing. So, there's a good chance that by directing that traffic to your own page being used as a lander, won't give you the kind of data you need in order to determine whether or not the product itself and the sales copy will convert for you.

By sending 100 or 200 potential buyers directly to the sales page you should be able to gauge what kind of conversions you'll get. This will tell you whether or not that particular product and the sales page in question is worth you spending not only your time but potentially your money promoting.

One thing that you have to consider when coming up with your traffic plan though, is the niche that you are looking at as well as what type of landing page it is that the visitors will see. As an example, at one point in time I was direct linking to a weight-loss product on click bank. I would have to send 5 to 600 visitors to the page in order to get one simple conversion. To sum up my experience with that, it sucked. So, what I tried next was sending the product to my own opt-in page and collecting leads. After sending out a couple friendly e-mails and then pitching the product, the conversion rate was a whole hell of a lot better.

What you have to pay attention to, and what you must consider is what the average person's mindset is going to be when they buy that particular product. Is it in a niche where people are not only looking to buy a product but also want information in the process. Because they're a ton of niches like that -- think anxiety, weight loss, acne, and pretty much any fitness type products.

On the other hand though, if you're promoting products with A CPA style landing page, redirecting the traffic directly to the landing page is definitely a winner. This is because most of the products are either completely free or only require the visitor to pay any small shipping and handling charge. So, the conversion rates are drastically higher than sending people to a clickbank style sales letter.

The best thing you can do, is to spend some time to actually understand the market. This means understanding from their perspective how the sales process should go, exactly what they're looking for, and what hoops if any they might be willing to jump through.

I've seen tons of people waste article after article and hour after hour of their time redirecting traffic straight to a landing page that simply won't convert the traffic like that. On the other hand, I've also seen trying to build a list in a niche that simply isn't list friendly.

Writing Content - actually producing content is sometimes a sticking point for some people. Believe it or not how you write something is often far more important than what you write. Understand, that as an article marketer, in most cases you're taking your content and putting it on somebody else's site which you have no control over. Not only that, you're putting your own content on somebody else's site for their benefit. Their benefit being adsense income, advertisement money, and the fact that in many cases you're building their sites up to be authorities across numerous niches.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not need to put yourself out there as an authority. People don't care. When they search in the search engines for particular keyword especially when they're in buying mode, they want a link where they can go to make the purchase. They could care less about your 650 word article. How many dogs you have, how many kids you have, where you went to school, or anything else about you for the most part. Knowing that, you should write your content in a way that it presells the site that you are sending them to. This means features and benefits and understanding exactly what their problems are so that you can make them feel the pain. If you can do this, they are almost guaranteed to click on the link in your resource box.

A good example of this would be in the anxiety niche. Whenever I either have content created or write content myself for this niche, you can believe that I bring up things such as social anxiety, not being able to sleep, the fear that is struck when their heart starts to beat 200 beats a minute, and a host of other things that I know are issues for people suffering anxiety. I don't get into what social anxiety is or why their heart starts to beat so fast - the fact that those things happen is enough to make them want those things to stop. So, even though an article by definition for most people is supposed to be informative, you want to make every attempt possible to sell that person within the actual article.

For me, the shorter I could make an article the better. I want my link in my resource box to be visible almost as soon as they read my title. As a party stated, I really don't think that people care what's written in the article. They want the link, they want a solution, they want their problem addressed. However, many of the article directories are starting to have minimum word counts, and effort to increase the quality of content that is submitted to their directories.

So, when this is the case, it's important to structure your article in a way which will lead them directly to your resource box. Again, the way to do this is by focusing on the pain and the problems that are prominent in the particular niche that your end. The other thing that you want to do is to break your articles up into smaller pieces. You could do this by making sure that your paragraphs are 2 to 3 sentences long at the very most, using bold text when possible, and using bullet points. All of those things will keep your article interesting, but more importantly your article will keep them flowing right down to your resource box, which at the end of the day is the most important part of your article.

The key to the whole entire process is to find a product that you could get a handful of sales in and then scale the hell out of it. Unfortunately, a high percentage of people get stopped before they ever really get started. In many cases this happens because they don't understand one small part of the process. If that happens to you, just push forward with what you do understand.

A great example of this, is the fact that when I very first started article marketing had no idea how to build a website, make an opt in page, cloak a link, or many of the other things we hear people talking about. What I didn't know how to do though was the right 300 words and simply submit them to article directories with my link at the bottom of, which at the time mainly directed people to lenses that I had on Squidoo. Even doing that, because I would beat the hell at a niches when I would get into him, it wasn't long before I was making $2000 a month. Nothing I was doing was complicated, the process I was following was one that anybody and everybody could follow if they were willing to put the work in, but sadly many wouldn't and still just can't bring themselves to put the initial work in.

If they do though, and they actually stick with it, they can often start to generate profits, even if they're small, which then allow them to outsource the entire process and to become involved in increasingly more niches. That's where the power of article marketing really lies. I'm a firm believer that with article marketing the key is to do everything in mass. Mass niches, mass articles, mass back linking, mass promotion, and to get my content and my link seen all across the Internet.

We as a community in the past year to year and a half have already seen a slew of software rolled out which enables even the biggest Internet dummy to not only automate, but to do things on a scale that simply wasn't possible to do manually unless you had an army of employees that were continuously banging away on the keyboard.

So, the final piece of advice I'll leave you with is to look at the way that promoting things on the Internet is going and general and try to keep up. Some people can make money in certain niches just because of the way that their name is recognized. For most of us though, especially in niches that are on click bank and the different CPA networks, our names simply aren't recognizable. So, people are not going to flock to our content, they're not going to search our websites, and they're not going to buy the products that were promoting simply because we recommend them.

As a marketer and a salesperson, it is your job and should be your goal to not only gets your offers, but your links in front of as many people as possible.