Using Articles to promote products, aka bum marketing

As you may, or may not know, I’m a bum marketer.

What that means, is that I subscribe to the school of thought that marketing is so easy that even a bum could do it.  The other tenet, is that we do not pay for traffic to our sites.  All traffic comes to our offers using free methods, either SEO, social bookmarking or article marketing.

The most powerful method, is article marketing.  I was not a believer in article marketing, until I started seeing results.  I was convinced that it could not be this simple.  Well, it is.

Notice I said simple, and not easy.  There is still a learning curve, and you need to know what you’re going to write about, what makes a good article and how to “sell the click” to your readers.

Having said that, there are 2 reasons to write an article:

1. To drive traffic to your offer page, so you can make money from a direct sale.

2. To drive your traffic to a squeeze page, so you can make money.

I read somewhere online that the only reason to write something is to get paid for it.  I agree.  Each of the points above has its own merits.  I’ll address them in a future post.

This is what you need to consider for article marketing:

1. Research a subject. Find long tail keyword phrases that relate to the product you’re promoting.

2.  Check how competitive the phrase is.  Do a search using “allintitle:keyword phrase” on google.  Try to target keywords that have less than 1000 competing sites.

3. Create a good title.  This is seriously important.  No matter how good your article is, if it has a bad title, no one will read it.  Try to put in a benefit driver and entice the reader’s curiosity in the title to get people to read your post.

4. Divide your article into 3 or 7 points.  As a follow up, you can create additional articles where you delve deeper into the points separately.

5. Promote your affiliate link in the resource box of your article.

6. Write on any of the major points, just use one or two paragraphs per point to flesh out your article. Keep your article between 450-550 words.  Anything longer than that, write two articles, avoid being much shorter than that.

7. Write the article first, then edit it.  Don’t stop the flow of the article so you can edit it, just let it flow and when you’re done, then edit.

8. Submit your article to the directories.  I’ve found that most of my traffic comes from 2-3 directories, but there are literally hundreds of article directory sites out there. I feel that you get better results from sites that have human review of the submitted articles, but your mileage may vary on that.

That’s it.  I’ve written other posts where I talk about the sites that I like to submit to, but I’m thinking of writing another post about that later on as well.  Tell me what you think!

Cheers!