Article Dealers.com

A lot of marketers starting out online don’t have a lot of money to invest in hosting, websites etc., some do, but either way the concept I’m going to discus works for both groups who employ article marketing techniques.

An article, whether it be at Ezine Articles, ArticleBase, GoArticles, any article directory for that matter, is really nothing more than a landing page. It’s you chance to presell your reader on the offer you are promoting. The best part is, its free. Your article should be structured to empathize with the reader’s “problem” or “question”, offer some solutions or answers and then lead them to click on your link in your resource box to finally “receive” the answer or solution they are looking for, in the form of the offer you are promoting.

Empathizing
By empathizing you are making your reader feel like they have a friend that understands their situation. This will immediately help bring their guard down, as most people are skeptical of what they read onlline. Once you have gained their trust by sharing their frustrations, with whatever their “problem” is, you can start positioning yourself as an authority that can help them with their problem, and then you send them to your offer. Is this really any different than a landing page? Not really.

The only difference is how the article and site look. With a landing page you can add graphics, video,etc. Unfortunately there aren’t many article directories that allow you to do that. But I bring good news.

I’ve found a very good directory run by a respected member of the Warrior Forum, its called ArticleProductions.com.

Not only can you add a graphic to your article, you can add links within the article as well as in your resources box. But there is ore. You can even add a Paypal Button at the end of your article, if your promoting a product for sale.

But here is the best part, you can have affiliate links within your article! Note: Any affiliate links must be either domain redirects or html/php redirects, in other words no long coded affiliate links like, “http://skdh.hoplink.iuyw&=fghry”, you know what I mean.

Now you’re not going to get these benefits for free, but these advantages, plus much more are worth the price, you’re essentially getting landing pages, with graphics and even a Paypal buttons.Have a look at ArticleProductions.com and see what it can do for you.

Check out ArticleProductions and all the other resources they offer that I haven’t even mentioned.

I recently wrote an article in the “Tax Niche”. First I searched for a good product or offer to promote, in this case it was a CPA offer. I then did my keyword research using only free tools like the Adwords External Keyword tool.

The next step was to write the article, of course. Now remember, I’m writing this article specifically for this CPA offer, not for backlinks or to promote one of my sites. That being the case it was short and sweet and left the reader hanging for the solution to their problem. My resource box was simply the last line of the article with my hyperlinked keywords that would send them, through a .info redirect, directly to the offers landing page. Why direct to the landing page? Well, isn’t your article, if written correctly, really a landing page in and of it self? Well, lets save that for another post shall we.

So I submitted my article to EZA, waited for it to go live, then submitted it to GoArticles and Article Base, with different titles and the content rearranged and rewritten just a bit. Wow, works over right, now just wait for those commissions, right?

Wrong! Offer/Niche selection and keyword research is just phase one. Phase two is writing and submitting the article itself. Phase three though is probably the most important phase, at least as important as the first two. What is phase three? Building back links to your articles.

Building Backlinks to Your Articles

Here’s how I go about building back links quickly.

1. Wait for your article to go live on EZA

2. Once its live copy the URL to an open NotePad file

3. Go to Blogger, Wordpress.com and Hubpages.com (hope fully you already have accounts there and you can keep them open in multiple tabs on your browser, it just makes it easier.)

4. Create a blog on Blogger and WordPress.com and a Hub on Hubpages. Just rewrite your original article a little and change the title but keep your main keywords in the title.

5. Link relevant keywords to the url of your EZA live article. Add your main keyword to the blogroll on the side bar, and link that to your EZA article. So now on Blogger and Wordpress.com you now have say 2 links in each article to your EZA article and a link in the sidebar, so that should be six links all together. Do the same on your hubpage, but you won’t be able to put a link on the sidebar since they do not offer that option,so thats two links for your hubpage, so far 8 links from high PR sites are all point to your EZA article. NOTE: You can link to your offer as well, in these Web2.0 blogs.

6. Social Bookmarking: Now this can be a little blackhat but its not that bad. I create three different profiles at sites like Digg, StumbleUpon,Mixx, Reddit and Mister Wongs. I put the links to my live EZA article in each profile as well as links to the Web2.0 Properties I created. So now I have 3 links to my article from each of the five bookmarking services, so that 15 links, plus the 8 I have from the Web 2.0 blogs, so now thats 23 backlinks.

7. Now of course you need to bookmark not only your live EZA article but also the three Web 2.0 blogs you set up, for each profile you have on each bookmarking service.

8. Now go over to Pingomatic.com and ping the following urls

a) Your live EZA Article

b) Your Blogger blog, your Wordpress.com blog and your hub page

c) Each of your 15 social bookmarking profile URLs

9. Continue passively building backlinks by blog commenting over the next few days if you want, the bulk of the work has been done.

It sounds like a lot of work, but once you set up your Web 2.0 accounts and your bookmarking profiles (these two take the most time at first), it really becomes a breeze once you do it a couple of times.

Try it out, see if it works for you, and let me know.

I hear a lot of people complain that their click thru rate (CTR) on their articles at Ezine or other article directories, isn’t very good and wanting to know why?

First lets establish a benchmark. You should always shoot for a 20% CTR, you may not always get it but if you follow this little trick it will certainly help.

Ok, so why are people reading your article? Because they need to know something that they don’t already know. So reason tells us that if you write a good article with plenty of info then you’re giving them what they need.

But that is not what we, as article marketers, need, is it? What we need or want at least, is for our readingto click that link in the resource box and go to our offer/site. So to kind of “force” our reader to click that link you CAN’T give them all of what they’re looking for in the article, if you do, they have no reason to click the link.

Instead give them a lot but not all of it, leave the final answer to their question out of the article. Point them to the answer in you resource box. So if the article is about how to make money online, for example, end the article with a question, like,”…..is it really possible to make money online?”….

Then the first line of you resource box should read something like, “…..You may find the right answer to you online earning question here.….”

Then just hyperlink the words “online earning question here” to your offer/site.

Test it out,