Your article marketing plan should center around a niche you find interesting AND that has multiple products that sell like hotcakes.
That doesn’t mean, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Nor does it mean, “Just sell the hottest new item with the biggest commission.” Find a field you’re interested in that also sells well.
Why “Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow” Doesn’t Always Apply to Affiliate Niche Marketing
“Just do what you love,” can be great advice–but not always in niche marketing. For example: you don’t want to start out trying to sell people on a great guide that teaches them how to be a great web writer. Trust me on this one!
Likewise, beginning affiliate marketing in the comic book, pewter miniature, or 80s post-punk vinyl markets…probably not great places to start. They might be decent to you in the very long run but if you’re just starting out, it’ll keep your morale up to see more money more quickly than niches like this can provide.
Most people looking to make money online don’t want to be web writers–they want to be rich. If you’re going to pick writing as a market, do it as an adjunct to something else (and hell, even then, you should probably angle your content to marketers more than to wannabe writers. I’m just sayin…).
But if your passions include payday loans, weight loss, making money online, colon cleansing, or getting back with your ex: boy are you in luck! That’s because when you start out at this gig, you need to go with markets that are proven performers.
If you want to see if you can monetize your favorite hobby or find underserved, obscure niches, that’s great too. But it’s best to wait on that and go with proven performers when you first start out. They’ll make you more money, more quickly, and keep you from loosing morale.
Speaking of discouraging–you’re going to get discouraged sometimes. You’re going to get frustrated and feed-up, you’re going to feell like you want to quit.
Don’t quit.
Accept the frustration and move along. Persistent effort, applied intelligently (aka with an article marketing plan and not just random effort), will see you through.
How to Pick Your Article Marketing Niche
Fortunately, there are several everygreen markets and niches and hopefully you’ll find one of them–or one of their subniches–interesting enough to keep on with. (You don’t have to fall in love with it.) These markets are all profitable. You just have to learn how to work them.
(You can always start a music blog or an automotive blog or whatever and hope to make money with it. but if you really want a quick and more-likely-profitable education in niche marketing via articles, you should pick from one of the four evergreen niches.)
The basic four evergreen niches are dating & relationships, make money, get out of debt / credit repair, and health. This last one includes some beautiful specialties such as weight loss, vitamins & supplements, and colon cleansing. Seriously, colon cleansing products sell as steadily as bottled water or cigarettes.
How to Pick Your Niche Product
Go to ClickBank.com and click on the “Marketplace” link at the top of the screen. Once you’re in the marketplace, you’ll see links for various categories (Cooking, E-business, Health & Fitness, etc.) on the left-hand side. Clicking on one will show you all the sub-niches contained inside that category. It will also show a list of products in the center of the page.
It’s usually best to click on one of the niches/sub-niches beneath the category. However, if you want to find the best-selling products in the category overall, you don’t have to.
Go to the results and click on the “Sort Results By” dropdown menu and select “Gravity”. Gravity is a measure of how popular the product is among affiliates, so you’ll want to select the product at the top of the list as a product to sell.
Now, select the product below that one. Then, select the product below that one.
That’s it. You’re done. You’ve found your three products. They’re the three best-selling so you don’t have to worry that you might’ve picked a loser. All you need to concentrate on now is your marketing ability.
Nearly all good online niche marketing starts with keyword research as a foundation. Your article marketing plan should be no different. In fact, keyword research is more central to article marketing than it is to most methods. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss how to do research without driving yourself crazy.
Article marketing is easy enough–right? All you need to is a simple article marketing plan where you pick a few keywords, write a few articles, make a few bookmarks and you’re on your way to two hundred bucks a day while you sit home naked with the wife all day and take the kids to the zoo every weekend, right?
I don’t have to tell you the kind of overblown crap these guys try and pass off as the Internet marketing dream.
And I don’t want to spit on article marketing, either. I know it works. But bum marketing is a little more involved–at least on the start-up– than most gurus would have you believe.
1 Important Element the “Gurus” Always Leave Out
Article marketing really is easy and profitable once you’ve got the groundwork done and have a system in place. But you won’t make anything but chump change unless you put in some consistent work on the front end.. .
There’s a reason you never read that kind of thing in the guberus’ sales letters: it’d run off 90% of their prospects. If you’re still here reading this, you’ve probably got the right attitude.
What’s Missing from Most Article Marketing Plans?
There are several steps to a successful article marketing strategy that don’t really get talked about a whole lot. While most how-to guides at least cover a bit of niche and keyword research, almost nobody ever tells you how to write an SEO-friendly article that people want to read. There are formulas and tricks you can use to make your articles great–even if you’re not a great writer.
While some Internet marketing gurus will make a mention of pre-selling, very few go into detail on how you do it. And almost nobody talks about how and why your directory submission articles should be different from the content on your site.
I wish I’d been able to find more info on those points when I first started out. That’s why I’m writing about them here in this series. Read the series and you’ll also pick up some pointers on how to chose a market, research keywords, and leverage Web 2.0 pages. (For all that the gurus talk about “Web 2.0 properties”, they never really tell you how to use them.)
This information, combined with effort and a little bit of elbow grease, can rocket you into some pretty good money–if you put in the flollow-throuhg.
Wait, Mr. Anti-Guru: Who The #*!& are You Again?
Nobody with a big name. Just someone who’s ghostwritten for a lot of different IM clients who (most of them doing some form of article marketing) who finally started to bum market a little on the side. I plan to keep it up, too. Why? Because article marketing delivers results.
But to see those results, I had to a) figure out how to play this gig the right way b) put in a little effort (okay: a lot, to start) c) have a good article marketing plan to follow. Come back here tomorrow and I’ll show you the first step of that plan.
Article Marketing Plan in 10 Parts
How to Pick Your Niche Market and Niche Product(s)
How to Do Keyword Research
How to Write All of Your Content, Part One–How to Write a Damn Good Article
How to Wirte All of Your Content, Part Two–How to Pre-Sell
How to Make a WordPress Affilaite Marketing Website in Under Two Hours
Writing for Article Directories–Some Differences
Article Directories You Should Submit To
Web 2.0 Sites You Should Use
How to Use Social Bookmarking Sites (and Which Ones to Use)
Testing and Analytics
Why is article marketing such a good linking strategy? There are four major reasons why:
1. Your links come from quality sites. While to a large extent Google judges every page on an individual basis, it also pays attention to the domain pages are on. That’s why an article on Ezinearticles.com will often rank higher than it would if you put it on a new site. Google trust is golden.
2. You control the anchor text. Web directories allow you to put an anchor-texted backlink inside your author profile. The anchor text in your links will help you to rank well for specific keywords. You don’t always get to choose the anchor text in links back to your site–but with article marketing, you do!
Some directories such as Articlesbase.com will also let you link to your website in the body text of your article.
3. Your links will be contextually relevant. The text that surrounds your links can influence the way Google sees that link. Relevant content can only help you out!
4. You can get good traffic before you get good rankings! Article directory pages often rank well and quickly for their keywords. The best of these sites also have very good internal linking schemes that help people find your content. It’s quite possible to get lots of traffic before you ever even appear in Google.
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Learn how to squeeze 16 articles from a single keyword!
I liked it so much, I bought the company!
Seriously though, this is what I’ve learned from almost two years of writing for internet marketers (as well as some article marketing of my own).
I’m letting it go for $7 because I need the money–got to pay rent in two places this month (the new place needs first and last month rent–so it’s more like 3 months at once!).
[Edit May 22 2010--You can get it again for $7 because...well just because it's a lot nicer than charging my $12 price for it!]
Plus I’ve got a little one on the way…I need about 100 more affiliate marketing sites up right now.
The little boy is here, he’s three months old, and we never stop needing new clothes (and diapers!).
Until then, everybody is getting this report for a song.
Check it out!
There’s a myth among webmasters (often of the newbie internet marketer variety) that Google will de-index you if you have duplicate content. Well, my friends, it just ain’t so.
About a week ago, I had to write some content about the two most (then-) recent bank failures in the U.S. (this search was in early June and uncovered events from late May; at least one other bank has been shut down since that time). The first Google SERP showed multiple pages on different sites, all with the same story.
I’m not just talking about the same story, rewritten. Fully four of the results carried the exact same text. Five of the rest had a rewritten version of the same story; most of them took huge chunks from the four dupe results just mentioned.
I went over to MSN’s search engine and got more varied results. About three of them had more substantial content than most of what I’d found with Google (the really good result on G was from Bloomberg.com, a standard in the banking industry).
One week later, the 1st page results in Google look a little better. But they still aren’t as varied and useful as what I found when I used MSN’s search engine. (I haven’t played much with Bing yet, but you can bet I’m going to.)
So yes, you can get away with duplicate content, but not always for very long. Then again, some key phrases seem to consistently show a lot of duplicate content results.
Also keep in mind that if you’re a writer, it really pays to use other search engines on a regular basis. Some of you already know this; it took me about a year to figure it out!
1. You need to keep a regular (or at least semi-regular) schedule. Discipline and freedom are two sides of the same sword. No boss is here to fire you or throw you out if you dont’ keep up with work. You have to either discipline yourself or start loking for a homeless shelter.
Keeping a regular schedule has a productivity-increasing side effect: it sets your brain in a pattern. Your brain will start to focus better just based on it being…well, being whatever time you start work. Which in my case, was often not early enough.
I’ve been at this a year and am still working on it. It’s gotten better–and so has my writing.
2. The work day goes better when you work first. It’s so tempting to do everythign else first, when you work for yourself. After all, I quit my J.O.B. so I could do things like sit around in my underwear and read 100 pages of fiction every day.
Two things are wrong with this. One: some days I didn’t get as much done as I meant to. Two: I always felt like I was putting work off. Which I was.
Treat your freelance online job much like an offline job in at least this way: start it early in your day! Then you’ll get done all you need done, AND you’ll enjoy the other things you want to do a whole lot more.
3. Don’t waste time with Associated Content. Or for that matter, any other mostly-automated site. Why? The pay is crap.
I messed around with AC for a while. In fact, I quit my job delivering pizzas largely because I thought I could make the good bulk of my income from that site. But it just ain’t so.
Yes, sometimes those actual human clients can be a pain in the ass. There’s really no other way to say it. But overall, you’re so much better working for real people than for Associated Content and other sites, that you might as well not even waste your time.
(I’ve heart slightly different things about Textbroker.com. I’m told the pay is a little more livable. But none of my friends who’ve worked for that site have stayed around there very long.)
4. Outline. I doubled my writing speed when I started outlining my articles. ‘Nuff said!
5. Get some sun. Seriously, you need to come out of the house every once in a while. Sunlight has vitamin E and the radiation won’t turn you into the incredible hulk or any such thing.
6. Don’t forget to sleep. Seriously, sleep is important.
Actually, that’s what I wish I would tell myself right now…
You don’t have to understand the technology from the ground up (unless of course you’re required to write about it from the ground up…)
You just have to understand the interaction between the parts your client wants you to write about. Get that down and you’re fine.
It’s still a bitch.