Article Marketing

[saad_sinpk]

Article Marketing :: $5K Monthly :: EASY!


As mentioned in some of my previous posts, my main income is from PPV and Article Marketing. Now, the majority of my Article Marketing ventures have been done the usual way. Write or pay for articles, submit them to random sites, do some linking and hope for the best. It works, and Ive made a nice amount of money doing it. However, you can always improve something. And, thats what I did.


The top two goals of any marketer are more money and more time. At least they should be their two top goals. That being said, I wanted to integrate both of these things into my Article Marketing business. And, thats exactly what I accomplished.



I developed this method a little over a month ago. However, I wanted to actually test it for a month before I released it. Here are my final results:


$4,300 revenue (Roughly)

4 hours worked (Roughly, excluding time you wont have to spend)


Id say thats pretty damn good if you ask me. Would you work 4 hours (of easy work) for $4k? And, its passive residual. Meaning, it keeps flowing in (passive) and it grows (residual). I guarantee that from the work done in December, Ill keep seeing income from the articles submitted for probably over a year.


This method is going to be a bit detailed, as I dont want any people attempting it coming back and complaining it doesnt work. Even if you dont complain, I still would like it to work for whoever goes and does it. Its definitely worth it. If youre having problems funding PPC/PPV campaigns, this can be your funding money

In a nutshell, youll be getting free articles by splitting your commissions with freelance writers. If youre rich already, paying for articles may be worth it to you. However, most of us arent that rich. And even if I was, I dont know if Id want to buy 1,000 articles at $5 – $15 a piece.


Ive also tried Scamming people out of articles. That doesnt work that well, and is definitely NOT a long term solution. You risk the hot headed freelance writers getting too pissed off at you and reporting you. Trust me, not a smart thing to do for a long period of time.



So, splitting commissions is the best way to go. Everything is free, so this shouldnt be a problem. Youre doing very, very little work.
So, lets get started:


1. Youll obviously be getting freelance writers for classifieds sites. Craigslist is all that is needed, as its a little difficult to work with a large amount of people. I personally only worked with 2 people. However, Ill be developing my own personal system that will allow me to work with over 100 500 people, easily. So, what youre going to want to do is make a Craigslist ad (preferably in your own area if you live in the U.S.). Always, always keep your ad professional. Proper structure, grammar, use of words, etc. Nothings worse than a poorly written ad. Be honest and straightforward in your ad. Im not going to post the exact ad I used, but its fairly simple. Youre looking for a few article writers to write articles for you based on a revenue sharing commission structure. You can lie and tell them that previous writers earn roughly $2 – $5k a month. No cost to get started, and will be able to see their articles published on the web. Keep it short and simple.


2. After the posting, if youve done it right, youll get a few hundred emails. At least I did. Instead of having an auto-responder, I just copy/pasted a pre-written response. All I did was replace their name at the top and bottom. (Eg. Hey ____ and Talk again soon _____) Obviously, the email response will detail the project more and then ask if they have any questions.


3. After theyve responded to the first email response, I have a pre-written 2nd response to go with it. Along with that response, Ill read over their first email and answer any questions they may have. The 2nd response starts with questions they have, and then a Heres a little bit more detail about everything. And again, will ask them if they have any questions to get started.


4. If theyve responded to the 2nd email, youve pretty much got them. At least I did.


Now basically what Im describing to you now is what youll be describing to them. Which start with how you should have them write your articles.


Offers
However, before you can have them write articles, you need an offer and keywords to go with it. The offer doesnt really matter that much, so Im not going to go into what offers/niches to target. However, I would advise you dont target brand new offers. If its a brand related offer and the merchant shuts down or pulls their aff. program off the network youve got a problem. Especially if all the articles list the brand name. If you find a related product to switch out your links on your site instead, then all the articles will ideally need to be changed to the new brand name. With 500+ articles floating around thats a bit of a task. So, stick to things that will be around for at least a year. And a good way to tell is by looking at how long theyve already been around.


Keywords
This is one of the most important things. If youve done article marketing or SEO its all about keywords. Youre not going to be throwing up random articles and hoping for them to rank for random keywords. You should, and will be targeting each article for specific keywords and specific search engines. One article that ranks on Yahoo! may not rank on Google. All search engines have trends. Follow the trend and youre golden. But, Ill get into that a little more down the road. But for now, you need to get keywords for your niche. Ideally, youd want to rank for heavy searched for keywords. However, those are a bit harder to rank for. So, you need more long-tail keywords as well. What I do is go into Google AdWords keyword tool, punch in the most generic phrase related to my offer and get ALL the results in the first section (which means all the results contain the word(s) I put in the search box. The second section is related terms) So for example, if my offer was free grant money, Id type in free grants, free grant, grant money etc and get all the keywords.


Once I have all the keywords, I use a proprietary piece of software to determine the competition for each keyword. I personally like to start from the bottom up. I like seeing results first. And with low competition (which most of the time result in low search counts), you can see results faster. Ive seen some guides and posts regarding not doing it this way, but I find it best. If you have your writers write 20 articles on high competition or medium competition searches and they dont show up 1st, that can be disappointing to them. Even if you get them ranked #1 for a less searches for term, its still awesome to them to be #1 on the search engines. Remember, they know nothing about SEO, so THEIR content as #1 for a search is amazing to them. It fascinates them.

For those that dont have software to use for analyzing competition, you can download a FREE trial of SENuke at SEnuke.com You can use the competition analyzer for free forever. Without ever having to actually buy the program. It may shut down on you, but all you have to do is restart the program but thats only if youre going to use the software for more than about 10 minutes.


How to Write Your Articles
Its not all about ranking #1 on search engines. Unfortunately, you cant really split-test 2 different articles. If you change your content, theres a good chance the search engine(s) will knock you down. Ive done it maybe a dozen times, and every single time I was knocked down the page, or knocked it off completely. That being said, you should have a general knowledge of what a good article looks like. Unfortunately, I cant provide you with a blueprint article to go off of. You do have to do some things yourself, and its not hard to find a well written article that sells something.
In a nutshell, the article should be part review, part description and part sales. The articles that perform the least are heavy sales articles. They get flagged as spam by real people. No one wants to feel like theyre trying to be sold on something. Good articles are informational and provide value. The type of article that youd send to a friend. A lot of my articles are pure information on a basic subject. For example, I may write an article about how to fix your slice in a golf swing. I wont promote some magic tool, but at the end of the article Ill have a link to Buy pre-owned Callaway golf clubs at 50% off!. Youd be surprised how many people click through to your offer. Same goes for any other niche. As another example, Ive written articles about weight loss tips for random things, and at the end of the article Ill link to a weight loss offer. Ive gotten thousands of dollars just using that technique.

[saad_sinpk]

That, in my opinion, is what the general pitch of the article should feel like.
Now, you have to structure your articles properly for each keyword. For very low search count and competition, its easier to rank because you dont necessarily have to target the exact keyword density and word count of the other top 5 10 results because they didnt target in the first place, and theres no trend. However, youll find that with the more competitive keywords search engines have a trend for the top 5 10 results. For example, a keyword like food the top results will have generally the same keyword density and word count. Sometimes there will be flukes (eg. The top 5 have an average of 663 words, and the 6th result has 7,000 words on the page) Same goes for keyword density. Some pages will have a 1 3% density and then one of the top results will have a 0% or 5% density. That being said, I usually ignore the flukes to get a better idea of the average keyword and word density of the pages that are currently ranking. And, each search engine will have different trends for different results. Which is why for the most part I have my writers write 3 articles for the top 3 search engines.


Now that you have a list with the competition levels for each keyword you grabbed, I then do batch research of averages for each keyword to send to my writers. To do this, I use SEO Studio from trendsmetrix.com which can be found at

http://www.trendsmetrix.com/website-promotion-optimization-software/website-promotion-software.php

It took me about 3 weeks to find software to do exactly this. And even after I found them, I had to ask the programmer to edit the way it does the research. What this program does is perfect for what we are trying to accomplish.


It does the searches for each keyword inserted (just like a human would), and then gives you the averages of that keyword, as well as other data if you wish for just about any search engine(s) you want. Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, AltaVista and a bunch of others.

I then export the results, and send them to my writers. After of course explaining to them how to read the report and write the articles.

For the low competition keywords, as mentioned the averages dont matter that much. I generally say 400 700 words, using the keyword ONCE in the first paragraph and ONCE in the title. Thats what Ive found to work best for the long-tail low competition keywords.


Link building
After an article is submitted, I bookmark it on all the top bookmarking sites, plus a few more if its higher competition. Digg, stumbleupon, mister-wong, etc. You can get a list of the ones I use inside the SENuke program under Social Bookmarking.

For a few of those submissions, I use the keyword targeted in the title of the bookmark. And for the rest, I use related keywords.
I always give my writers 50/50 profit. They dont know youre actually really doing all the work with buying the domains, designing the site, hosting it, having the aff. network hookup bumped payout, etc. So naturally, even if you tell them, they think theyre doing all the work. Even though they couldnt do it without you. But, 50/50 is very fair, as youre spending very little time publishing the articles and doing the linking to them. As mentioned, I made about $4,300 half of that went to my writers based on their own generated commissions. I used Prosper202 to track each individual writer. I added them as PPC Account in step 1 in the setup. I keep in touch with the writers (but in the future when I work with 100 500 I obviously wont be able to do that). And when youre first getting started with them, you need to treat it as JV. And if you already havent guessed you should have SEO sites for this. If you have 500 articles linking to one site thats a nice amount of links to just throw away on direct linking. Have an SEO site to go with this and youre even more golden.


You should be submitting your articles to top article sites like GoArticles, eZineArticles, HubPages, Blogspot, Wordpess, other sites listed in SENuke, as well as a few other ones you can find with high PRs.

[Richardson06]

The information in this post helped me a lot.

There are some of the important steps to be taken in order to provide a good high position ranking to the website. Some of the steps are getting the back links from the other blogs or the website from the blog and the forum posting. These services are also offered by some of the SEO companies.

[seoserviceproviders]

Article submission and blog commenting are good ways for promoting the site and getting backlinks...

[Gloria]

thanks for you sharing

[eyalindub]

nice idea. good luck with that.

[trybexus]

I just absolutely can not believe the response I have gotten from craiglist and kijiji with this. It is really amazing to note how many people blindly trust you with their IP.

I have been doing this for just under a week and I already have 5 writers (most university students) pumping out articles as fast as I can put them up and there is more on the way.

This method is more then viable, when your getting started you can pay the writers out of the money you make including your own profit and what comes in after that is all yours.


Thanks for the great Idea!

[lwelch45]

So we should outsource the articles for the hop of a greater return.