Using Article Marketing To Our Advantage
If you are seeking a way to get traffic to your desired website, or want your website to get high ranked in major search engines i.e. Google, it is well known that you need as many back links as possible for you to achieve these goals. In some sense yes it is true but there are other ways to get your website ranked and increasing traffic to your site whether its using web 2.0 properties or SEO for example.
Personally article marketing is one of the “old school” methods but still considered to be one of the most effective forms of free advertising you can do online. If you want to create good targeted traffic and increase your ranking on Google then Article marketing is the place to start.
Article marketing is a skill because what you doing are writing a article on a specific niche, and wanting viewers to come read your article which then will get people to come to our site. There are so many different directories for submitting articles these days but the top dog of them all is Ezine Articles.
Ezine Articles has a PR (Page Rank) of 6 which means it has a lot of authority within Google. If it has a lot of authority that will mean it is a popular site, which means if this site gets a lot of traffic to it, we can easily take a percentage (and remember this is for FREE) of the traffic and get it to come via our Articles. This is a short blog post as I have put a video together below showing you in more detail how we want to get the traffic flowing to our site. Check it out…
Like I said in the video the downside of article marketing is that it takes so much time. Some people feel that article marketing is a waste of time, but the bottom line is that if done correctly it can greatly increase traffics. So do not just read this and do nothing with it! Go write some articles! Or if you are as lazy as me then go get someone else to do it for you here is some great resources that I use:
Elance.com
Guru.com
Just inclosing on this post I have put together a FREE course on how you can use the same tactics I use to make at least $400 a month with around an hour and half work, and like I said I am giving you that for FREE, so look out for that in the next day or so.
How Affiliates can become Article Marketer
If you’re at all familiar with Article Marketing, then you know that the main thrust behind your articles is the bio box or resource box which is located at the bottom of all articles. This is where you put a link to a significant website that you’re trying to promote.
But that can be a real problem when you’re attempting to promote a product that isn’t your own.
Affiliate links can be long and very ugly, not to mention obvious. So it becomes pretty difficult to get your readers to see you as an expert when your links have all those “=”, “?” and long arrays of numbers and codes in it.
To add to the problem, most of the article directories now strip out html coding in both the article body and the bio box and hyperlink your URL instead.
So hiding your long affiliate link behind some coded text is pretty much out of the question too. Which leaves you to post your articles with your affiliate link hyperlinked in your bio box. And as you probably know, it’s awfully hard to hide something that’s neon blue against a background of black and white.
There are, however,a few things you can do to hide the fact that you’re promoting an affiliate product. Some of them have some potential drawbacks, but when you’re desperate, anything is better than nothing.
1. URL Shrinkers:
Pros: These are usually free to use and can quickly change any link to a much smaller, cloaked link. You just have to paste your long affiliate link in the box and click one button to get a mini link that will take visitors to the same site.
Cons: Your new URL will have the link shrinker’s domain name. If they are a popular service you might find your links timing out when their servers get over worked.
Seasoned marketers usually know what a shrunken URL means (affiliate link).
2. PHP Script Rerouters:
Pros: Allows you to create alternate links directly on your own domain. Good for Article Marketing because they usually have you place the script in a folder named “recommends” or something similar. So your link looks like . . .
“yourdomain.com/recommends/theirproduct”
Cons: You have to manually tweak php files and upload them to your server. Then you have to have a system where you can keep track of all your real affiliate links, what you’ve renamed them and where they are on your server.
3. Desktop Link Management Programs:
Pros: You fill in a few lines on a form, click a couple buttons and your new links are created and uploaded to your server for you. Your real affiliate links are stored in the system along with the name and location of your rerouted links. Plus you’re able to easily modify the whole process.
You can create hundreds of links for one product, which is a big plus for article marketing because if you use an article submission program you can load all your different links into different bio boxes, which solves the html code stripping problem in the directories.
Cons: They don’t come free. There’s a price to pay for ease, speed and efficiency. Prices vary, but expect to pay at the lowest around $30.
In any event, there are ways to successfully turn an Affiliate Marketer into a high powered Article Marketer. Affiliate links don’t have to look like affiliate links anymore, which opens things up for Affiliate Marketers to use this highly effective marketing venue.
