Article marketing methods

Which is better:

- 100 or so articles submitted, ranked with a few back links to each

- 1000 articles submitted but not ranked

Then:

- Articles linking to the product landing page with your aff link

- Articles linking to your own site/blog with your aff link on

 

Different people have different opinions about this. Often, the more forcefully they present them, the less true information they're really based on. For myself, I'd prefer 100 or so articles with a few backlinks to each. But it's difficult to answer "in abstract" without knowing anything about the niche and/or how good/appropriate the articles will be. Just being honest, here.

This is a poor approach. It's really difficult to make many sales this way.

This is much better. No comparison at all between the two, for two main reasons:-

(a) It allows you to have your own opt-in and build your own list

(b) It allows you to "pre-sell" (but don't confuse it with "selling"!), which will dramatically increase the conversion-rate of the traffic when they get to the vendor's sales page.

 

I find the term "Article Marketing" oxymoronic. The people who are "Article Marketing"... are actually just submitting crap for the hope of ranking... very little marketing going on.

If you are "Marketing" you are determining your market then putting product in front of them later to sell.

So it makes no difference if you throw up 1000 or 1. Do you have any idea who your customer is?

 

I need to learn more about opt ins. Right now I just have landing pages set up which contain affiliate links, but I think building a list would be far more profitable. I just have no idea how to get started. I think I should just concentrate on one thing at a time and not get sidetracked, but I have a lot of reading to do.

 

Even this on its own is very much better than not having landing pages set up at all and trying to do it by "direct linking" as some people do. (Those are people who fail and drop out).

If you do a google search for "free opt-in forms" and "forms for websites" and this sort of thing, you can have a read around and learn quite a lot. I agree it's not the easiest of things to do, and quite offputting at first, but worth while. I actually pay someone to do them for me - it's not an expensive service at all, to get this sort of thing done, but of course you need an autoresponder service as well, to send out emails to the people who opt in, and that's another learning-curve!

 

Yeah, it seems like too much for me right now. I've only got the ball rolling with my first batch of articles approved. I'm sick of learning- done that for a few months, I just want to get stuck in now, and then when I make enough sales I'll consider opt-ins.

 

I wish you good luck! I suspect you're really stacking the deck against yourself quite a lot. It's very difficult to make appreciable sales without building a list. I'm really good at this (and a professional writer, and really arrogant, sorry!! ) and I couldn't do it. I know it's not what you want to hear; sorry.

 

No. Thank you. I'd prefer someone be honest with me then tell me what I want to hear. So it would be very difficult to generate sales if I don't build a list? would having a list substantially improve sales? and would you test the product with a pre-sell landing page first before you build a list so you know which products to promote?

Ok - I've changed my mind. I'll look into it. Thanks

 

Unless you're brilliant at it, anyway. You'd be "leaving a lot of money on the table", as they say.

Enormously. Very few people buy at their first visit to a sales page. You need to be able to send them autoresponder emails. This is where the money is. Vendors know this and that's why some of them try to get people to opt in at their sales page (even though doing so makes it really hard for them to get professional affiliates).

I don't normally, to be honest (but have done a couple of times). No point in sending traffic to a site without an opt-in when you can just as easily send it to a site with an opt-in (is my opinion).

The easy "trap" to fall into here is to assume that if something converts at all from just a pre-sell page link to the sales page (which many products will), then that's the one to build a list for because that will make it even better (which it will, but not always as much as you hope!), whereas if something makes no sales that way, it's "not worth bothering". The truth can be exactly the opposite: sometimes the ones that won't sell without sending emails to a list are the ones that sell best when you get them to opt in. Unfortunately. It makes it complicated and unpredictable, but that's how it is. It's a mixture of niche-specific and product-specific.

 

Personally, I've had great success article marketing with direct linking. It depends on the product. The only way to find what is best for you and your product is to keep testing.

I would guess that Alexa writes in the areas that do not receive that many views compared to the high traffic areas. She stated that she promotes the less competitive niches. In this instance, I think, opting in is more important, as you have to do more with less. Also, a lander probably helps considerably in this instance.

But there are some products that are simply going to sell no matter what, and these are the ones that I direct link to.

 

Thanks, Alexa, I appreciate your response. what autoresponder service do you recommend to a newbie such as myself? I am looking at phplist.com. It seems good enough, if not slightly complicated... what free gifts can I give away? would I just use PLR packages or do I craft my own e-book (harder route) and how many free gifts would I give each customer before I sart selling to them? thanks again...

 

Obviously ranked is better when it comes to the first case. Quality over quantity, though it doesnt hurt to have more quantity of such ranked articles, but hundred should do.

Obviously linking to your own site is better. But only a split test can show, which page is better pefforming in terms of raking in revenue.

 

I say neither of your options is quite right:

1 article that's actually submitted is better than 1000 articles imagined.

1 affiliate code linked anywhere is better than no affiliate code at all.

There's only so much you can learn from other people's experiences. In the end of the day, it's really all about making your own experiments and drawing your own conclusions. That's the only way to make any actual progress in this game.

 

I recommend Aweber. (My second choice would be GetResponse. Anything else would be a poor third. Different people have different opinions about this, though!).

Deliverability is everything.

Once you're set up with your autoresponder, it becomes effectively impossible to change it without losing a significant proportion of your lists, because of the opt-in rules. No decent autoresponder company will let you "import" a list without first being really conclusively satisfied that the people on the list have double opted-in, and that you're the person to whom they've double opted-in, and so on, and in practice it can be difficult to prove to their satisfaction, whatever they say initially in their marketing materials before you join them and pay.

As with other aspects of internet marketing, the time to avoid mistakes is at the start. Making mistakes is easy. Correcting them, unfortunately, can be very difficult. So I recommend Aweber right from the start. (I think they have a special offer for your first month for $1, or something).

It depends on your niche, and how competitive it is, and your traffic. Sorry, but there just isn't a simple answer to this. (I tend to write my own stuff to give away, but that's easy for me to say, I know, and I don't pretend it's always necessary.)

I think one, as long it's really something they were interested in that has some potential value to them.

 

Thank you Alexa.

*blows a kiss*

 

From my own article marketing adventures this past year I have been more successful with decent articles with very catchy titles linking to a lander or blog post that reinforces the same catchy message. Also, I don't build backlinks for every article. I tend to focus on the articles that are producing the most views, click throughs and conversions. Those articles that are successful right from the start will tend to fall in the serps over time without building backlinks to them, so I focus on those articles to make sure they stay in the top three positions for the long haul.

My next project is list building and I plan on using aweber.

 

I wish I had this advice last year. I wrote a ton of articles and linked directly to sales pages. 1 sale. I'm a little confused about the "pre sell" concept though. Isnt that what a sales page is, really? How do make your presell blog differ from a sales page?

 

Great thread. I'll subscribe this thread.

 

I'd agree with all of that.

You need it to be totally different in style, presentation and content from a sales page. The idea of a pre-sell is that it establishes some sort of "independent credibility". By "independent" I mean "not coming directly from the people selling the product".

Two examples of a "pre-sell" that can work very well for Clickbank products with "hypey" sales-pages (which most of them tend to have, and I don't mean that rudely) are:-

(i) A "comparative review". Four (say) different products are "independently" reviewed on what looks like either someone's blog (not too professional, just a "real person"), or an "authority review site" in which the reviewers looks as though they really know what they're talking about. The reviews are very honest in tone and point out some drawbacks and downsides to the product you're hoping to promote, as well as the advantages (just not drawbacks that will stop too many people from buying it!) and there are also some bad reviews of really poor products there, too (those are easy to produce: there's loads of crap on the market!). Each product reviewed has a link for "further information" or whatever (that's your hoplink)

(ii) A "personal story" of how you had such-and-such a terrible problem and this product happened to solve it for you completely, on someone's recommendation: you were skeptical about it at first but decided to try it because (a) you were desperate and (b) you knew it had a 60-day money-back guarantee anyway, and so on and so forth. But without sounding like the vendor's story on the sales-page. This is harder to do! (And especially harder to do honestly!).

In either case, nothing hypey.

The key is not to give people the impression that you want them to buy after reading what you tell them. (At the same time, as from 1st December, FTC rules require you to disclose that you get a commission if they do - but there are various ways of making that sound innocent enough).

Don't try to make them feel "I want to buy this now". Trying to do that will just produce an inferior and unnecessary version of the sales page. Try to make them think "this sounds interesting, I want to know more about this". That's a receptive frame of mind, for the average person, for them to respond to the sales page as you want them to.

Key concept: far more customers are lost through trying too hard than through not trying hard enough. (That's actually true of sales pages, too, in a different way). DON'T "PERSUADE".

Most of the pre-selling pages that my article-writing clients ask me to look at and comment on, if they're not making enough sales and want to improve things, are miles over the top and are attempts to be persuasive. That's the job of the sales page, not the "pre-sell" page. (If the sales page doesn't do that well enough for your liking, then forget it and find another product: there are over 10,000 to choose from on Clickbank.)