Not Your Typical Article Marketing Report

http://www.affsphere.com

http://www.affiliateclassroom.com

An AffSphere Report

By Anik Singal, CEO, Affiliate Classroom, Inc.

Copyright 2008 © Affiliate Classroom, Inc. All Rights Reserved

http://www.affsphere.com/

http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/

http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/

JOIN AFFSPHERE… http://www.AffSphere.com…… 2

Earnings and Legal Disclaimers The information you'll find in this report is to educate you. That means we are providing you with information only, not a guarantee that you will make money from this information. We make no promise or guarantee of income or earnings. You have to do some work, use your best judgment, and perform due diligence before using the information in this book, and even then we can't promise that you will be successful - that's up to you. Nothing in this book is intended to be professional, legal, financial and/or accounting advice. Always seek competent advice from qualified professionals before making any business or financial decision. The information in this ebook represents the best expert opinions of the writers as of the date of publication. But on the Internet, conditions can change rapidly, so we reserve the right to alter and update this information in the future. Also it is always wise and prudent, especially when it comes to online marketing and email marketing, to check all local, state, and federal laws to make sure you are in compliance. We encourage you to do so. If you break federal, state, city, or other local email laws, we will not be held liable for any liabilities or damages you incur. All trademarks and company names mentioned in this book are the property of their respective companies or business entities.

Copyright and Use of this Ebook Copyright 2008, Anik Singal and Affiliate Classroom, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is protected by U.S. and International copyright laws. The reproduction, modification, distribution, transmission, republication, or display of the content in this book is strictly prohibited without prior written permission from Affiliate Classroom, Inc. This book is for your use only. You do not have resale or giveaway rights to this book.



Table of Contents

Introduction: Not Your Typical Article Marketing Report .………............…… 4

Chapter 1: Affiliate Marketing - How You Make Money..………………...…... 5

Chapter 2: How To Find a Ridiculously Profitable Niche in 6 Fast Steps! … 14

Chapter 3: Finding a Money Making Product In 30 Seconds! ……………… 46

Chapter 4: The Only 5 Kinds of Websites That You Should Make…………. 53

Chapter 5: Writing Articles That Create IMMEDIATE Results! ……………... 72

Chapter 6: The Only Way To Submit Your Articles…………………………… 85

Chapter 7: 6 Commandments To Follow To Guarantee Success …………. 91

Chapter 8: A Simple Checklist To Follow……………………………………… 95



INTRODUCTION

Before We Get Started… This Is Not Your Typical Article Marketing Report!

In this report I’m going to share an article marketing system that I have been testing and refining for almost three years. If you follow this system to the letter, you will master a way to make money online that is simple, is very cost-effective, and keeps paying you on your articles for a long, long time to come. Now before we get started, I’d like to explain a couple of things about this report. Why This Isn't "Typical…" Just a warning…this is NOT your typical article marketing report. It’s specifically geared towards using articles to support your affiliate marketing. Much of the time, I am assuming you know almost nothing about affiliate marketing. That’s why I start with some very simple and elementary stuff (we have to set the groundwork for everyone, especially those who are just starting out). But even if you’re experienced, we’ll soon be getting into some very interesting methods that you probably haven’t see before! NOTE: Be sure to pay special attention to “Chapter Two: Finding that Money-Making Niche,” and “Chapter Five: Writing Articles that Get Results.” Those chapters are critical to your success with this method and you want to follow them EXACTLY. Why So Much Emphasis on EzineArticles.com? Throughout this report, over and over, you’ll see that I use EzineArticles.com in the examples. Why would I do that, especially after launching AffSphere.com, our own article directory? The reason is simple. AffSphere.com is not out to compete against EzineArticles.com. We recognize that AffSphere is new and just getting started, while EzineArticles has over 1 MILLION articles in its database. That’s a huge pool of material you can do research on. Also I strongly encourage you to submit your articles to EzineArticles, plus other article directories, as well as AffSphere. EzineArticles is the highest traffic article directory today. So as of this writing, EzineArticles is really the single best place to do niche research today. Next… Let’s learn about affiliate marketing…


http://www.ezinearticles.com/





CHAPTER ONE

Affiliate Marketing: How You Make Money NOTE: If you have not yet read the Introduction on page 1, please go back and read it before you start! What Is Affiliate Marketing? Before you can make your first profits by writing articles, you need to understand exactly how you make money with affiliate marketing. So let’s start by covering the following:

What is affiliate marketing? What is an “affiliate”? How you make money What is an “affiliate program”? Signing up for an affiliate program What is an “affiliate link”? Compensation: How do you get paid? Two types of commissions Payment terms Cookies

Yes, I know that for some of you, this is very beginner-level material. No worries; we’ll get into more advanced strategies that you’ve never heard about! But just stay with us for a minute, as we go through this material for beginner-level students... This is Affiliate Marketing… Affiliate marketing is a way of making money on the Internet. The basic concept has been around a long time — paying someone only when they produce results.

In affiliate marketing, you are paid when you send sales or leads to a merchant who sells goods and services on the Internet.

Affiliate marketing is big business. It is responsible for an estimated $14 billion in annual online sales (source: Marketing Sherpa). When you hear people talk about “pay-for-performance” marketing, they’re talking about affiliate marketing. As an affiliate, you are paid a fee — usually a commission — for helping sell somebody else’s products or services online.


http://www.marketingsherpa.com/


What is an “Affiliate”?

People who make money by sending paying customers to online merchants are called “affiliates.”

Sometimes they’re also called “associates,” “program partners,” or “publishers,” but “affiliate” is the most commonly used term. How You Make Money! Have you ever worked on a commission-only basis? Affiliate marketing is a lot like that.

When you make a sale, the merchant pays you a percentage of the sale. Of course, if you don’t make a sale, you don’t get paid.

If you’ve ever bought an information product online, such as an ebook or a downloadable report, it’s a good bet that an affiliate made a commission on your purchase. A vast majority of the ebooks you see for sale online are offered through ClickBank. What is ClickBank? I’ll cover this in greater detail later, but ClickBank is an affiliate “network” that specializes in downloadable products like ebooks and software. In this report I’m going to focus on ClickBank products a lot, simply because I’ve found through testing that they work beautifully with article marketing.

Some affiliate merchants pay you when you send them qualified leads. These merchants promote “offers” through CPA (Cost Per Action) Networks.

Ever get an email offer for a “Free $100 Gift Card” from a big box store like Home Depot or Wal-Mart? That was a CPA offer, sent to you by an affiliate. If you decided to take advantage of the offer and filled out an online form — with your name and zip code for example — the affiliate got paid. Just like ebooks sold through ClickBank, my testing shows that CPA offers work extremely well with article marketing. Later I will devote a whole section of this report to how you can promote CPA offers with articles. What is an “Affiliate Program”?

When you sign up for a merchant’s “affiliate program,” it means you are signing up to be a member of the merchant’s online sales force.



Basically a merchant starts an affiliate program so they can get as many people as possible promoting their product online. The merchant is willing to give you a cut of the sale — from a few percentage points to as much as 90% — as a commission. The commission compensates you for the time and money you spend advertising and promoting the merchant’s products on the web. This works out for the merchant, too, because you get paid only if you generate sales or leads. If you don’t get results, you don’t get paid! Some other terms you’ll see for “affiliate programs” are “associate programs,” “bounty programs,” “referrer programs,” “partner programs,” or “revenue sharing programs.” They all basically mean the same thing. Signing Up for an Affiliate Program Signing up for an affiliate program is usually pretty simple. You’ll need to fill out an application, which will include your name (or your business entity name), address, and telephone number, and an address to where the program can send your checks (some programs even offer direct deposit). In the USA you’ll also be required to provide a Social Security number or an EIN. (Yes, you have to pay income tax on your earnings, just like any other independent contractor.)

One of the smartest things you can do is sign up with a third-party affiliate network — ClickBank is definitely one of the most popular — that provides a lot of different merchants with support for their affiliate program.

For example, ClickBank issues affiliate IDs and affiliate links, plus link tracking and payment services, for thousands of merchants. Third-party firms like ClickBank get paid for all these services by the merchant — so it’s free for you, the affiliate, to join. A service like ClickBank also represents many different merchants, which is a big advantage for you. Instead of searching for all kinds of products, from many different merchants, in all kinds of niches, one by one (tedious)…you can quickly access multiple programs in a fraction of the time with one ID. Also, a service like ClickBank issues you one check — twice a month — combining commissions for all the different ClickBank products you promote. For example, if you sell products from 12 different ClickBank merchants, ClickBank combines all those separate commissions into one large check every other week. This really simplifies your banking and bookkeeping. Later in this report I’ll show you how to sign up for ClickBank, and the exact steps I use to search in ClickBank for the best products for article marketing. Now that you know what affiliate marketing is, you might be wondering exactly HOW you send business to a merchant. You do it through your “affiliate link.”



What is an “Affiliate Link”?

On the Internet, you send business to an affiliate merchant with a special kind of link.

The merchant, or a service like ClickBank, gives you this link. Here is how it works: Let’s say you find an ebook that you would like to sell. You see the merchant has an affiliate program with ClickBank. You see that the merchant pays a 50% commission, every month, on net sales. So you sign up for the program by filling out an “affiliate agreement.” This is a legally binding document in which you agree to the terms and conditions the merchant requires, such as not sending spam.

Affiliate agreements are important because if you violate these terms and conditions, the merchant can withhold payment, or even drop you from the program.

Once you’ve signed up, the merchant sends you a confirmation email that will tell you how to log into your account and get your special link. Your job is to put this special link on a website, in an email, or even in a picture online. Then you’ve got to get people to click on it and BUY. When someone clicks your special link and makes a purchase, you will be paid a commission on that sale. But remember, the customer must actually make a purchase. Just because someone clicks your affiliate link doesn’t necessarily mean you will get paid. This is the challenge of affiliate marketing. The merchant must do a good job of selling the person who clicks on your link. Also, you can help by adding your own creativity. For example, if you place the link on a website that includes your detailed review of the product, the person will be more inclined to buy.

How does the merchant know that you should be paid, and not someone else? The merchant knows you sent the sale because the link contains special code.

This code is a unique set of numbers or letters. It’s called your “affiliate ID.” The code identifies you — and only you — as the person who is responsible for the sale. So that is what an “affiliate link” is. It’s VERY important, because you cannot get credit for sales unless people click YOUR unique affiliate link.



Here is an example of a ClickBank affiliate link:

http://youraffiliateid.thisistheproduct.hop.clickbank.net/ The part in red - youraffiliateid - is your unique ClickBank affiliate ID. I’ll cover signing up for ClickBank, including your affiliate ID, later on. The important thing to remember right now is this:

Your unique affiliate link is what enables you to get credit for sales. If you don’t use your affiliate link correctly, your sales won’t be tracked, and you won’t get paid!

Compensation: How Do You Get Paid? In affiliate marketing, you make money primarily from commissioned sales — that’s the most commonplace compensation method. However, there are also other ways you can get paid. Let’s look at ALL the ways you can make money: Pay-Per-Sale Pay-Per-Sale is basically earning commissions. When someone buys a product or service through your affiliate link, the merchant pays you a percentage of the sale. Pay-per-sale commissions range anywhere from a few percent to 90 percent (or even more!). Commission sales on digital products — such as ebooks — really match up well with article marketing. Residual Income and Recurring Revenue In residual income programs, merchants pay you a recurring commission on subscriptions and monthly services, such as web hosting. Even though you may not make a large percentage on these programs, they can be very beneficial to you. This is because you sell the subscription only once, but you receive commissions for as long as the customer pays their monthly fee. Like commission sales, many recurring commission programs are a good fit for article marketing, and the ClickBank Marketplace includes recurring commission programs.



Pay-Per-Lead or CPA (Cost Per Action) This type of affiliate program pays a flat fee, or “bounty,” for each qualified lead you send to the merchant site through your affiliate link. The visitor has to give their contact information to the merchant to be considered a real lead. With pay-per-lead programs, you can make anywhere from 25 cents for a simple lead, to $50 or more for a completed loan application. Remember, the MERCHANT decides who is a “qualified lead.” Some of the best pay-per-lead programs come from insurance, mortgage, and loan applications. There are about 50 different networks right now — they’re called CPA networks — that specialize in these types of programs. I have had excellent success with promoting selected CPA programs with articles. The only downside to CPA is that if you’re a new affiliate, most CPA networks won’t approve your application. That’s because most CPA merchants absolutely demand a certain volume of traffic and leads. Until your website gets at least 5,000 unique visitors a month, you probably won’t be able to get approved for most CPA networks. While you build up to this level of traffic, stick to commission-based programs. Pay-Per-Click Contextual Advertising Normally merchants don’t pay you when someone clicks your affiliate link — only when someone BUYS after clicking your affiliate link. But certain special advertising programs do pay just for clicks. You give the program ad space on your site, and make a small amount of money from each click on an ad. These special programs are often called “contextual advertising” programs, because they use special JavaScript code. The code displays ads that try to match the content — the text — on your page. So if your web page has an article on skin care, ads for skin care products should display. Today’s most popular contextual advertising program is Google’s AdSense. You show anywhere from two to five Google ads on your site, and when visitors click the ads, you receive a small percentage of the amount the advertisers pay Google. In most of my testing, sending your article readers to a web page with contextual ads isn’t as profitable as commission-based sales, but still does make money! The trick really is to have a nice enough website to get approved by Google. This can be tricky. Even AffSphere was rejected the first time we applied because they saw that we were still under construction.



Pay-Per-Search This is similar to the pay-per-click contextual ads model, except that you receive a few cents whenever a visitor searches the web via a special search box that you have to put on your website. Again, I’ve found that sending your readers to a page that offers a commission-based product is a much better bet. Hybrid Programs Sometimes merchants combine different payment programs. They might offer 10 cents per banner click and then 15% on sales made after someone clicks. These programs are very rare, but can be found if you look hard enough. Some will also offer bonuses after you make a certain number of sales. Others offer a scale that pays higher commissions the more sales you make. I haven’t tried this model much. It’s often used for physical products. I’d recommend it only after you’ve mastered promoting commission-based products. The Two Different Types of Commissions There are basically two types of commissions: SINGLE-TIER COMMISSIONS are straight commission payments. You get a percentage or a fixed dollar amount per sale. This is how ClickBank commissions work, as well as CPA lead payments. TWO-TIER COMMISSIONS pay on two levels. You get a commission on your own sales, and also a small percentage on sales made by new affiliates you refer. Two-tier programs can be beneficial because even if you don’t make many direct sales, the affiliates who sign up under you will. Over time, this can add up to a substantial passive income. For example, you may get paid a 25% commission on your own sales, and a 5% commission on affiliates you refer. Even if you make only a few sales of your own, if you have a large team of affiliates under you, you will make money. Two-tier programs are becoming more rare, mainly because of the complex tracking required. However, if you happen to find a two-tier program in a niche that fits well with article marketing, you might end up recruiting many second-tier affiliates through your articles. Those small second-tier commissions can slowly add up!



But honestly, don’t focus too hard on two-tier programs. They have a couple of disadvantages. One, merchants can change their programs and compensation plans. And two, unfortunately, most affiliates never do anything (not you, of course). Payment Terms You must accept the fact that in affiliate marketing, merchants can issue checks whenever they want to. This is why it’s important to read the fine print in your affiliate agreement when you sign up for a program. The good news is, programs administered through ClickBank and most CPA networks pay on a very regular schedule. ClickBank pays like clockwork twice a month, and has never missed an affiliate payday. Just remember that before you can get paid, your total earnings must reach a pre-determined amount — usually a $25 to $100 minimum. For ClickBank, you must also fulfill their Customer Distribution Requirement. Cookies Finally, you need to know about “cookies.” Cookies are tiny programs given to a visitor’s web browser when they click your affiliate link.

The cookie stores information on that person’s computer. This information identifies you as the affiliate whenever the visitor returns to the merchant’s site.

Cookies generally last for a certain period of time, anywhere from a few hours to days, months, or even years. Then they expire. Cookies can also be “reset” if the visitor clicks on a different affiliate link after they click yours. It all depends on how the tracking system is set up. With ClickBank, the commission is tracked to the last affiliate link clicked right before the sale. With a CPA network, it all depends on their policies and their tracking software. Of course, if a customer gets a new computer, the cookie is gone. And if they buy from a different computer, cookie gone! That wraps up the basics of affiliate marketing. Let’s review…


https://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_faq.html#aff_question_16


Review Time! In this first chapter, you learned:

That affiliate marketing is a way to get paid for sending sales or leads to a merchant who sells goods and services on the Internet.

An “affiliate” is someone who makes money by sending paying customers to online merchants.

When you make a sale for a commission-based program, the merchant pays you a percentage of the sale.

Some affiliate merchants pay you when you send them qualified leads through CPA (Cost Per Action) offers.

An “affiliate program” is the system merchants use so you can sign up to be an affiliate and make sales for them. The program issues you an affiliate link and tracks your sales.

Signing up for an affiliate program network, like ClickBank, has the advantage of providing you with a wide variety of products and merchants, along with consolidated payments on all your sales each month.

Your affiliate link is very important, because it contains special code that tells the merchant that you — and not someone else — sent him the sale.

Commissioned sales are the most common form of affiliate compensation, but you can also get paid for CPA leads, make recurring commissions, and even get paid for clicks. In this report, we’ll stick to commissioned sales and CPA.

The two basic types of commissions are single-tier and 2-tier. It’s great if you can find a good 2-tier program, but single-tier will work just fine for article marketing.

Be sure you understand the payment terms and timing. For example, ClickBank pays twice a month, but you should read the fine print to be sure you understand how to qualify for payment and when checks are issued.

Cookies are little scripts that store information on a visitor’s computer so YOU are identified as the affiliate who referred the sale.

Next… Picking a profitable article marketing niche (vitally important)!



CHAPTER TWO

How To Find a Ridiculously Profitable Niche in 6 Fast Steps!

Now that you know how to make money with affiliate marketing, you’re probably eager to start writing articles. But wait, you’ve got to do your homework first! You need a list of ideas for topics, and then do research to find a profitable “niche.” Through more than five years of trial and error and lots of testing, I’ve come up with an almost foolproof system for selecting profitable niches — which I’m about to share with you. This is by far the single most important chapter in this report! I recommend that you read it carefully at least three times — yes, it’s that crucial to your success! Here’s what you’ll learn:

What exactly is a “profitable niche”? Getting ideas for niche topics My EzineArticles.com research system The best landing page for your niche Building your personal “article niche list” marketing plan

What Exactly is a “Profitable Niche”?

What is a niche? I like to think of it as a topic — market focused but not too narrow — that appeals to some segment of the huge audience out there on the web.

Notice I said “market focused but not too narrow.” What exactly does that mean? Believe it or not, there’s no cut-and-dried answer to that. After all, a “market” isn’t mysterious — it’s just a group of people who buy a particular thing.

“Market focused” means that your research — not your imagination or your second cousin or your best friend — will tell you whether there is a market interested in reading about your topic.

Believe me, if lots and lots of people are reading about the topic, at least some percentage of them are looking to buy something. Also you don’t want the niche to be so narrow and specialized that only five people a day will ever read your articles. It’s got to be broad enough that you’ll get plenty of traffic (i.e., lots of people) looking for and reading your articles.



Finally, you want to pick profitable niches to write about — topics that are searched by people who are looking to spend money on solutions, interests, relief, hobbies, or passions.

If you want your articles to get syndicated — reprinted on other people’s websites — they need to be on topics that a lot of people are interested in. Distribution of your articles, or the lack of it, depends on choosing a strong niche. If the market is too small, no one will put your articles on their websites! So before you write a word, you have to do some research. Luckily, I’ve developed some methods for getting ideas for niches, and then researching them, that takes out almost all of the guesswork. Getting Ideas for Niche Topics When I decide it’s time to look for a new profitable niche, here’s how I get ideas…I watch TV! #1: Watch the News! Turn on your local news channel and CNN and keep your eyes and ears open. Focus on ALL the stories, not just the news items — pay attention to sports (especially controversies), health features, entertainment news, technology and gadgets, human interest…everything! If you can find some twist or angle in the media that can be tied in with a niche you’re interested in, you can be pretty sure there will be traffic to that niche and readers for your articles!

Also remember that “news” doesn’t have to mean just the headlines of the hour. The results of product tests or research, new product announcements, new techniques, new research results, offbeat or crazy new ideas — all these can be labeled “news.”

You can also use Google’s New Alerts service to get fast news links based on keywords. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts to sign up.

#2: Watch the Talk Shows

All those funny, weird, interesting or controversial talk show hosts who spin opinions on everything under the sun are a great source of ideas. All Oprah has to do is mention a product or a topic on her show and millions of people are searching for it!

Trust me, watch Oprah’s recommendations and guest names. The search volumes on those skyrocket the day of — and the day after — they appear on the show.


http://www.google.com/alerts


#3: Watch “Niche News” Shows

You can get a lot of great ideas from those entertainment and celebrity news shows, financial news reports, business news segments, and technology news shows. Remember that you’re looking for a way to take something “newsy” and tie it in with your niche.

#4: Watch Infomercials!

It’s 3:00 a.m. and you can’t sleep? Do some niche research by watching infomercials! If a product developer is paying to promote their gadget, weight loss system, self-help system, etc. on TV, then there’s a very good chance of it being a good niche.

And sometimes the products on infomercials have an affiliate program, which is great. You can then write articles that are direct reviews of the product. These types of review articles usually have the highest conversions.

As you watch TV, start making a flat list of ideas, like this: Acne Wrinkle removal Skin care Botox Scar treatments etc.

My EzineArticles.com Research System

NOTE: This is probably the single most important part of this report, so don’t skip any of the steps!

Now for the next step, we have to figure out whether a niche gets good traffic from articles. To do that, we’re going to do some research on the Web’s biggest and most popular article directory: EzineArticles.com.

In this report, we’re using EzineArticles to show you how to do research because it’s the biggest article directory online. With more than a million articles, it’s a good place to show you examples, since every niche is represented.

You can also do research using any other article directory, including our own AffSphere.com as it builds and grows.I’ve developed this research system over the last five years. It’s absolutely critical that you go through this process step by





step. It may seem pretty time-consuming at first, but once you do it a couple of times, it will go very, very fast. Step 1 — Go to EzineArticles.com and search for articles on your niche topic. Goal: Determine the EzineArticles category for your niche. I absolutely LOVE EzineArticles! They just hit their one-millionth article, which makes them the most populated article directory on the web. Articles in EzineArticles.com also get indexed really well by Google. So it’s the perfect place for you to do research on how much article traffic a given topic is getting. However EzineArticles does have some limitations — and one of them is figuring out which category a particular topic fits into best. (By the way, this isn’t EzineArticles’ fault. Categories are NOT easy to manage in an article directory! I should know, it took us weeks to figure out the categories for our own AffSphere.com article directory.) So the first step in your research is to figure out what EzineArticles category (or subcategory) your topic falls into and is popular in. You need to know the category so you can research how much traffic that category gets. Here’s how you do it: 1. Go to the EzineArticles.com home page: http://www.ezinearticles.com/. Here’s what you’ll see…





2. Type your topic in to the Search box at the TOP. Don’t use the box in the left navigation — you won’t get the same results. I’ll pick the first topic on my list, which is “acne.” After you click the Search button, you will be taken to a list of results, which will look similar to the one on the next page…



3. Click the first article in the search results. NOTE: Sometimes the first ITEM is not the first article. Look for an article title, and click on that. (If you are following along and search “acne” on EzineArticles today, remember you’re going to see different results — it varies from day to day.)

On the next page, I’ll show you where to find the category…



4. Look for the category at the top of the article, above the title. In my example using the topic “acne,” we see that the category is HOME::Health-and-Fitness/Acne. Actually, the category is HOME, and the subcategories are Health and Fitness/Acne.

From this quick search, I see that “acne” has its own special subcategory, which is GREAT. It means that “acne” is a popular topic on EzineArticles!


http://ezinearticles.com/

http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness


http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness:Acne


Step 2 — Click your specific category or subcategory. Goal: View a list of the most recent articles. In this example, if I click on the word Acne in HOME::Health-and-Fitness/Acne, I’ll be taken to a list of the most recent articles in the Acne category.

On the next page you’ll see the list of articles…


http://ezinearticles.com/


http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Health-and-Fitness:Acne


After you click on the “Acne” category, you’ll see a page like this. NOTE: Even though it says “Top Authors in Health-and-Fitness: Acne” what you’re really seeing here is the most recent articles.

At this point I’m interested in seeing how many “views” the most recent articles are getting. Then I can start “rating” them. In the next step, I’ll show you how I do it...



Step 3 — Click on the most recent article titles, and see how many “views” each article received. Always start with the first article and work your way down. Goal: Do an initial short-term “mental rating” of the potential of this niche. Now I’ll click on the first article (ALWAYS start with the first)…

That takes you to the article page, which will look something like this:



Don’t bother reading the article right now. Instead, scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the page to see how many times the article has been viewed. From the moment I look at the first article, I start to “rate” this niche in my head. I want to determine something extremely valuable…the short term traffic potential of this niche! How will I “rate” the potential of this “acne” niche?

I use a scale from 1 to 10. I factor in both the age of the article and

the views. With this first article, I see it was…

Submitted on June 30, which means it was approved a few days later, and probably went live on July 2 or 3.

Viewed 356 times since it went live.

This “mental rating” is very important! Everything else builds upon it. What rating would I give the niche based on just this one article? I’ll show you on the next page!



I’ve made a chart that shows what rating I’d give a recent article. It’s based on how long an article has been online, and how many times it’s been viewed. This isn’t written in stone, but when you’re first starting out, it will make it a lot easier to decide whether a niche is “hot” or not. Take a look:

EZINEARTICLES.COM RECENT ARTICLE VIEWS SHORT TERM TRAFFIC POTENTIAL

# DAYS ARTICLE IS “LIVE” # OF

VIEWS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8+ 300+ 10 10 10 10 10 9 9 7 250 10 9 9 9 9 8 8 6 200 10 9 8 8 7 6 6 5 150 9 8 8 6 5 5 5 4 100 8 7 6 5 4 4 4 3 50 7 6 5 4 3 3 2 2

>50 5 4 4 3 2 1 1 1 Did you notice this chart applies only to articles that are less than 30 days old? For older articles, I use a different rating chart, which I’ll show you in the next step. Let’s take another look at the article we started with (the one on the previous page): On the day I looked at this article, it had 356 views and had been online more than eight days. So using the chart above, I’d give it a mental rating of “7.” Now I’ll go look at the second article, and check out the views. On the next page, I’ll show you what happens…



I go back to the Acne category page — where I clicked the first article — and click on the second article…

When I scroll down to the bottom of that article page, here’s what I see:

Now on the day I looked at this article, it was probably online less than one day. (Remember, it takes a few days for EzineArticles to approve the article, so most likely no one saw it until a couple of days after it was submitted.) Using my chart, I see that this article rates a “6.”

SHORT TERM TRAFFIC POTENTIAL

# DAYS ARTICLE IS “LIVE” # OF VIEWS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8-29 300+ 10 10 10 10 10 9 9 7 250 10 9 9 9 9 8 8 6 200 10 9 8 8 7 6 6 5 150 9 8 8 6 5 5 5 4 100 8 7 6 5 4 4 4 3 50 7 6 5 4 3 3 2 2

>50 6 5 4 3 2 2 1 1



Is this lower rating good or bad? Neither! The first article was a “7,” but this one is a “6,” so I may adjust my mental rating of this niche to a “6-7” — for now, anyway. But the real point is this: I’m not going to stop here. I’ll keep going to the next article, and the next, and adjust my mental rating. IMPORTANT NOTE: Never base your rating off of just one article. Review at least 7 to 10, or even more if you have to. Here’s what I see with the next article I look at…

Wow, this article is way older than the first two. Sometimes these types of articles end up on the EzineArticles “most recent” page — not sure why, but it happens. So I won’t rate it using my “short-term” chart. Instead, I’ll rate it later, based on a different chart I’ve developed to assess its long-term potential. That will be covered in the next step. For now, it’s best to keep going and…

Check at least 10–12 of these recent articles — or more if the numbers are all over the map — to develop a “first pass” at a mental rating for this niche.

For example, what if the first three or four articles show almost no traffic? Or the numbers are a lot lower than you expected? Jump to the middle area of the recent article list, and check those views. Often they will show a lot more promise. Sometimes articles need to “age” a little before they start getting some traffic. In this case, I check the next 15–20 articles. On the next page, I’ll show you what I discovered (I made a nice little chart!)…



DAYS LIVE # OF VIEWS MY RATING 1 day 36 6 1 day 15 6 1 day 50 7 1 day 145 8 1 day 182 9 2 days 39 5 2 days 31 5 2 days 103 7 3 days 110 6 3 days 54 5 3 days 91 5 3 days 128 6 3 days 264 8 4 days 94 4 4 days 101 5 4 days 140 5 5 days 125 4 7 days 434 9

8–29 days 433 7 8–29 days 357 7

These numbers are somewhat diverse! But see the section I highlighted in yellow? What a big difference between the views certain articles are getting, even though they’ve been online for the same amount of time. One three-day-old article is getting 2–5 times more views than the other articles of the same age! In my experience, the articles with the most views usually have much stronger titles than the others. Therefore, I’m more likely to bump this niche a little bit higher in my mind right now, since I know I can write excellent titles that will get a lot of clicks.

For getting some nice short term traffic, you want to shoot for a mental rating of 6 and above. This allows you to profit immediately from your investment in writing articles.

I also see that as articles in the “acne” niche begin to age a bit (8–29 days), they seem to get a lot of views, in the 350+ range. That’s a good sign, as you’ll see later.

Right now the “acne” niche is taking on about a “7” short-term rating in my mind.

Because right now the most recent article views are sort of spread all over the place, I want to make sure my short-term rating is accurate. On the next page, I’ll show you how I do that…



Now go to the Other Recent Articles in this niche, and see how many “views” they get. We’re going to look at another section of EzineArticles that’s very important for our research: the “Other Recent Articles” area. You find it by clicking an article, then scrolling sown to this spot, which is right underneath the author information. This section shows 15 Other Recent Articles. You’ll do exactly the same thing you did with the most recent articles — you’ll click on each article and give it a rating. I’ll make another nice chart to show you what I found…

DAYS LIVE # OF VIEWS MY RATING

1 day 53 7 1 day 21 6 1 day 57 7 1 day 61 7 1 day 15 6 2 days 151 8 2 days 64 6 2 days 8 5 2 days 5 5 2 days 41 5 2 days 16 5 2 days 33 5 2 days 14 5 2 days 32 5

8–29 days 1,202 7 Once again, the short-term traffic looks pretty good, though there are a few articles that are barely getting any views. But that can usually be explained by less-than-



stellar article titles (which happens to be the case here). What really catches my eye, though, are the blue highlighted articles. Here’s why…

IMPORTANT SHORTCUT TIP: Any time you see very short-term (1–2 day) views of more than 100, you’ve probably found a good niche! You can just jump ahead and check the long-term potential.

If I see even a couple of articles that are less than a week old with 150–200 views, I’m ecstatic! To me, that’s a sign of a niche with great potential. Once I see just 2–3 articles like that, I might stop right there — and immediately go check the long-term views (which I’ll show you in the next step). In fact, that’s a little shortcut you can go ahead and take, once you’ve done this research process a few times and have it down.

Given everything I’ve seen so far, the “acne” niche is still a very solid “7” rating in my mind for short-term traffic. It might even be edging towards an “8”!

Because this part of the research is so important, let’s review…

From the moment you look at the very first article, you must have a rating going on in your head.

With each NEW article you review, you adjust the rating, using the scale of 1–10 above.

Click the category to see a list of the most

recent articles, and rate most of the articles on that list using the short-term chart.

Then click the “Other Recent Articles” section, and rate those articles using the short-term chart.

Decide on the overall short-term rating number for this niche.

There are still a few more things we need to research…and the next one is to decide on a long-term value of the niche. We’ll get into that on the next page…



Step 4 — Go to the “Most Viewed” section of EzineArticles, and rate the older articles. Goal: Give this niche a long-term rating. Short-term traffic/sales is one thing, but your articles can actually make money for months and years to come. In fact, I have articles that have been online for five years, and they still send me traffic, sign-ups, and sales! So you really want to research the long-term potential of a niche, too. Here's how…

First, go to an article page. Then scroll down and find the section called “Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Health-and-Fitness:Acne category (90 Days).” The screenshot on the left shows you where to find it. It’s right underneath the “Other Recent Articles” section. Now you’ll do the same thing you just did with the Recent Articles.

Click on each article. Don’t bother reading it, just scroll down to see the date and how many times the article has viewed.

been

Concentrate only on the older articles — the ones that have been online 30 days or more.



As you look at each of these older articles, give it a rating using this chart…

EZINEARTICLES.COM MOST VIEWED (90 DAYS) ARTICLES LONG TERM TRAFFIC POTENTIAL

# DAYS ARTICLE IS “LIVE” # OF VIEWS 30 60 90 90+

3,000+ 10 10 9 7 2,000–3,000 10 10 9 6 1,000–2,000 9 9 8 5 600–1,000 7 7 6 4 300–600 5 4 3 3 100–300 3 3 2 2 50–100 2 2 2 1

>50 1 1 1 n/a Remember, you’re scrolling down to the bottom of each article and looking for this:

That’s from a real “acne” article on EzineArticles! At the time of this writing, this article is not quite 60 days old. So using my chart above, it would get a “10” rating. I’ll look at a few more of these older articles, and make another chart for myself:

DAYS LIVE # OF VIEWS MY RATING 30 days 1,235 9 30 days 1,656 9 60 days 1,402 9 60 days 1,245 10 60 days 14,723 10 60 days 1,796 9 60 days 1,809 9 90 days 2,279 9



With numbers like those, it looks like articles in the “acne” niche should get nice long-term traffic.

At this point I’d give this niche a solid long-term rating of “9.” And I’d probably bump up my overall rating of the “acne” niche to an “8” or even a “9.”

Now just to clarify, if you’re seeing long-term numbers that are low, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad niche. But, if you started with a mental rating of 8, lower long-term numbers might push it down to a 7 or even a 6. That means you would put this niche lower on your priority list, and start with a different one with better numbers. If you’re seeing numbers in the 1,000s and up, like I’m seeing with “acne,” you have the makings of a really powerful niche! That prompts me to bump the “acne” niche up to maybe a “9.” Very few niches get a “10,” but right now I’ll be bumping “acne” way up on my priority list. Bottom line is, with long-term numbers in the 1,000–14,000 range, we can see that the “acne” niche has tremendous readership. So even if only a tiny percentage of your readers buy your affiliate products, you can make decent profits over the long haul! Now it’s time to study some article titles…we’ll do that on the next page.



Step 5 — Click some recent article titles that are really interesting to you — titles YOU would write. See how many “views” they get. Goal: Once again, adjust your “mental rating” based on the best titles. Okay, now we’re just going to pay attention to article titles for a second. You can go back to the big list of recent articles by clicking the Acne category at the top, right above the article title. Once you get there, click on a good title — one that really catches your interest.

To me, a good article title offers the reader some kind of list, such as “3 Things You Must Do…” or ““5 Ways To…” I’ll get into writing article titles in Chapter 5, but for now, just keep your eye open for those list titles — they really work. However, I’m going to click the one about Cameron Diaz — celebrity names definitely get people’s attention, so it’s worth checking this one out!

Don’t bother reading the article right now. Just scroll down to the very bottom to see how many page views it got. Be sure to check the date PLUS the number of times it has been viewed.



Hmmm, this article has been online about two and a half weeks, and it hasn’t gotten too many views. Maybe celebrity titles don’t work so well for this niche! So I’m going to start clicking on some titles that I think are better — titles with lists and possibly some negative titles (you’ll learn more about those in Chapter 5). I just want to see whether they do anything to change my overall rating of the niche, which so far is a solid “8.” Here’s an example… A few minutes ago I was looking at an article called “How to Get Rid of Pimples Permanently: Here are the Earth Shattering Tips You Can’t Afford to Miss.” Not a great title, but definitely not bad when I look at the page views:

On the day I’m writing this, the article has probably been “live” for only a day, and it’s already getting decent traffic (116 views). I look at a few more articles, and see that the ones with really good titles are getting nice traffic over the last few days, about 70 to 200+ views. Remember the “Shortcut Tip” I gave you earlier? Here it is again.



IMPORTANT SHORTCUT TIP: Any time you see very short-term (1–2 day) views of more than 100, you’ve probably found a good niche!

Well, in the case of the “acne” niche, this is definitely the case with articles that have good titles. So at this point, I think I’ll bump up my overall rating to “9.”

When I decide this niche is a “9” or “10,” it’s definitely one I feel is a “must do.” I try to start submitting articles in that niche immediately!

Let’s quickly review how to “rank” a niche…

First, if you see that an article has been online for only one day, and has already gotten 100 views, that’s a niche worth looking at further. This tells you that even an “okay” article will probably get decent traffic.

Second, remember that article titles matter! The more articles you look at, the more you’ll notice that some get a lot more page views than others. In 90% of the cases, it’s because of the article title. We’ll get into article titles in detail in Chapter 5 — you’ll want to study that carefully!

Third, do a short-term rating. Check at least 7–10 of the most recent articles, and use my short-term potential chart to help you rank the niche. Each time you see an article has been online only a day or two, and has gotten 100+ views, you can bump up your mental rating a little higher. If you find a lot of articles with only a few views — even if they have good titles — you’ll probably want to lower the rating.

Fourth, do a long-term rating. Check a sampling of the Most Viewed Articles (90 Days) using my long-term potential chart.

Finally, check the views on some of the best titles, and assign the niche an overall score.

Even though it takes a few minutes to get the hang of this research system, believe me, it will really pay off in the end. It allows you to prioritize your article marketing, so you can target the niches with the most profit potential first. Now that we’ve given the “acne” niche a “9” rating, we’re going to see whether it’s worth starting out with some product review articles. Reviews may not always get the most traffic, but they often get the highest conversions (sales) — but not in every niche…



Step 6 — Click any article title that could be a review for an information product (like an ebook). Goal: See how many views these product-related articles are getting.

Now it’s time to check out any article that looks like it might be a product review. Check the list of Most Recent articles first, and then the Most Viewed.

If actual reviews of ClickBank products get good traffic in your niche, you’re in luck — reviews usually get the best conversions (meaning they make the most sales)!

In this screenshot, this review has been viewed 41 times. When I wrote this, it was online for a few days — so not great, but not bad!



Keep going, and look for more review articles to see if they are getting traffic, and how much traffic. Be aware of whether the review articles affect your “mental rating.” Do they lower it or raise it? After you look at the review articles, if your rating is in the same ballpark or close, that’s great! If not, no worries. It just means that a review is not necessarily the best type of article to write in this niche, and you should probably stick to the tips we share in the “article writing” chapter. If you find that “product reviews” are popular in your niche, then you want to take some time to note down the names of the products that are being reviewed, and follow that with a search in EzineArticles specifically using the product name. This allows you to…

Check the popularity of the product review articles. Sometimes you’ll be shocked to see how many views these product reviews get long term.



Some product reviews may get a lot more views than others, so note down which ones. You obviously want to promote the most popular products!

Uncover which kinds of titles work best for reviews. You’ll often see that some reviews get only a few views, while others get hundreds or even thousands of views. That’s because of the titles! In fact, sometimes you’ll even see two reviews with almost exactly the same title (maybe only a word or two are different), but one gets massive views and the other almost none. So note down the exact titles of reviews that are the most popular. That way you can model your own titles on the ones that get the most traffic.

Be sure to write down all the names of the products you see reviewed. That way you can research them in ClickBank later (I’ll go over all that in the next chapter).

Okay, that's it! Those are the six simple steps that tell you whether the niche you've researched is a sure winner, a pretty good bet, an "average" niche, or one that's not an immediate money maker (though might be good to test later). Now we’ll research another factor that makes a big difference in whether you’ll make any sales from your articles — your website. On the next page, we’ll talk about the web pages that authors of the most popular articles are sending their visitors to…



The Best Landing Page for Your Niche Now you need to figure out what your website should look like. Luckily, all you have to do is go to the most popular articles, and click through to their “landing pages.” Goal: Study those web pages to get ideas! See how there is a section at the end of the every article that tells you about the author? And there is usually a link to the author’s website?

The outlined area on the page above is what’s called an “Author Resource Box.” That’s where you get to put links to your website. When visitors click those links, they end up at your web page. (In Chapter 5 I’ll tell you how to compose a good resource box.) Right now, you want to click on those website links for one of the most recent articles. Check out the author’s web page, which I call a “landing page,” and see what it looks like. This particular author is sending readers

straight to the product sales page, which you see on the left. The author is using a redirect link (more on that in Chapter 5).



Here’s the resource box for an article called “How to Get Rid of Acne Overnight”:

On the left is this author’s landing page, which is pretty good. The only problem is it’s a Blogger blog, which I would not recommend using, unless you’re just testing this niche out. Blogger is free, but since you don’t actually own the blog, it can be “turned off” or shut down at any time — not good if you’re making sales! (In Chapter 4 I’ll discuss how to design your landing page website in great detail.)


https://www.blogger.com/


You want to check out the landing pages for all the most popular articles, and try to see if there’s a typical “structure” and content on those pages.

Do they share the same basic layout? What products are they promoting? What kind of content is on the page? Does the page have a headline, and what does it say? Do they have a place for you to sign up for a newsletter? Do they compare a few different products on one page? Do they have a product review on the page?

NOTE: If you see a product being promoted over and over by a lot of different article writers, make a note of it. You will want to research that product in ClickBank next. When we get to Chapter 4, I’ll show you examples of various types of landing pages. For now, you want to take some quick notes on what other authors are doing with their websites. Building Your Personal “Article Niche List” Marketing Plan At a certain point in your research, you may say to yourself, " Darn, what if the numbers aren’t so great? What if the numbers you are seeing — for short-term and long-term traffic — are less than ideal? Does that mean you shouldn’t do article marketing in that niche? Not at all. It could actually turn out be an excellent niche! Just put the niches with “not-so-hot” numbers lower on your priority list. Make plans to definitely test them later on. Sometimes the only reason that articles in a particular niche aren’t getting a whole lot of traffic is because of the titles (later I’ll cover what makes for a good title that will get a lot of click-throughs). But for now, you want a niche that has some very strong numbers so you can make your first sale! So skip down through your list of niches, and see if you can find one that gets a mental rating of at least “6” or above. In fact, I always keep a running list of niches. I think of it as a marketing plan. At the beginning of this chapter I talked about where to get ideas for niche topics, like the news, television shows, etc. If you do that, you’ll soon have a long, long list of possible niches — maybe even enough to fill up six months to a year’s worth of article marketing. So here's how to turn thar list of ideas in a mini “marketing plan." It’s easy, and just takes a few steps…



First, be sure write down ALL your niche ideas.

Next, do some quick research and rank EACH niche on your list. It’s worth taking some time to go through the research system I’ve just showed you above. You can do an initial scan of a niche pretty quickly, just by…

Checking EzineArticles (or any of your other favorite article directories) for the number of views the most recent articles are getting, and how quickly. Checking how many views the most popular articles are getting long term. All the while, assigning a “mental rating” number to each niche.

Once you’ve ranked each niche, make a list from highest to lowest. Make the highest-ranked niche your first priority when starting a new article marketing effort. This now becomes your article marketing plan.

Don’t throw any of your niche ideas away, because you never know when a “cold” niche may suddenly get “hot.” For example, every year Oprah does her “Favorite Things” show. On it she features anything and everything that strikes her fancy, from kitchen appliances to clothing to automobiles. If one of the “lukewarm” niches on your list happens to be related to a product she features on that show, it can suddenly turn into a “hot” niche overnight! The same is true of other time-sensitive events, like a sports tournament, the premiere of a new movie or TV show, a celebrity wedding or other life event, or a political election, just to name a few. Any of them, at some point in time, could end up being related to a niche on your list. So keep all those niche ideas on your list, and give it a quick glance any time there’s an event in the entertainment world, news media, etc.

Review Time! In this chapter, you learned a lot! Let's take a second to review the main points. If you don't remember something or it's unclear, be sure to go back, since this is the most important chapter in this whole ebook!

A “profitable niche” is a topic that is market focused – but not too narrowly focused – and that appeals to some segment of a larger web audience.



Market-focused: While there is no cut-and-dried definition of “market focused,” it does mean that doing market research on a particular topic will tell you whether that market is interested.

Watching TV is a great way to look for a new profitable niche. The local news, the talk shows, the “niche news” shows, and infomercials all can provide ideas that tie into a promising niche.

EzineArticles is the biggest article directory online. Just about every niche is represented, and articles that appear there are indexed really well in Google.

Researching the volume of article traffic for a particular topic on EzineArticles first involves searching that topic to determine where EzineArticles has categorized it.

Find most recent articles in your category: Clicking on the first article in the EzineArticles search results, then clicking on the subcategory at the top, enables you to see the most recent articles on your chosen topic.

Begin formulating a “mental rating” of your niche’s marketing potential by clicking on the most recent articles and scrolling down to the bottom of the page to see the total number of “views” that article has received.

Keep going: You should continue developing your mental rating by reviewing at least 7–10 of the most recent articles using a scale from 1 to 10, factoring in both the number of days that an article is “live” and the number of views for that article. This enables you to determine the short-term traffic potential of your niche.

Rate other recent articles: As with the most recent articles, you should also check “Other Recent Articles” with the same rating system in mind. With each new article reviewed, adjust your mental rating accordingly. Short-term views (1–2 days) of more than 100 views for an article mean that your niche is promising.

Rate older articles: Once you’ve finalized a short-term rating for your niche, you should rate the older articles (30 days or older) in your niche to determine the niche’s long-term potential.

Click on titles of articles in your niche that you might be inclined to write, see how many views the articles received, and adjust your mental rating accordingly.

Article titles that could be informational product reviews are worth researching on to see how many views those articles are receiving. Reviews of ClickBank products that get good traffic in your niche are a good sign.



For the most popular articles, it’s worthwhile to click on the authors’ websites and look through their landing pages to see any similarities in structure and content, as well as to get ideas generally.

Niches that don’t have stellar rating numbers should be placed lower on your priority list, not eliminated. A seemingly “cold” niche can suddenly become “hot” later on.

Next… Find that money-making product with my ClickBank research system…



CHAPTER THREE

Finding a Money Making Product In 30 Seconds!

Now that you have a pretty good idea of the niche you’re going to write about, it’s time to choose a product to sell. Here’s what you’ll learn:

What exactly is a “profitable product?” Researching products in ClickBank Finding CPA products

What Exactly Is a “Profitable Product?” You may think that a profitable product is the one that pays you the highest commission. But that’s not really the most important thing. What you really need to pay attention to is the product “conversions.”

The definition of “conversions” is the percentage of people who actually BUY after clicking over to the merchant’s product page.

In a moment I will show you how to find products with good conversions in ClickBank. In my experiments over the last year, I’ve found that there are two types of products that are the most profitable to promote with article marketing:

ClickBank products (best for beginners) CPA offers (if you already have good traffic to a site)

Researching Products in ClickBank We will start with ClickBank products. If you are new to online marketing, you won’t be able to get approved by a CPA network to start. CPA networks require you to show substantial traffic to your sites, and they also expect you to get results pretty quickly. So if you’re new to this, start with ClickBank. They approve almost everybody (the exception is if you live in a country that has a high transaction fraud history).



ClickBank is filled with ebooks that are automatically delivered to your customers. Your sales are immediately visible in your account, and payments are made twice a month. And with ClickBank, you don’t have to be too concerned with getting paid a decent commission. Almost all the products offered on ClickBank offer at least 50% commission on sales — and some are even higher. Step 1 — Register at ClickBank The first thing you’ll want to do is create a ClickBank account and set up your affiliate username. Signing up with ClickBank is easy. Just go to: http://www.clickbank.com/index.html and click on the sign-up tab. The one thing you need to think about is the part that says “Select a nickname for your new account.” Under that, it states: “The nickname you choose will be the “ClickBank ID” for your account. It will be visible to the customer every time we sell one of your products, and will appear on the memo line when we send you a check. Keep in mind that the nickname cannot be changed once your account has been opened.” So be careful when choosing your nickname! If you select a keyword-targeted name, such as “acneshop,” when you want to sell something in a different niche, the nickname won’t make sense.

When you choose your ClickBank nickname, consider making it

something generic or branded so it can be used for ALL of your marketing efforts.

This way, if you want to sell something in the dog training niche, you can use the same account. That said, I know some people who like to set up separate ClickBank accounts for each niche market they’re in. But I find it gets time-consuming to check into multiple accounts every day. Also, each separate ClickBank account you have will need to meet the minimum payment threshold and the Customer Distribution Requirements before you will get paid. You can read about these requirements here. Plus to be honest, it’s nice to get one really BIG check every month, instead of separate little checks! Somehow it just feels nicer ☺! The bottom line is, I recommend that when you start out, get one generic ClickBank nickname that can be used for all your article marketing. NOTE: After you sign up, don’t close the window that appears! You need to enter the confirmation code that ClickBank sends you on that page. This email is


http://www.clickbank.com/index.html

http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_faq.html#aff_question_16

http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_faq.html#aff_question_16


very easy to miss! The subject line will say something like “Confirmation Code.” To be safe, make sure you whitelist the “@clickbank.com” domain in your email program. That way, you’ll get your confirmation code for sure. Step 2 — Search the ClickBank Marketplace using your niche keyword. Go to the ClickBank Marketplace here: http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm In the box that says “Keywords” type in your niche. In this case, I’ll type in “acne.” A list of acne-related ClickBank products will be displayed. Step 3 — Do a quick scan of the results. Here’s what you’re looking for:

Multiple products. Absolutely more than two, and preferably four or more.

Ignore irrelevant products. Be sure to scan the list for products about your specific topic, because lots of somewhat unrelated products will inevitably be mixed up in there.

NOTE: If you see a LOT of products in your niche, that’s good!

I see there are more than 10 different acne products on ClickBank. This is great, because it means two things:

1) There’s lots of money to be made in this niche. The more competition, the more likely that there’s a big demand for products and that people are consistently spending money on them. 2) You have lots of choices of products to promote. This is good because you can test different products. You can also do comparisons of different products on your website. And if one product’s conversions start to slip, you have others you can try.

Step 4 — Sort by Popularity and by Gravity. Now you want to sort the list two ways: first by popularity, next by gravity.

ClickBank’s popularity rating helps you see what products get the most sales.


http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm


ClickBank’s gravity rating shows you that lots and lots of affiliates are able to convert their traffic into buyers of this product.

Popularity is pretty much which product is selling the most copies. Gravity is a little more complicated. Here is what ClickBank says about the gravity rating: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added. Yikes, what a mouthful! Let me translate that into English for you…

Basically, the gravity of a ClickBank product is higher when many more unique, individual affiliates are making sales.

Sales that were made longer than eight weeks ago don’t count as much toward gravity as the most recent sales made by unique affiliates. And any affiliate sales made more than eight weeks prior don’t count towards gravity at all. Why is a high gravity rating important? It tells you:

A lot of affiliates are having success selling the product — which means you probably will, too!

The product has good momentum.

The product converts very well for affiliate traffic. Most likely the sales page does a really good job of closing the sale.

You probably won’t be competing with just a couple of super affiliates who totally dominate product sales.

Let me explain that last one. If a ClickBank product has good popularity but a low gravity, it could mean that just a few affiliates are selling it successfully. They may have saturated the market and are mopping up almost all of the sales. While this doesn’t mean you can’t compete against them, I find it’s actually much easier to grab a piece of a pie that’s divided up among a lot of affiliates than just a few big guns. Also, if you noticed lots of EzineArticles that were sending people to a product with a low gravity, it’s definitely worth testing at some point. The product could be converting very well, but it may also be fairly new, and a lot of affiliates haven’t discovered it yet.



Look for a gravity rating of 30 or higher. That product is definitely worth testing with article marketing! Anything close to 100 is a sure thing.

Let’s look at what this looks like in ClickBank…

As you can see, with my “acne” search, I see that the most popular product AND the product with the highest gravity happen to be the same product — and the gravity is really high, over 100. Definitely a winner!

Also, I see that the product with the second-highest popularity has a gravity score of more than 35. That one is definitely a candidate and worth testing. Finally, the third most popular product has a gravity of 11. I won’t reject that one completely — it might be a new product that hasn’t had a chance to develop Gravity



yet, or it might be one of those products that are dominated by super affiliate sales. I’ll make a note of it, because it might be good to use on a comparison website. NOTE: If you decide to do a comparison page website, then you’ll be comparing three different products for your visitors. The highest gravity product will always be shown FIRST on your site. We’ll discuss websites in the next chapter, but for now, if your search turned up more than 3 products, be sure to note down the gravity rating for each one. Step 5 — Note the % Referred Number. For the products with the highest gravity, you should now check out the % referred number. You’ll find it right under the description of the product and the URL, in a line of stats that looks like this: $/sale: $20.64 | Future $: - | Total $/sale: $20.64 | %/sale: 60.0% | %refd: 88.0% | grav: 93.56 Again, here’s a screenshot of where you’ll find it:

This shows the percentage of total product sales that are coming from affiliates (as opposed to sales made directly by the product owner).

A high % referred is good! I like to see at least 50%. As shown in the example above, a nice high percentage means that the vast majority of sales are coming from affiliates. This increases your odds of being successful with this product! What if the gravity and the popularity are good, but the % referred isn’t? I can’t think of any case where gravity and % referred aren’t related, except when a product’s gravity is at a low point of a downswing. Sometimes ClickBank products go through gravity cycles. Product A gravity will be high for a while, then Product B comes out, and some affiliates stop promoting Product A for a few months. So Product A’s gravity may drop a bit, even though most of the % referred is still coming from affiliate sales. I’d say if you run into a product with a lower % referred than you’d like, but the popularity and gravity are good, then it’s probably worth testing. Review Time!



In this chapter, you learned…

Conversions rule: The most important aspect of a profitable product is not the commission paid out, but the number of product “conversions” — the percentage of people who buy after clicking over to the merchant’s product page.

Why ClickBank? Products sold through ClickBank are the most profitable ones for beginning affiliates to promote with affiliate marketing. Products sold through CPA offers are well suited to affiliates who already drive good traffic to a website.

Focus on ClickBank first: “Newbies” to online marketing should start by selling

through ClickBank, due to its easy approval process, regular payments, and decent commissions.

Use a generic nickname: It’s better to use a generic or branded nickname for

all your article marketing efforts through ClickBank; keyword-targeted nicknames won’t make sense if you decide to sell in a different niche.

Look for multiple products: When searching ClickBank for products within a particular niche, look for lists of multiple products, and ignore those products that are not directly related to the specific topic.

Check popularity and gravity: Once you have generated a list of products on ClickBank, sort the list first by popularity, then by gravity.

A high gravity rating means lots of affiliates are successfully selling the product, the product has good momentum and converts very well, and there is little competition from super affiliates. A gravity rating of at least 30 indicates that you should consider testing the product with article marketing.

The % referred number, the percentage of total product sales that are generated by affiliates, should also be checked. A % referred number of at least 50% is good.

Next… The five types of websites you will send your readers to…



CHAPTER FOUR

The Only 5 Kinds of Websites That You Should Make

Now you’ve got a profitable niche and one (or more) profitable products to promote. The next step is to build a website. NOTE: With our AffSphere.com article directory you don’t HAVE to have a website. You can use affiliate links directly in your article and resource box. But almost all the other article directories, including EzineArticles.com do not allow this. Also, we highly recommend that you DO create a website, your conversions will be much higher! For the purposes of article marketing, there are just five types of websites I’ve found that work. Which one you choose depends on your niche and the product you’re promoting — don’t worry, we’ll cover all of that. Here’s what you’ll learn in this chapter:

Five types of websites: Adsense, Opt-in, Direct, Blog, SEO Examples of each type of site When to use each type of site and why How to get ready to build a list.

The 5 Types of Websites: Adsense, Opt-in, Direct, Blog, SEO When you’re building a website specifically to support your article marketing efforts, you need to think about what you want the website to do. What’s the primary purpose? In several years of article marketing, I’ve learned there are basically five reasons to build a website: 1 - To earn AdSense income. 2 - To promote your newsletter and build an opt-in email list. 3 - To present a direct sales pitch for a product (a “sales letter” site). 4 - To start a blog for quick indexing and free targeted traffic. 5 - Purely for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. In practice, you will usually combine a couple of the above purposes into one website.





And if you’re smart, you’ll ALWAYS include an opt-in form on ALL your sites (I’ll explain why a little later).

Let’s look at the five types of websites in a little more detail. 1 — The AdSense Site The goal here is to make a site with good AdSense placements. If you aren’t familiar with AdSense, you can find out more about it here. AdSense is an ad program offered by Google. Unlike affiliate programs, where the visitor has to make a purchase for you to get paid, AdSense pays you whenever someone clicks one of its ads.

An AdSense site offers your visitors excellent quality information, plus it displays AdSense in a way that encourages them to read the ads and click on the ones that interest them the most.

What you make from an AdSense click depends on many different factors — it can be anywhere from a couple of cents to a couple of dollars. Once you qualify for an AdSense account, you place a small piece of code on your website where you want ads to display. Why would you want to make a small amount on an AdSense instead of going for a large commission on an affiliate sale? Two reasons:

With AdSense, you start making a little bit of money immediately. That can be very encouraging when you’re first starting out.

In certain select niches, AdSense pays very, very well! In some cases you can make a dollar or more per click. These tend to be popular niches that also get excellent article traffic. So even if you get just a little traffic, if the clicks pay well, your earnings can add up quickly,

We’ll go into how to build a good AdSense site later in this report. 2 — The Opt-In Site As I mentioned earlier, you should actually build an opt-in list on ALL your sites. But sometimes you will build a site for just this ONE purpose — to get subscribers to your opt-in list.


http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/index.html


On an opt-in site, there will be nothing else on the main page except your opt-in box and a call to action, encouraging the visitor to subscribe.

The goal of your opt-in site is, of course, high conversions. In this case you’re not selling a product — you’ll do that in your email newsletters — though I guess you could say that your newsletter is a free product ☺! The point is to get as many visitors as possible to actually become subscribers. I’ll show you what a high conversion opt-in page looks like later in this report. 3 — The Direct Sales Site The name says it all. Everything on this page — layout, content, graphics — are designed to “pre-sell” the reader on owning the product.

The Direct Sales site is designed to encourage visitors to click through to the merchant’s sales page and BUY the product.

There’s a lot you can do with this type of website. You could provide full product reviews, mini-reviews, videos of the product, testimonials and endorsements, and even compare several similar products side-by-side. Later on I’ll show an example of one type of Direct Sales site that has converted very well for my own article traffic. 4 — Blog Blogs are a very interesting phenomenon, and can really multiply your article marketing efforts. Blogs have a couple of advantages over ordinary websites:

Search engines love blogs. If you set up your blog correctly, Google will index your blog pages very fast. This means that if you put the right keywords into the articles you put on your blog (called “posts”), you’ll start to get free traffic from searches almost immediately.

Blogs allow you to get free traffic from social bookmarking sites and social networks. Sites like Digg.com, Bumpzee.com, MyBlogLog.com, Ma.gnolia.com, and many others allow Internet users all over the world to share their favorite web pages. The beauty of a blog is that you can easily add little scripts to it — called “plug-ins” — that allow readers to share what you’ve written on these sites, and with just one click. That’s more free targeted traffic, and you don’t have to lift a finger to get it.


http://digg.com/

http://www.bumpzee.com/

http://www.mybloglog.com/

http://ma.gnolia.com/


Blogging works incredibly well with affiliate marketing and article marketing — if you set up your blog properly. In fact, over the last year and a half I’ve been using blogs almost exclusively when building new websites. And there are bloggers who make five figures a month using blog marketing, so it definitely works! Recently I developed a whole course on blog marketing with Rosalind Gardner, who you may know as one of the world’s most successful affiliates (you can get the free mini-course we created here). The point is, blogs work hand-in-hand with article marketing. Later on in this report, I’ll show you one of my new blog sites so you can see how it’s done. 5 — The SEO Site SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the art and science of creating web pages that the search engines — especially Google — will display on the first page of results for certain keywords you are targeting.

An SEO site is designed to give you a strong presence in natural search results through lots and lots of excellent content.

“Natural search” is when someone goes to Google and searches for something about your niche. For example, let’s say someone Googles “heal acne breakout overnight.” Your goal with an SEO site is for one of your web pages to be on the first page of results that show up without paying for the placement.

When you build an SEO site, you make sure every single aspect of the site — page code, headlines, writing, and graphics — are all designed to work WITH the way search engines rank pages. You also need to work at getting lot of links to your web pages from important sites on the web.

There are very specific ways to accomplish good SEO, and while it’s not hard, it’s also not something you learn overnight. Basically SEO involves more research than the Ezine Articles and ClickBank research you just learned about. You’d need to research keywords related to your niche using a tool like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Then you would write your content using those keywords a specific number of times, as well as including related keywords. You’d also need to make sure your web page code makes it easy for search engine scripts — called “spiders” — to read your pages. And finally, you’d start a link-building campaign to get other sites, especially important sites called “authority sites,” to link to your web pages.


http://www.blogclassroom.com/

http://www.blogclassroom.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal


But there is good news. First, Google’s spiders are getting better and better at figuring out what web pages are about, and whether they are relevant for a given keyword search. And second, if you use a blogging platform to build your site, a lot of the SEO is very easy to set up. Most of the time I use WordPress — it’s free and easy to install on almost all web servers. But in the past I’ve used other blog software and CMS (Content Management System) software, and those can work really well, too. Later I’ll show you an example of one of my older SEO sites that was built using blog software. Starting with the next page, I’ll be showing you examples of each type of website. Let’s take a look... Examples of Each Type of Website On the following pages, I’ll analyze examples of each type of website:

AdSense Site Opt-In Site Direct Sales — Comparison Site Blog Site SEO Site


http://wordpress.org/



1 — The AdSense Site

Built around a very high-paying AdSense niche. Some of the highest-paying AdSense niches: Financial niches, FICO scores, loans, mortgages, bankruptcy, credit cards, payday loans, taxes, debt consolidation, insurance of all kind Investments, including stocks and day trading, FOREX, stock quotes, estate planning Internet-related, such as domain names, web hosting, antispam, adware and spyware programs, shopping carts, web design and development, high speed, DSL, broadband, cable Internet, wireless Travel, such as hotels, airfares, vacation packages, vacation rentals, timeshares, cruises Cars, trucks, sports cars, SUVs, motorcycles, ATVs Telephone, cable and satellite, including cell phones, VOIP, toll-free numbers, cheap long distance, ring tones Health and fitness issues, such as diabetes, heart disease, weight loss, diets and dieting, body building, antiaging, nutrition, and supplements

s

PROMINENT AdSense placements

AdSense links are “hyperlink blue” so

people notice the links and click on them.

Includes comparison of several products, but the real money is coming from AdSense clicks.

Need to include 10–20 pages of solid content — articles, reviews, etc.

Every article that drives traffic to this site makes an average of $2.50 in AdSense clicks within 24–48 hours!

Before the week is over, you may make around $6 in high paying AdSense niches. From there, it’ll continue to bring results for the life of the article.


2 — The Opt-In Site

A link in your article resource box would send visitors to a page similar to this.

Incentive should convince the potential customer that once they give you their email address, you will give them something of real value to them.

The opt-in box does not ask for any more information than the user’s first name and email address. The more information you ask for, the lower the conversions (though leads may be more qualified). If you ask for more information, the opt-in gift needs to be VERY special.

Clear privacy statement says that the information that the user provides will not be shared or sold, plus a link to a Privacy Policy Page.

Headline is strong and compelling.

Bullet points highlight the advantages of subscribing and Show PROOF.

Note the equivalent of a P.S. in a letter — a short statement that emphasizes the biggest benefit the opt-in incentive will provide for the user.

Keep the exclamation points to a minimum, and…

Don’t BEG! Be polite without being “too chummy.”

This page gets a nice 20% conversion, which is quite good for the mass traffic we send to this page.




3 — The Direct Sales Pitch Site (Comparison Page)

Comparing 2–3 products is often more effective than offering just one product.

Arrange the products in order of ClickBank Gravity score. Put the one with the highest gravity first, second highest second, etc.

People don’t believe any ONE product can solve all of their problems, so comparisons “keep it real” and lend credibility.

Keep everything short! Keep bullets short, descriptions short.

People don’t READ these types of sites, they skim them. Remember, they already read your article, now they want to know about the products. So bullet points are your friend on this type of site!

Say NO to hype. If you can, include some PROOF.

Work hard to create a strong headline. If you can, state the biggest benefit to the visitor in a short headline.

Use graphics of the products plus short bulleted highlights.

Use HIGHLY VISIBLE “call to action” links (like “Click Here to Get Started”). Make them BIG.

Use an opt-in box. Don’t be shy, go

ahead and put your opt-in box on the page. You can put it below the fold on a site like this, since your #1 goal is to make a s

ale.

Don’t forget links to privacy policy, terms, disclaimers, etc.



4 — Blog

My newest blog project — traffic within 24 hours of launch, already making sales.

Choose a niche that gets people passionate and enthusiastic, to get the social elements of blogging to work for you.

Use WordPress! Avoid free blogging programs like Blogger.com. You want complete control over the look and feel of your blog, plus you want to OWN the site.

Note the prominent placement of the opt-in box. If you use an autoresponder service like AWeber.com to collect subscriber names and emails, you can set up a “Blog Broadcast,” which sends your list a notification with links to your latest post.

It seems like there’s a lot going on with this blog —recent posts at the top, liCategories, a “tag cloud,” recent readers, plus a few advertisements thrown in for good measure! But that’s okay. You want something for everyone, to make your blog “sticky,” a place where people will stick around and that they will bookmark and share.

nks to

weeks.

You’ll see at the bottom right I even have some AdSense on there. You could start with only AdSense, and once the traffic picks up, include some affiliate offers.

Blogs are all about CONTENT, so be prepared to write one post a day for at least a few

http://wordpress.org/

http://aweber.com/?299636



5 - The SEO Site Yes, once again, note the opt-

in box! In this case I offer a very nice incentive for them to sign up for the newsletter. The incentive also helps to “pre-sell” the ClickBank product featured lower on the page.

The links contain specific keywords related to the niche topic. If you write articles that include those keywords, especially in the title, you basically set yourself up to get quality incoming links from all the sites that syndicate your article.

The links to content include a link to a blog on this topic, plus a link to a forum. Both of these help make the site “sticky.”

The bright red “Bookmark Us” link at the top of the page is important. You want people to keep coming back, and the best way is for them to choose to add your site to their Favorites. There’s also a “Tell a Friend” link, which helps to spread the word about your site.

Sales of the ClickBank product have been consistent for more than two years. And the CPA offer also brings in a small but consistent income month a

fter month!

onth.

Out of more than 5 million web pages, this site is on the first page of Google when you search “crohns disease help.”

Need LOTS of articles for a site like this. Plan to start withat least 10–20 articles, and then be sure to add some every m


When to Use Each Type of Site, and Why So how do you decide which type of site to build? Some of it is personal preference. For example, I just LOVE blogs and so I tend to build a lot of those. But I also like to build Direct Sales sites to make quick income from a hot article niche I’ve just discovered. So here are some guidelines for when to use each type of site. When to Build an AdSense site…

If you already have an AdSense account, and want to make money from a niche that pays well on AdSense clicks. You can outsource the article writing, making this a quick and easy way to increase AdSense earnings with very little work.

If you know enough about some of those high-paying AdSense niches to easily and quickly write 10–20 articles. Build a site by adding an article or two a day for a month. Make sure it has everything Google wants, then apply for AdSense, get approved, and drive traffic by submitting articles to directories.

If you already own some solid PLR content in high-paying AdSense niches. Just rewrite that content and build it into a site. Then submit the rewritten articles to article directories to drive traffic.

If you want to make some “extra” money from a comparison site, like the example I showed you earlier. Every new article that I submit to an article directory that sends traffic to that site makes an average of $2.50 in clicks within 24 hours.

If you want to make some money from “exit traffic” on your opt-in or direct sales site. Warning! Make sure the AdSense ads don’t distract visitors from doing what you REALLY want them to do, like opt-in or buy. Test to see if adding AdSense reduces your conversions on those sites. If it does, remove it.

When to Build an Opt-In Site…

ALWAYS! Or almost always ☺. By that I mean you should always try to find a place to include an opt-in box, no matter what type of site you are building. By building a list, you have multiple opportunities to make money over and over again. It’s all about continuous money.


https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&topic=8423


If you have easy access to content you can use for your newsletter. This is a great way to use that PLR content you've got sitting around on your hard drive!

If there’s a decent variety of products to promote to your list. Remember that a list doesn’t have to be large to make money. I have very small lists that consistently generate income. But you need to have something to sell them. If you find at least three good ClickBank products in your niche, then build a list!

If the product merchant is collecting opt-ins on his sales page! You want your chance to grab the visitor’s email address BEFORE they get to the sales page. It’s not bad if the merchant is collecting opt-ins, because many merchants will cookie that subscriber with your affiliate link, so if they buy later, you’ll make a commission. But it’s always a good idea for YOU to get that subscriber, too!

When to Build a Direct Sales Site…

When you find a strong ClickBank product in your niche, it’s always worth testing a Direct Sales site — especially if the product has an excellent sales page that would obviously convert very well!

When your research turns up multiple products in ClickBank with good gravity and a high % referred sales. You can promote each product on a separate direct sales site, do a comparison site like the example you saw earlier — or both!

When you don’t feel you can develop unlimited articles on a topic, but CAN do about 10–20 content pages. That’s enough to build a decent direct sales site.

When a ClickBank product’s numbers aren’t the strongest, but you feel it’s worth testing. Most of the time it’s simpler to test using a direct sales site.

When to Build a Blog…

When your research reveals that a niche has a big audience of people who are really passionate about the topic. Niches related to things like hobbies, sports, celebrities, technology, news, and fashion are great for blogs, since people are always hungry for updates, new products, new trends and fads, and new information on these topics.

When YOU are passionate about a topic and would enjoy writing about it regularly.

When you want to get some really quick search engine indexing to boost your traffic.



When you want to take advantage of the instant traffic possibilities that come with the Web 2.0 social networking aspects of blogging.

When to Build an SEO Site…

When you really love the topic and would like to make a long-term commitment to the niche. SEO takes time to build up. If you can make a commitment to growing your SEO site, even if it’s just a little bit every month, it can develop longevity and good search engine presence.

When you want to build an “authority site” over time. An authority site is one that develops a higher and higher Google PageRank, lots of good incoming links from other important sites, and a strong presence in natural search results. The benefit of building an authority site is you can link from it to your new sites in that niche — giving them a little bit of instant “Google love!”

How to Get Ready to Build a List Sometimes it takes seven or more advertising messages before some people will actually decide to make a purchase. That’s why it’s so critical to build a list! What is an Autoresponder? The first thing you need to do is select an autoresponder company. You could do a lot of research comparing different systems, or use the one that most affiliate marketers use — AWeber.

An autoresponder service is a program that collects contact information about your prospects and sends them follow-up email regularly.

Sometimes these services are called “list servers,” since they usually manage a mailing list and perform various functions that mail servers do. There are two kinds of autoresponders.

The first kind of autoresponder is a program or script that you install on your hosting server. You have to monitor and maintain this type of autoresponder yourself, including protecting it from hackers. Not recommended for beginners!

The second type is a third-party autoresponder service. For a monthly fee, an independent service will manage your mailing lists, prospect contact


http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html


http://www.aweber.com/


information, send follow-up emails on a regular schedule, and handle all the security necessary to keep your list safe. Some will even allow you to send audio messages and attachments.

You know what? Even very experienced online marketers usually prefer to use a third-party service! For a modest monthly fee, all the concerns about security rest on someone else’s shoulders. Also, third-party autoresponders are extremely simple to use. You log into the service with a username and password. Next, you create a “campaign” — a series of emails that will get sent out on a schedule. As you compose each email, you add it to the campaign and indicate when it should be sent. After that, you choose the type of information you will collect from your subscribers. At a minimum, you’ll want their first name and email address, but most third-party services allow you to collect all kinds of demographic information as well. Finally, most autoresponder services will automatically generate the HTML code for sign-up forms. You simply copy this code, and then paste it into the appropriate place on your web page. How easy is that?

Your autoresponder automates the process of both distributing your virals and following up with prospects. It can send them a download link, deliver the viral information in installments, and send follow-up messages days, weeks, and months later.

Choosing an Autoresponder I’ve tried various autoresponders, but over the years I’ve been most satisfied with AWeber. With only a few exceptions, I’ve had very little trouble with delays in message sending. Also the price is very reasonable. So I’m going to use AWeber as the example in this report. Click here to get your own AWeber account. Setting Up Your Autoresponder When you first log into AWeber, you’ll need to set up your first list. You’ll need to choose a unique name in the AWeber system that will identify this particular list. Be sure to choose a name that has something to do with your niche! When you set up the list, you can choose from single or double opt-in. Always go for double opt-in (it’s the default setting) — it helps protect you from spam complaints. Then you’ll need to customize your confirmation message.



http://www.aweber.com/faq/

http://www.aweber.com/videos.htm


The Verified Opt-In Message With the double opt-in system, when someone signs up for your newsletter, they will get an email that requires them to confirm that it’s okay for you to send them email. To confirm, they have to click a confirmation link in that email. You can always leave the default AWeber confirmation email, but it’s a really good idea to personalize it just a little bit. Simply adding the subscriber's first name to the subject line and the greeting can make a big difference in the number of people who confirm their subscription! Just go to the “Verified Opt-in” area and update the message. On the next page you’ll see what that section looks like:

Here’s how I customize most of my confirmation emails:



Hey {!firstname}, Thanks for subscribing to NEWSLETTER NAME HERE. You just need to confirm your subscription by clicking this link: Thanks, talk to you soon!

All this runs smoothly and automatically once you set it up — no manual work! Making a Subscription Form Once you’ve got those basics set up, you’ll need to create a “Web Form” that you will add to your website to collect subscriber names. This is done through the “List Settings” tab. A Web Form is just a fancy name for the opt-in form that subscribers use to sign up for your newsletter. The AWeber form set-up looks like this:



Since AWeber uses a double opt-in system, this section includes a default link that takes the subscriber to a generic activation message that says: “Please check your email and click the confirmation link to activate your subscription.” If you’re in a hurry, just leave this as is. Most of the time for my niche lists, I don’t make a custom thank-you page, since it’s not really necessary. Your First Newsletter and the Opt-Out Message When the time comes to send your first official newsletter, you will discover that some people will have forgotten they signed up for your list. It’s soooo easy for AOL and other users to report an email as SPAM. So it’s always a good idea to remind them that they asked to be on your list! You can do that easily in AWeber. You also need to be sure there is always an opt-out link at the end of your emails. AWeber adds this automatically. If you include an opt-out link, they won’t be as likely to hit the “report as spam” button. Here’s a header that one of our most experienced AC team members uses to remind people that they opted into her list. She has not been tagged with a SPAM complaint since she started using this at the top of every newsletter! To exclude yourself from all future mailings click the link at the end of this email. Feel free to send your friends to the site where you signed up for this newsletter and received your free ebook: http://www.YOURURLHERE.com

Pretty clever, huh? This header does three things:

It reminds subscribers that they signed up for her list.

It reminds subscribers that they received something in exchange — a free ebook.

It encourages them to tell their friends about the newsletter so they can get a free ebook, too.

If you haven’t used an autoresponder before, AWeber has excellent customer support. You can access the AWeber FAQ and Knowledge Base section here: http://www.aweber.com/faq/ And view all the AWeber video tutorials here: http://www.aweber.com/videos.htm




http://www.aweber.com/faq/

http://www.aweber.com/videos.htm


If you’re just testing out a niche, in your first newsletter you want to keep things short and simple. For example, if you’re giving away a free report, just provide the download page link and instructions again. Or if you want to make sure your subscribers get ample chances to click through to your product offer, you can simply send a link to one of your other articles. Of course there’s a LOT more to list building than this, but now you have an idea of the basics. After going through the process the first time, you’ll see how it all comes together and be able to do everything else pretty much on autopilot. Now if you want, you can pre-load your AWeber campaign with articles, pitches for affiliate products, or a little of both. Review Time! Whew, we covered a lot in this chapter! Since your landing pages are so important, let's do a quick review of all the major points…

Five reasons to build a website are: to earn AdSense income from Google; to promote a newsletter and build an opt-in email list; to present a direct sales pitch for a product; to start a blog for quick indexing and free targeted traffic; and to work on SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

AdSense enables you to make a little money immediately and pays very well

in certain select niches. AdSense sites generally include prominent AdSense placements, “hyperlink blue” links, product comparisons, and 10–20 pages of solid content.

Opt-in sites serve solely to get visitors to subscribe to an email list by

offering them something of real value in return. The main page consists mostly of an opt-in box, a compelling headline and bullet points, and a call to action.

Direct sales sites encourage visitors to click through to the merchant’s

sales page and buy the product. Such sites include product comparisons, short descriptions and bullet points, an emphasis on proof rather than hype, and a highly visible call to action.

Blogs offer very fast indexing by the search engines and the ability to get

free traffic from social bookmarking sites and social networks. They should cover niches that get people passionate and enthusiastic; they should include a prominent opt-in box, at least one new blog post a day from you, and “sticky” elements so that people will return to the site.

An SEO site facilitates a strong presence in natural search results through

lots of excellent content. Designed to work with the way search engines rank



web pages, SEO sites generally are built around an opt-in box, links to content that help make the site “sticky,” and several new articles each month.

An AdSense site is best if you have an AdSense account and want to make

money from a niche that pays well on AdSense clicks. You can also add AdSense elements to another site to make extra money, provided they don’t distract visitors.

A direct sales site is worth pursuing if you find a strong ClickBank product

in your niche, if you can produce only a limited amount of content about the product, or if you simply want to test the product.

A blog is worth pursuing if… a lot of people are passionate about the topic, if

YOU are passionate about writing about the topic, or if you want quick search indexing or to take advantage of Web 2.0’s instant traffic possibilities.

An SEO site is worth pursuing if… you want to make a long-term commitment

to the niche and to build an “authority site” over time.

With any site, you should always try to include an opt-in box and build a list, because it provides multiple opportunities to make money over and over again.

Third-party autoresponders: Autoresponders collect your prospects’ contact

information, regularly send follow-up email to prospects, and automate the process of both distributing viral information and following up with prospects. Most affiliate marketers use AWeber.

When you’re testing out a niche, keep the newsletter short and simple.

You can provide the link and instructions for the subscriber’s free download, or send a link to one of your articles that contain links to your product offer.

Next, exactly HOW to write articles that will send traffic to your site…




CHAPTER FIVE

Writing Articles That Create IMMEDIATE Results!

Now that you’ve got a site to send your readers to, it’s time to write some articles! Here’s what you’ll learn about article writing in this chapter:

My rules for writing articles Resource and author boxes that get clicks Outsourcing articles How much is an article worth? Tracking and calculating article ROI (Return

on Investment) Recycle your own content with fresh ideas Rewriting PLR articles

My Rules for Article Writing My rules for writing articles are actually pretty simple. Just remember that it’s important to follow ALL the rules. If you leave something out, your article won’t get the results you want! Article Title — MOST IMPORTANT! After several years of testing out all kinds of articles, I have to tell you that the #1 factor for getting article views is the title. Always!

Your traffic is determined by your title! Here’s my checklist for writing a killer article title:

Write your title as if it’s a mini-headline. That means a powerful message, with no excess words or fluff.

What’s in it for your reader? If the title states a benefit for the reader, that’s perfect.

Keep it short. People skim online; they don’t read carefully. A short title that gets to the point can be grasped with just a glance.

Study the titles of “Most Viewed” articles in your niche. Look for patterns, key words, or terms, and model your titles after the most popular articles.



Look at the articles in your niche. Which titles do YOU like the best? Which ones grab your eye immediately?

Use lists and numbers. My personal favorite titles always seem to contain a number or a list. For example, “6 Ways to Kick Your Junk Food Habit Today” or “3 Stock Investment Nightmares You Must Avoid.”

Hot tip! Try a negative title. I’ve found that a warning or other negative message can get a lot more views. So tell people what NOT to do in the title, like this: “6 Things You Must Not Eat if You’re On a Diet” or “3 Things You Should Never Say to a Car Salesman.”

Take weak titles and pump them up. For example… Here’s what I’d consider a weak title: “Preparing Yourself to Win Every Time.” To make it stronger, I’d first add a number and a list:

“3 Ways to Guarantee You’ll Win Every Time.”

To make it even stronger, I’d make it more specific:

“3 Ways to Guarantee You’ll Win Your Next Argument”

And maybe I’d even add the negative element to test it out:

“3 Things NOT to Say if You Want to Win an Argument”

If you can get your keyword into the title, great; but if not, don’t sweat it. Keywords are necessary if you want your articles to help you with SEO. In fact, if SEO is your primary purpose, you should start your title with the keyword. EzineArticles.com has very good Google PageRank, and its articles often get good search engine placement. So a good 3+ word keyphrase in your title can help get your article ranked well in the search engines. But I have found that for marketing and sales purposes — for getting those page views, click-throughs, and sales — putting your keyword first doesn’t always work very well. So it’s a trade off. In my experiments, I’ve found that I usually get less short-term views with a keyword in the title. But I will get more views, longer term, from the SEO value of the keyword with search engine rankings (that’s if I do all the other work for proper SEO).

I can’t stress enough the importance of your article titles — they will literally make or break your marketing efforts!



So please, take some time to study the titles of the most popular articles in your niche. And pay special attention to authors who are doing list-based articles. Now that we’ve covered how to write a good title, let’s get to the article itself. Article Length and Format Believe it or not, I find that writing an article is actually pretty easy once I’ve got a good title! I don’t follow any special formula, because when you write “list” articles, they pretty much flow according to the list of tips, hints, instructions, etc. But there are a few rules I do follow pretty religiously…

Between 450–500 words is the sweet spot. You can even get close to 600 words. But if you find that the article is going over 600, you’ve probably got enough material to break it up into two articles. Why use shorter articles? Because online, people don’t read — they SKIM. They can skim a shorter article quicker — and get to your resource box and links faster!

Keep Paragraphs SHORT — three sentences maximum. Again, this is for

the benefit of your reader (and ultimately, yours). When reading on a screen, your eyes can’t get through really long paragraphs of many, many lines without losing your place. They will simply skip over long fat blocks of text. Short paragraphs are MUCH easier to read on a screen.

Split up your article with boldface formatting. I love splitting up my articles

using bold lists, bold list headings, and bold subheadlines. That makes it easy for people to skim!

Use lists! Lists work incredibly well. Readers like lists. People who may reprint your article on their website also like list-based articles. Also, when you write your article around a list, the article is pretty much organized for you. You don’t have to write an outline. And you can make each element of the list bold, to break up the article visually.

Keep sentences short! No looooong run-on sentences, please. Make it easy for people to skim.

Write conversationally. I really don’t have a special style or a formula I use for my articles. Just write the way you talk! The articles I write in an informal tone always perform better.



Now we’ll discuss something that, to be honest, most authors do flat-out wrong — the resource box. These rules are really important because if you don’t follow them, your articles won’t drive traffic to your site. Resource and Author Boxes that Get Clicks Your resource box is almost as important as your title. Why? Because with a good resource box, you can convince readers to actually visit your website — where the money is made! You want a resource box that gets people to take action. If all they do is read your article, you won’t make any money. So spend some time writing resource boxes and even testing them out. You want that resource box to get clicks! Here are my most valuable tips for writing a clickable resource box…

Don’t write about yourself; instead, bribe them to click! This is HUGELY important. I know it’s 'supposed' to be an “author bio.” I know that 80% of the resource boxes out there say “About the Author.” But forget about that! Your resource box should be about what you’re offering at your website. People won’t click the links in your resource box to find out more about you. They’ll click the links if there’s something in it for THEM.

Try to offer something FREE in your resource box. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or big, just offer them something, followed by a link to your website. Examples:

“For more free articles like this one on winning arguments and getting what you want, visit…” “Get your free report on negotiation skills here…” “Get our free newsletter filled with more tips on conflict resolution and team building here…”

Basically, make your resource box about some nice little bribe that will get people to visit your site.

Keep it short! In my tests, the ideal length is 3–4 SHORT sentences, or about 3–4 lines.

Be sure to use the maximum number of allowed links. Each article directory is a little different. But if you’re allowed up to two links in your resource box, use two links, not just one. If you’re allowed three links, use all three!



Use one keyword link and one full URL. By “keyword link,” I mean one link that is hyperlinked anchor text, like this: How to resolve a conflict. The other one should be the full URL, with “http://” and everything else, like this http://www.iwillfight.com/personal-growth/the-outline-i-used-to-resolve-a-conflict/. Believe it or not, in my testing, it seems that people click the FULL URL more than the anchor text link! Maybe it’s because they recognize the “http://www” as a link and will click that readily.

Test different resource boxes. If I’m going to do a lot of articles in a niche, I will always use more than one resource box and test different things. For example, I’ll start by testing out four articles. In the first two I might use a resource box that has the anchor text link first and the full URL second. In the other two articles, I might use a resource box that flips the links around. Then I’ll see which one gets the most clicks.

Now that you know how to write a title, the article, and the resource box, you’ve got to do one more thing. Remember how I keep saying you should TEST certain things? Well now I’m going to show you how to track the results of your articles, using unique URLs. This allows you to figure out how much money each article is making — cool, huh ☺? How Much Is an Article Worth? Tracking and Calculating Article ROI (Return on Investment) Again, I like to keep this simple. You can get really fancy if you want to, but the whole point of this system is to simplify your article marketing. Once you get your first sales coming in, you can decide whether more elaborate tracking is worth your time.

Make sure every link in your resource box has a UNIQUE TRACKING URL.

How do you make a unique tracking URL? This is a drop-dead simple and fast method. The big advantage is you don’t need any experience with installing scripts, and you don’t have to do anything fancy on your web host — and it works! What I do is this: Step 1 — Always drive traffic to an offer page. Let’s say the website you’re driving traffic to is http://www.AffSphere.com. Make sure that you have some kind of obvious offer on that page!


http://www.iwillfight.com/personal-growth/the-outline-i-used-to-resolve-a-conflict/





The offer can be an opt-in to your free newsletter, links to more free articles, a free download, a comparison of three different products, etc. (If you need a refresher on building your site, go back to Chapter 4.) Just make sure there is something for the visitor to DO — preferably opt-in or click to a purchase. Step 2 — Duplicate the offer page on a unique URL. Here’s a really simple example. If I have an opt-in page on http://www.AffSphere.com/, then I’ll make a copy of that page and call it 1.html. Then I’ll upload it to my web host, so the URL is http://www.AffSphere.com/1.html Now I’ll use http://www.AffSphere.com/1.html in my resource box. When I publish my articles, all I have to do is log into my web stats to see how much traffic I’m getting from that particular resource box. Pretty simple! You can create as many of these unique URLs as you want. Just be sure that on your web host, you have web stats turned on. Check that through your cPanel settings. Step 3 — Track the action links on your web page. What if you’ve got a comparison page on your site, with links to three different ClickBank products on it? Wouldn’t you like to see which product link is getting the most sales? You can! Just put unique tracking IDs on each product link. A unique tracking ID is called a “TID” for short. Click this link for ClickBank’s instructions for how to use TIDs. Remember that we made a unique URL on http://www.AffSphere.com/1.html? If you make a unique TID for every product link on the page, ClickBank can show you which product is getting the most sales from that particular resource box. Pretty cool! For example, if you have three TIDs — A001, A002, and A003 — if 100 people click on A001 and seven of them buy the product, that’s a conversion rate of 7%. You can find more information on how to set up IDs on your hoplinks on this ClickBank FAQ: http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_faq.html Tracking is important, especially when you’re testing out a product. Even though this isn’t PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, where you PAY every time someone clicks a link, you need to track so you know which niches and products are worth your time and energy.


http://www.affsphere.com/1.html

http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_faq.html#hoplink_question_3

http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_faq.html


Step 4 - Calculate ROI (Return on Investment) for your article. Once you start using a unique URL in your resource box, you can calculate what an article is worth. Here’s how. The following is the most simplified type of example — a unique site you just put up, and it has no traffic at all yet. On Sunday, you put up your site called totallyuniquesalestactics.com, where you have a product review of a ClickBank ebook on winning every single sales negotiation. On Monday, you write three articles and submit them to EzineArticles.com. On Wednesday, your articles are approved by the Ezine Articles reviewers. The articles go live and start to get views. By the next Monday, you’ve made four sales, which resulted in $40 in ClickBank commissions. So you earned $40 within seven days of submitting three articles…now let’s calculate what those articles are worth…

$40 commissions / 3 articles = $13.33 per article What this number tells you is each article you submit in this niche, on average, will be worth about $13 within about a week. Not bad, huh? If you want to be more conservative, cut that $13 in half, and figure about $7.50 per article in about seven days. Still not bad! That can take into account the niche getting saturated with more products or articles, and other factors like seasonal drops in traffic. You could also DOUBLE that $13 if you are using good keywords in your title. When the SEO starts kicking in, the longevity value might go up to $26 or more per article. What if you do the same thing as above, but in a different niche with a different website, like all-about-underwater-basket-weaving.com? Turns out the numbers aren’t so good, so you earn only $10 in commissions. Your formula comes out like this:

$10 commissions / 3 articles = $3.33 per article



What does this tell you? Underwater basket weaving may not be a bad niche, since $3.33 is definitely money. But is it worth spending more time on this niche, or the sales niche? Obviously writing articles for an ROI of $13 per article is far more worth your time than writing for $3 per article! To put it another way, an article on underwater basket weaving is worth about $3, while an article on sales negotiation is worth about $13. Even if you cut that $13 in half to be superconservative, it’s still a better return on your investment. Knowing how much an article is worth helps you decide where to invest your time. It also helps you figure out how much to spend per article if you decide to hire freelance writers. And that leads me to the next thing we need to cover — hiring freelancers to ghost write articles for you. Outsourcing Article Writing I have had the most success finding writers on Guru.com. Elance.com is okay too, but overall I’ve been most pleased with the writers I’ve found on Guru. Here are my tips for finding good writers and paying a fair price:

Test a few articles in the niche yourself, and calculate ROI per article. That way you’ll get a good idea of a far price to pay for articles. In our sales negotiation example above, I might be willing to double the $13 per article, to about $25 per article, since the long-term value of each article will probably be much more than that over the next 3–4 months.

Prepare the titles for the writers! One thing you’ll find is that most of the freelancers really don’t understand how to write those high-traffic titles. So write the list of titles for them. This will also increase the chances that you will get good list-based articles that are organized well.

Never go with the new writers who have no feedback. Use experienced people, and check their feedback carefully to see if they deliver on time, if the work was error-free, etc.

Ask if they have experience with article marketing. Many of them will! These writers are always worth trying out.


http://www.guru.com/


Ask to see samples of articles written for article marketing. All the experienced writers will have samples to show. You wan to see if they have the right style -- conversational, with short paragraphs. Make sure these are articles they wrote specifically for article marketing.

If they don’t have samples they can show, test them! Go to EzineArticles.com and pick out a good article, similar to what you want, in your niche. Then ask the writer to do a complete rewrite, based on a title you give them.

Prepare a list of keywords for the writer. All the good writers will want to know what keywords you want in the articles. Send them keyphrases that are 3–4 words long.

Buy at least 10 articles at a time. A minimum of 10 articles makes it worth a good writer’s time. Anything less than that, and you probably won’t get bids from the more experienced writers — or you will get bids, but they’ll have a much higher “per article” price.

Understand pricing and bids. Basically the price you pay for outsourced

articles is dependent on two factors: the niche and the author. If you are calculating the worth of an article with a few of your own tests first, you’re in a much better position to offer a fair price and get better bids.

Recycle Your Own Articles with Fresh Ideas Let’s face it, we all run out of ideas eventually. Once you get heavily into article marketing, you can burn out if you want to do a lot of articles in a niche. Writing five new articles a week on a topic is easy if you have a lot of expertise — heck, I can write articles about Internet marketing, entrepreneurship, and similar topics all day long and never run out of words! But in other niches, you might totally run out of ideas after you do 15–20 articles. If that niche is making you some nice money, what do you do now? Three things…

Do COMPLETE rewrites of your own articles, mixing concepts from two or three different articles.

Get fresh ideas from other people’s articles. Hire freelancers to rewrite your old articles.

Let’s look at each one of these… Do COMPLETE rewrites of your own articles, mixing up ideas and concepts.



Basically you need to develop the art of recycling your own content. Here’s a checklist of things you can try — you’ll be surprised how easy it is once you get the hang of it.

Turn a positive article into a negative article. Or vice versa! If the original article is “7 Things You Must Do Before You Try To Quit Smoking,” reposition the article as “7 Things You Must NOT Do If You Want To Quit Smoking Forever.”

Split two or three articles into pieces, and rearrange them into new articles. I find this is easy if you do “list-based” articles. Just take all the things on the lists, rearrange them into new groups, and rewrite the text. Simple!

Grab some PLR articles in your niche, and turn them into list articles. Often the quality of PLR is very bad, but if you can find some good PLR articles in your niche, you can use those to get ideas and turn them into list articles. Turn each one into a “positive” and a “negative,” and you’ll double your output.

Research the “most viewed” articles on EzineArticles.com and other article directories to get ideas. Do a little research not just in your niche, but related niches. So if your niche is “acne,” do some research on “skin care,” “scar treatments,” etc., and you’ll probably get a bunch of new ideas.

Talking about researching other people’s articles leads me to the next option… Get fresh ideas from other people’s articles. You don’t want to STEAL someone else’s ideas, which is just plain wrong and bad karma. But really, there aren’t that many totally original ideas for articles out there. Most of it’s been said before. The only question is: Can YOU say it BETTER? So I spend quite a bit of time researching how other people position their articles, how they write their titles, and how they write their resource boxes. That can really give you a fresh perspective, and maybe help you crank out another 20–30 articles or more — without too much brain drain! Here are my best tips for getting fresh ideas from other people’s articles:

Try rewriting the idea in your unique style. Often I find a really good article, but it’s written in a way I would NEVER write. Maybe it’s too formal or stiff, or it’s not list-based. So I set myself a challenge: Can I rewrite this article completely, so it’s in my own unique style, with my own unique spin? A lot of times, not only will I come up with a completely new and unique article, but while I’m writing, I’ll get ideas



for more articles. Nice!

Can you put negative spins on positive articles? Negative campaigning may not be cool in politics, but it’s often very helpful in article marketing. If you find a lot of articles on “what you should do,” see if you can come up with ways to turn them into “what you should NOT do” articles.

Look at articles in related niches. Don’t just stick with your niche, do a little sideways research. Often writers who are not in your niche have great ideas that you can adapt to your niche.

Check out all the popular article directories for ideas. EzineArticles.com is my #1 place for doing niche research, but for getting ideas, look at some of the other directories. I like IdeaMarketers.com a lot for this type of research, plus you’ll find a list of article directories in the next chapter. Look at the most viewed articles and analyze — examine the titles, and see the points they are making throughout the article. Lots of fresh ideas there!

Rewriting PLR Articles A lot of marketers frown on Private Label Rights (PLR) articles, and for good reason. Many PLR articles aren’t very good. You really must do a bit of work to get them into shape for publication, and often you can write an original article that's much better in the same amount of time See, when you buy PLR articles (or ebooks, or anything else) you get editorial rights to the content. Once you’ve paid for them, you can change them any way you like. In fact, you are SUPPOSED to change them. Unfortunately, a lot of people are lazy and try to use PLR articles “as is.” Sooner or later that gets them in trouble with article directories. Others buy and publish the same article, and bam — they get banned for submitting a copied article. If you’re going to buy PLR articles, always look for merchants who limit the number of buyers for a package of articles. (I like Stephan Everaet’s Niche Content Packages — http://www.niche-content-packages.com — for that reason.) But whether you’ve bought an article that thousands of people own, or an article that’s in limited supply, you absolutely MUST rewrite it. You can also hire someone to do it for you (though you should realize that many times, it won’t cost you much more to hire freelancers to create original articles). Here are some tips for rewriting PLR articles:

Add your personality. So many PLR articles are blah — no zazz! Rewriting an article to give it some punch and personality is pretty easy, so that’s the first


http://www.niche-content-packages.com/


thing you should try.

Turn it into a list! Did I mention I love lists? Really well-written PLR articles will usually be full of ideas or specific facts that can be turned into lists.

Fix the grammar, spelling, and length. Just because you paid money for an article doesn’t mean it was professionally written. It’s always good to clean up all the errors. Also, most PLR articles will be too long or two short — remember the 400–500 word “sweet spot.”

Rewrite to appeal to a specific audience. PLR articles are always written for a general audience. Think about your target market, and rewrite in a way that will appeal to their age, gender, education, and income level. Also think about cultural differences. If you’re marketing a product for a less sophisticated audience, make the language simpler. If your audience has a special language or slang all its own, use that. You’ll rewrite differently for a younger audience than an older one, too.

Chop up and combine articles. Change the focus by simply combining multiple articles in creative ways (I like making lists!). Just some simple copying and pasting, plus adding some personality, can give you a really nice article very quickly.

Listen, no matter how many people buy the same article, they can never be you. So think of PLR articles as a template that you can spin into something unique. This is true for ALL articles, whether you write them yourself, hire someone, or rewrite PLR. Make yours stand out from the crowd. There’s nothing better on the Internet — where so much information is repeated over and over — than being unique! Let's Review!

Article titles are vitally important. Your traffic is frequently determined by your title.

Write titles that are "mini-headlines." Model your own titles on the “Most

Viewed” articles in your niche. Try to state a benefit to the reader in the title.

Use lists and numbers. Articles with "list titles" often get the most views.

Experiment with negative titles that contain warnings or other "avoiding disaster" messages.

Try to get keywords into the title. But don't sacrifice excitement or "punch"

just to get the keyword into the title.



Keep articles short. Articles should run between 450–500 words. If you find

your article is running long, break it up into two articles.

Format for readers who skim a page quickly. Keep Paragraphs SHORT — three sentences maximum. Split up your article with boldface formatting.

Lists make great article content. These articles are easily organized and

break up the web page visually.

Your resource box is important! In it, bribe your readers people to take action and click through to your landing page. Offer them something free

Short resource boxes work best. Use just 3–4 lines, including hyperlinks. Test

variations of different resource boxes to see what gets the most click throughs.

Use links wisely. Be sure to deploy the maximum number of allowed links. Include one keyword snchor text link and one full URL.

Track your article traffic. Use unique tracking URLs in your resource boxes,

and for all the action links on your web page.

Calculate your article ROI (Return on Investment). You don't have to get fancy, just follow the procedure I outlined in this chapter for calculating how much an article is worth.

Outsource once you make some profit. Be sure to prepare the article titles for

your freelance writers, and use experienced peopleyou know something about article marketing. Look at samples of their work or test them before hiring them.

Recycle your article ideas. Rewrite them yourself, revise PLR content, or

outsource rewrites to good freelancers. Next… submitting your articles to directories…



CHAPTER SIX

The Only Way To Submit Your Articles

Smart Submission In this chapter we’ll cover the next phase, getting your articles out there so you can get traffic. We’ll cover the following:

Manual vs. automated submissions — which is better? Some automation options Recommended article directories

Manual vs. Automated Submissions — Which Is Better? What’s the difference between automated and manual article submissions? With an automated submission service, you enter your article and author resource box just once, and the service will submit it to many different article directories (20 to 150, or even thousands) all at once. If you wanted to get that kind of coverage manually, you’d have to go to each separate article directory, one by one, log in, and enter your article and author resource box over and over and over — tedious! However, even though manual submission is a little extra work, I highly recommend that you do manual submissions to just the top 4–5 directories when you first start out. Why? Two reasons:

You will learn the editorial and submission policies for the top directories. This is important because you want to follow these policies PRECISELY. Having this knowledge will save you time in the long run, because you’ll have fewer articles rejected and you won’t have to resubmit. The more you understand how each directory approves articles, the better an article marketer you’ll be!

90% of your traffic will come from the top 4-5 directories. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t submit to many of the smaller directories — in fact, there are good reasons to do so! For example, if you’re submitting articles for SEO purposes, giving your articles the widest possible distribution can only help. Later in this chapter I’ll tell you to which article directories you always submit articles, and which ones are best for different types of article marketing objectives.



At what point should you consider using an automated submission service?

Once you’ve had at least 25–30 articles accepted by each of the top directories. That’s when you will really know how to write articles that meet all the accepted standards.

If you’re going to do article marketing in a big way. You have to define for yourself what “big way” means, but I think if you plan to submit more than 4–5 articles a day, it’s time to think about automation. In the time you spend submitting all those articles, you could write a few more!

When you’ve made some good profits from your article marketing. I don’t recommend spending money on submission services until you are making a decent return on your articles. At that point you can take some of your profits and invest in automation.

If you’re using articles for SEO. Automated services submit not just to the top 5–10 directories, but to hundreds or even thousands of smaller article directories all over the web. Getting all those articles distributed far and wide on hundreds of websites can, over time, be very helpful

Some Automation Options There are various automated and semi-automated article submission services and softwares available, with new ones popping up periodically. In fact, we’re working on a submission system for our own AffSphere article directory. Here are the services I have tested and would recommend: Article Marketer I’ve used this service and am a huge fan. Investor and venture capitalist Chris Ellington puts his money where his mouth is with this service - literally! His company, Internet Properties Network Management (IPNM), funded Article Marketer in 2005 as a simple way for authors to get their ideas out into the world. It all started while working on a project to drive targeted traffic to another IPNM property. Here's how Chris describes it: “I saw first-hand how hard and time-consuming it is, not to mention dreadfully boring, to manually submit articles to content sites and article directories. I pulled my staff together and said 'We have GOT to make this easier!' " So Chris tasked a dedicated team of professionals to create a robust, easy to use article distribution service - and Article Marketer was born.



http://www.articlemarketer.com/


Since then, the Internet marketing community has responded enthusiastically to Article Marketer, and I can fully understand why. It's become their Web 2.0 tool of choice for article submission. It was the first service I used to distribute my own articles, and it just seems to keep getting better and better. The Article Marketer servers have processed hundreds of millions of article distributions from more than 15,000 authors and Internet marketers. On top of that, their article review process protects content sites from receiving hundreds of thousands of poorly written, badly formatted, or spam articles. That's why Article Marketer has such a great reputation: it combines a simple distribution process for authors, and better content for online publishers. Article Marketer has some nice pricing options, including a lifetime membership, which is an investment, but is also a really good deal. All their plans include unlimited article submissions. This is a great service for the widest possible distribution of your articles for SEO purposes. And yes, they do submit to EzineArticles for you (not to AffSphere yet, but we’re working on it). Unique Article Wizard I really love this service. It’s a little bit of extra effort, but so worth it. In addition to submitting to a large number of article directories, it submits unique versions of your article to each directory. It works beautifully! Because users of UAW must agree to an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), I can't tell you exactly how the service does its magic. But I think I can say that the Wizard helps you construct unique articles with very little effort, and it then submits these unique versions to a wide variety of directories. Unique Article Wizard also allows you to submit unique resource boxes for your articles, which is great. You can do also set up some interesting "on the fly" customization of your keywords in your resource box, which can really help with SEO. Unique Article Wizard is definitely a service that will help your SEO traffic. The creator, Dr. Noel Swanson, knows a lot about SEO, and the many directories he submits to will help you with long term natural search engine ranking. The only downside is that using Unique Article Wizard requires a tiny bit of additional work on your part. Once you get the hang of it, it's no big deal, and the rewards are huge. I’ve found the benefits to far outweigh the extra work involved. Also if you happen to outsource some of your articles, some freelance writers will be familiar with Unique Article Wizard and will do that little bit of extra work for you, and for a very reasonable price. For example, if it costs you $10 to get an original article written, many writers will do the extra work for $2 or $3 more.


http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/


Submit Your Article This excellent service does an outstanding job. It also submits unique versions of your articles, and one nice touch is they actually submit to Ezine Articles (most other services don't). My tests confirm that this service works flawlessly — in fact, it’s the next best thing to having your own submission team. Your articles will show up in the EzineArticles directory very quickly. In addition to article directories, SYA will submit to selected web publishers, syndicated content channels and RSS feeds, and article announcement lists. The only downside is you are limited to only eight articles a month. As of this writing the service is $37 a month, so it’s a little under $5 per article. A good strategy is to use this service for your “big money” niche — the one that’s pulling in the highest profits. Advanced Tactic — Your Own “Submission Team” This can be an expensive proposition, so not suitable for beginners. But you should keep it in mind as your article marketing grows. Once you are earning a good profit in at least five different article marketing niches, you might want to consider creating an “article submission team.” This involves hiring one or more people to submit your articles to article directories, either by hand, using automated tools, or some combination. I have used Guru.com to find administrative people who will submit articles to the directories for you. Search for contractors who have some experience with “article submissions” or “article syndication.” As article marketing becomes more popular, you’ll find more and more administrative assistants who know how to submit articles. You will also find that some experienced article writers will do the actual article submissions for you, for an extra fee per article. Before you purchase this extra service, be sure you know exactly which article directories they are submitting to, HOW they do the submissions (manual or automated), and how quickly they will do the submissions. Be sure to do some testing and calculate what an article is worth (see Chapter 5) before you hire someone to do article submissions for you. Think ROI. Recommended Article Directories Top Traffic Directories


http://www.submityourarticle.com/indexi.php


Here are the top directories you want to submit to. They will account for about 75–90% of your traffic, depending on the niche. EzineArticles.com AffSphere.com GoArticles.com ArticleCity.com ArticlesBase.com ArticleDashboard.com You will also want to consider submitting to Idea Marketers. This directory has a system where you can bid on article placements, as well as featuring your article on the home page. Using the paid placements, you can get a big boost in readership quickly: IdeaMarketers.com You also want to start submitting articles to Google's new site that is a little like Squidoo, a little like an online encyclopedia, and a little like an article directory. It's called Knol, and while it's brand new, you can be sure that Google will be indexing articles in its own directory immediately: http://knol.google.com/k# Other Good Article Directories ArticleCube.com ArticleAlley.com ArticleSnatch.com EasyArticles.com ArticleBiz.com TheLeadingArticles.com ISnare.com ** You’ll find a much more detailed list with hundreds of article directories waiting for you inside of AffSphere.com – so login now! http://www.AffSphere.com Review Time! In this chapter, you learned about these important aspects of article submission…

Manually submitting articles to directories enables you to learn the editorial and submission policies for the top 4–5 article directories

An automated submission service is worth considering once the top

directories have accepted about 25–30 of your articles; if you’re going to expand your article marketing efforts; when you have made decent profits from your article marketing; and if you’re using articles for SEO.




http://www.goarticles.com/

http://www.articlecity.com/

http://www.articlesbase.com/

http://www.articledashboard.com/

http://www.ideamarketers.com/

http://www.squidoo.com/

http://knol.google.com/k

http://knol.google.com/k%23

http://www.articlecube.com/

http://www.articlealley.com/

http://www.articlesnatch.com/

http://www.easyarticles.com/

http://www.articlebiz.com/

http://www.theleadingarticles.com/

http://www.isnare.com/



Article Marketer, Unique Article Wizard, and Submit Your Article are three services that you should consider when delving into automated article submissions.

Expand with a "submission team:" As your article marketing efforts grow,

using an “article submission team” to submit your articles can become a viable option. Guru.com can help you to find freelance contractors with experience in article submissions.

Focus on the top directories: The top six directories — EzineArticles,

AffSphere, GoArticles, ArticleCity, ArticlesBase, and ArticleDashboard — can account for 75–90% of your traffic, depending on the niche.

Next… your rules for success!




CHAPTER SEVEN

6 Commandments To Follow To Guarantee Success

Following these “rules” will help you get your article marketing into a repeatable system — one you can apply to almost any niche with decent traffic and profitable products. Rule #1 — When you first launch a site, go heavier on submissions.

For new sites and new niches, submit two or more articles a day for a week to 10 days.

You might have heard it’s not a good idea to “bulk submit” — not true! If you have six, eight, even 10 articles ready, go ahead and do them all in one day. It won’t hurt you, and it might help — you’ll get more readers right off the bat, and you’ll command more real estate inside the category listing. Rule #2 — Once traffic and sales start, submit one article a day.

Once you’re getting traffic and sales, make it a habit to submit at least one article a day in your niche for about 4–6 weeks.

This increases your odds of getting lots of views, traffic, opt-ins, and sales, not to mention that it keeps the search engines coming back over and over! Rule #3 — Submit 2–3 articles a week once you have established traffic and steady sales. “Steady sales” will vary, of course, depending on the niche. One or two sales a week is probably acceptable if you chose your product(s) wisely. In fact, two sales a week might actually be very good, especially if the niche is pretty obscure and you make a nice fat commission on each sale! Just weigh your income with time spent and see if the niche is worth your time.



Rule #4 — Be sure to submit articles to AffSphere!

Submitting your articles to AffSphere has many advantages, but the biggest one is that you earn money multiple ways from us!

You can view a video that explains how you can earn credits and cash with AffSphere here. You can also read the FAQ here, which explains how AffSphere is different. Our basic submission guidelines are pretty simple, you’ll find them here. Rule #5 — Once you can prove good traffic in a niche, test out some CPA offers. I have mentioned using CPA offers with article marketing only because CPA is a somewhat advanced strategy. You need good traffic to start doing CPA…

Once you are getting decent traffic to your site — at least 3,000 visitors a month — you should apply to some CPA networks and test their offers.

What is CPA? It stands for Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition. Here’s how it works. A merchant creates some sort of offer that you put on your website. Some offers are used to get a prospect to take a specific action, like fill out a loan application (Cost Per Action). Other offers are used to collect leads and customer information, like an email address or a zip code (Cost Per Acquisition). You get paid when the “action” or the “acquisition” is successful, anywhere from 50 cents to $50 or more, depending on the type of offer. Remember that merchants will usually be very clear about what type of action you’ll be paid for, and they are very good at weeding out fake leads. You will find CPA offers in the big networks like Commission Junction, but there are also many networks that specialize just in CPA offers. The specialized CPA networks are known for being very picky about approving affiliate applications. Here are some of the things they look for:

Large lists of opt-in email addresses — 10,000 names and up

A large volume of traffic to your sites — a minimum of 3,000 unique visitors a month, preferably more

Good link popularity, Google PageRank, and Alexa scores


http://www.affsphere.com/getting_started.php

http://www.affsphere.com/getting_started.php

http://www.affsphere.com/faq.php

http://www.affsphere.com/publishing_rules.php

http://www.affsphere.com/publishing_rules.php


Sites that rank well in the search engines — first-page results for popular keywords

A large network of websites that have mass-market appeal in mass- market niches

Existing PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns

No previous allegations of spam or black-hat tactics Bottom line is, CPA networks just won’t accept you based on your intention to drive traffic or build a list. You need to have these in place before you apply to their network. But if you do your article marketing research correctly, and get into some really popular niches, it’s not that difficult to build up decent traffic and a good sized list over time.

If promoting CPA offers interests you, start off with the most popular, high traffic niches. The list of AdSense niches in Chapter 4 is good place to start.

Here are some other tips for promoting CPA offers with articles…

CPA offers work best on the “direct sales” type of site. Show either just one offer on the page, or a comparison of 2–3 offers on the same page.

Start with one or two very simple field offers — even if they pay less. I’ve found that the more complex the form, the more likely it is that the visitor will abandon the form and the lower the conversions. I have the most success with simple forms, such as zip code offers, where you can make an easy dollar or two.

Test the higher-paying, more complex offers. CPA offers that require more work from the visitor — like filling out a loan application or insurance quote form — can pay very, very well. But I would advise testing these offers with a new web page, and calculating the ROI per article. The attention span of every niche market is different, and your visitors may love or hate these types of offers.

Rule #6 — Keep an eye on your earnings per article. Always keep track of ROI and visitors per article — watch your stats.

Review the section in Chapter 5, “How Much Is an Article Worth.” It will explain simple ways to



Use your web stats to watch for boosts in traffic after submitting an article. You’ll get valuable clues about which article titles and resource boxes are sending you the most traffic.

With brand new sites, watch to see what percentage of readers turn into actual sales. This works only with a new site or new web page, but that’s about all you have to watch in order to decide whether a niche is going to be a real money maker or not. For example, you submit one new article, and you send all its traffic to a new web page. Over the next two days, that article brings you 30 visitors and you make one sale for $15 in commissions. So now you know that:

$15 commissions / 30 visitors = $.50

or…

You make about 50 cents per visitor from that article and…

One article in this niche is worth about $15

(or even $30 if you double for long-term traffic value) Now it’s time to get started! I'll show you how on the next page…




CHAPTER EIGHT

A Simple Checklist To Follow

Join AffSphere! http://www.AffSphere.com .

Research some niches as described in Chapter 2. And be sure to keep a prioritized list of niches to serve as a mini "marketing plan."

Find some products to promote as described in Chapter 3.

Build a website using the methods in Chapter 4. Add an opt-in box to your site to collect subscribers using AWeber.

Write some titles, articles, and resources boxes using the techniques in Chapter 5.

Now submit some articles to AffSphere - you'll earn credits immediately!

Get your AffSphere referral link inside your member area, then get others to join AffSphere under you. Not only will you earn credits when they sign up, when they buy this report, you'll earn 100% commission on every sale!

Join the Affiliate Classroom affiliate program: http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/affiliateprogram.php

Add your AC affiliate link to your AffSphere member area. You'll earn recurring commissions when anyone in your downline joins AC (nice!).

If you'd like to earn DOUBLE AffSphere credits, consider joining Affiliate Classroom (all AC members get double credits automatically): http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/free-course.html

Be sure to submit your articles to EzineArticles.com to get maximum exposure and traffic.

Submit your articles to other directories too. Consider using a service like Article Marketer to make the process faster, easier, and less boring.

Don't forget to track visitors to your website and clicks on your affiliate links, as I explain in Chapter 5.

As your profits grow, expand by outsourcing some article writing.

Rinse and repeat ☺ !



http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/affiliateprogram.php

http://www.affiliateclassroom.com/free-course.html



Documents

Not Your Typical Article Marketing Report