Split-testing, sometimes also called A/B testing, is the process of testing two or more variations of a webpage against each other in order to determine which one performs better. The goal of split testing is simply to find out how to structure your page so that you can get more clicks, more conversions, more sign-ups or whatever else may be the purpose of the site.

Read on for to learn how and what to test.

How Split Testing Works

Lets begin with a very simple example: We take a hypothetical campaign where we try to get people to sign up to a mailing-list. To run an A/B test, we create two different versions of our squeeze page, one with a blue colour-scheme and the other with a pink colour-scheme.

We will now send our traffic either to a page that serves up one version of the page or the other via some type of script or we will send the to a script that will redirect to one variation of the page or the other. There are different ways to accomplish this on a technical level, but whatever the solution, the result is that 50% of our visitors get to see the pink-themed page and 50% get to see the blue-themed page.

Now, we want to find out which version of our squeeze page gets more sign-ups. To do this, there are again several possibilities, but it always comes down to tracking the source of all our sign-ups or conversions.

Your auto-responder system will almost certainly feature some kind of tracking for this purpose. If you’re measuring click-throughs (to a sales-page or offer), you can track the conversion rates with a tracking system like Tracking202 or similar. You can also set up two separate redirects, one for each of the page-variations, but both pointing to the same sales/offer-page, to see which one of the redirects is used more often.

Again, there’s no shortage of tracking options, but it all comes down to this: Split your traffic evenly between two variations of a page and keep track of which one gets more clicks, sign-ups, sales or whatever it is you’re after.

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What to Test

There are three basic rules to follow when doing split-testing:

1. Test only one variable at a time
   If you change several things on a page and get better conversions as a result, you won’t know what exactly caused the increase in conversions. Was it the new font? The different headline? The new pictures? The only way to know for sure is to only change one thing at a time.
   –
2. Test big differences first
   Don’t test tiny details as they will rarely make a difference (e.g. exclamation mark vs. period in the headline). Test large, significant variations first.
   –
3. Keep testing
   Test two variations of a page against each other. When you’ve found the winner, make another variation of that page and test it again. Repeat this process until no change you can think of still produces better conversions. The worst thing you can do in online marketing is not to test. The second worst is to stop testing to early.

Here are some examples of what you can test:

• Text vs. Video
  Have a text-based squeeze-page and test that against one where you read the text and record a slide-show or some other type of video. You could also test video vs. video and text.
  –
• Long vs. Short
  This goes for text as well as video: Test a long, extensive sales-page against a short one. Test a two-minute video against a 30-minute video.
  –
• Bullet-Points vs. Paragraphs
  Write out a few paragraphs highlighting the main benefits that come with your product or offer. Then test that against a brief description and bullet-points listing the main benefits.
  –
• Different Incentives
  Most squeeze-pages offer some type of incentive for signing up, like a free report or something along those lines. If you have more than one incentive at your disposal, test them against each other as well as one against several (remember that too many incentives can make you seem desperate). Also try giving your incentive a more compelling name and/or description.
  –
• Colour-Themes and Design
  Test a “naked” squeeze-page against one with more graphical elements. Test different colour-schemes against each other. Even fonts and background-colours can make a difference. At the end of the day, you have to make sure that your page is visually appealing to your target demographic otherwise they’ll leave before taking a closer look at it.

Whatever you do, you should be testing your sales-pages and squeeze-pages. For a free solution to create split-tests, check out Google Website Optimizer. If you’re a WordPress user, I’ve got a very interesting for split-testing, a review of which will be published here shortly. :)

Now go forth, test and prosper.

Cheers,

Market research is usually concerned with the demographics of a market, the amount and kind of competition you can expect, evaluation of what type of content and delivery the target demographic responds to etc.

For this article, I want to take the market research down a notch and present you a very simple, very basic research “method” that you should be applying on a regular basis as an online marketer. Especially if you are new to this game.

Competition “Spying”

To get a feeling for a market (or even Internet marketing in general), go and take a look at websites and sales-pages created by other Internet marketers.

How do you find those pages? If you are already selling products or affiliate offers yourself, simply find some more offers in your niche and run a search on the product names as well as some closely related keywords. Especially for the product names, most of the resulting pages will be pure marketing sites. For your “typical” money-makers like “weight loss”/”how to lose weight”, “dog training”, “make money online” etc. you’ll also find lots of pure money-sites.

If you haven’t decided on a niche yourself yet, just go to ClickBank or CBtrends and search through the product catalogue there. Not that ClickBank is the only or even the most important online marketplace, but it’s the most easily accessible and you can find lots of product names and keywords to search for within minutes.

If you’re a member of some CPA networks, apply the exact same method. Search for the product/offer names as well as closely related keywords and browse some of the results.

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What to Look Out For

As you are browsing these sites and pages, here are some things to take note of:

• Types of Sites
  Are you encountering many squeeze pages or sales pages? How are they set up? Is there an order-button right on the page or do they squeeze your e-mail address first? Or are you encountering blogs and blog-style pages?
  –
• Use of Media
  What are you finding on the resulting pages? Is it mostly text, test with images, audio or video? What’s the writing style like? How is the information in the video delivered?
  –
• Visuals
  Are the sites visually appealing? How are they making use of colours and fonts? Are they simple or graphically elaborate?
  –
• Incentives/Promises
  What is being offered on the pages? Are there free giveaways or other incentives? What’s being promised?

Once you’ve taken note of these things, simply ask yourself: Could you do the same? Or could you even do better?

Remember that many of the people behind those pages you’re looking at are making money from them. Of course, not every offer and every sales-page is profitable, but particularly the top listed pages in organic search results are almost guaranteed to turn some kind of a profit for the site owner.

The reason I mention this is because especially those new to online marketing can easily feel overwhelmed by it all and not know where to start. If you just take a close look at what other marketers are doing, you’ll soon realize that there’s no real magic to it. Many a successful sales-page is not particularly pretty and you don’t have to be a genius to create something similar, or superior, yourself.

Allright, now go forth and research! And once you’ve researched, build!

Cheers,

Below, you find two short videos explaining everything you need to know about how to add affiliate banners to your WordPress blog. The first video covers the very basics and the second video goes into a little more detail, showing you how to cloak the banner-links, how to make your own banners (in case none are provided) and how to add a banner to the sidebar.

Part 1

Part 2

I hope you find them useful.

All the best,

P.S.: For good measure, here’s a banner:

This post covers the most important basics you need to know about backlinks. Getting backlinks to your web pages is an essential part of search engine optimization (particularly for Google). However, not all backlinks are equal. In this post, I describe the three things that matter most, in terms of backlinks. These three factors are: Amount, value and anchor text.

Note: If you prefer watching a video to reading, scroll down to see my video accompanying this post.

Here’s a short description explaining each of the three factors:

Amount

This first factor is the simplest. The higher the number of backlinks pointing to your site, the better this is for your ranking.

The thinking behind this is simply that every link to your site represents something like a “vote”. Someone linking to your site is basically saying: “Check this out, there’s something worth seeing there.”
And the more people are saying that there’s something worth seeing on your site, the better your site must be.

On a perfectly innocent Internet (what a weird concept), this would be all it takes to determine the rank of websites. But because there are many people with commercial interests online and it’s fairly easy to build links yourself, determining rank based solely on the amount of backlinks would just result in those pages whose owners have the most powerful link-spamming bots working for them to rank highest.

This is where the other two factors come in.

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Value

This is the most debated and most elusive factor determining website ranks. The value of any given backlink is dependent on many different variables and no one, apart from a few engineers at Google, knows exactly how link value is determined.

Here are some factors we can be pretty certain about:

• Page Authority
  A link coming from a high authority website is more valuable than one coming from a low authority website. How the authority of the website is determined, is an entire subject of its own. You can assume that the more traffic a website is getting, the more people are participating on that website and the higher the Google PR of that website is, the more valuable a link from it will be.
  –
  As example, a link coming from a blog with thousands of subscribers and many people participating in the comments is more valuable than a link coming from a blog that hasn’t been updated in months and sees hardly any traffic.
  –
• Link Location
  Another important factor is where on the page the link is located. For example, a link placed in the footer of a website is less valuable than a link that is part of the main text on the page. The context, and number of other links on the same page also play a part.
  –
  For example, if your link is just one among hundreds a page consisting mainly of links, then it’s not very valuable. However, if the link is one of only a few integrated in the text flow, then it carries a lot of value.
  –
• Link Distribution
  In a greater context, it also matters where your links are coming from. Hundreds of backlinks, all coming from the same domain are probably less valuable than just a handful of backlinks coming from many different sites.

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Anchor Text

Finally, the anchor text of your links is what determines which keywords you will rank for. For those who don’t know, the anchor text is the text you click on, to follow a link. As an example, here is a link with the anchor text reading “Killer Bunnies”: Killer Bunnies

The anchor text of your backlinks help the search engine spiders decide which keywords to rank your page for. Ideally, you want to get many backlinks that have your targeted keyword as their anchor text. However, you should avoid getting many backlinks that all have the identical anchor text, because this looks unnatural.

For the links you build yourself, I recommend using your keywords in the anchor text in most cases, related keywords in some cases, and something completely unrelated (e.g. “Click here”) in a few cases.

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Rule of Thumb

The rule of thumb for good backlink building is this: the more natural your backlink-profile looks, the better.

In other words, aim for diversity when you build backlinks. You can’t go wrong with links from different sites, using variations of anchor text and placed in different contexts on the sites.
Also, don’t shy away from getting links from low-authority sites. As long as it doesn’t take you too much time to get those links, even low value links are useful and make your overall link profile look more natural.

–

Video

Here’s the video, where I say the same stuff I wrote in this post:

If you have any more questions about link-building, ask away in the comments section below!

Cheers,

Today’s post features the most simple, easy to understand and straight-forward explanation of Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match you’ll ever find. Plus, it’s presented in text as well as in a video. This post will clear up any questions about this important subject you may have.

Throughout the text, I will be using “blue vintage car” as an example for a search term. I picked this at random and you can choose any search term if you want to follow along and experiment with some Google searches. I recommend using a search term with three or four words to get results that best illustrate what the match types are all about.

Broad Match

The broad match is the most common type of search result. It is what you get when you type in a search term into Google as you normally would.

What does it do?
Broad match results are any websites that contain the words you typed in, in any order and any distribution.

So, while a site that contains the exact sequence of words “blue vintage car” is likely to show up in the results, other possibilities include:

• Vintage car: blue
• Vintage car with blue leather interior
• Blue skies, vintage comics and car models.

Of course, a page featuring the words in the exact order you typed them in is likely to show up first in the results. If you take a look at pages ten and beyond in the results, you’ll see the words you typed spread ever further apart on the resulting pages. Here’s an example:

As you can see, the words are not in sequence and neither are they next to each other in this resulting page. But since all the words are present on the page, it’s still a broad match result.

Phrase Match

To see phrase match results, type in your search term in quotes:

What does this one do?
Phrase match results display websites that feature those exact words you typed, in the order you typed them in. As you can see on the picture above, this returns drastically fewer results than the broad search (almost 5 million results broad and fewer than 30’000 results phrase).

There can still be punctuation marks or symbols like brackets or slashes in between the words in the results-pages. Here’s an example result:

As you can see, even though there is a hyphen before the word “blue” and a comma afterwards, this is still a valid phrase match result for our search term.

One great use for typing your search term in quotes is when you remember part of a text but you can’t remember where you read it. If you can remember the exact sequence of five or more words you read on that page, a phrase match search will very likely return the page you are looking for.

Keyword Research/Advertiser Perspective

Here’s where most people seem to get confused with the whole match-type thing: The meaning of the match types differs depending on whether you are looking at them from the perspective of a regular search engine user or that of a keyword researcher or AdWords advertiser.

In this next section, let’s look at the significance of the match types have to you as an Internet marketer.

To follow along, fire up Google’s keyword research tool.
A very crucial factor in keyword research (and online marketing in general) is how often your chosen keyword is actually searched for. After all, it’s not much use to rank well for a term no one ever looks for. This is where the keyword tool can help us out. Let’s take a look at the search volume we get for our example term “blue vintage car” as well as the more popular term “vintage car”:

As we can see, there are roughly 320 broad searches for “blue vintage car” and over 200’000 monthly searches for “vintage car”.

Now, these are broad match results. This means that among those 320 searches could be examples like:

• bright blue vintage car
• vintage model car, blue
• where to buy vintage models of a blue car

In other words, any search containing the three words “blue”, “vintage” and “car” is included in this count.

Now, let’s look at the phrase match results for the searches:

As you can see, there are now significantly less results listed. This is because the phrase match count only includes searches that contain the exact sequence of words typed in. There can still be additional words in a search, however. The following example searches would be included in the phrase match count:

• buy blue vintage car
• blue vintage car picture
• more information about a blue vintage car

Finally, we have the option to search for exact matches:

Now, the numbers have shrunk even further. The reason is that the exact match only counts searches that are exactly, word for word, what you signify. So, in the above example, 18’100 is an estimate of the amount of times the exact words “vintage car” are typed into Google, each month. If someone types the words in a different order or ads another word (e.g. “bright blue vintage car”) that search is not counted.

As an advertiser, this can be very significant, since you might want your ads to display only when very specific terms are searched for. I don’t want to get into the whole AdWords research thing in this article.

Instead, I want to clarify a very common cause for confusion when it comes to keyword research:

Evaluating Competition Strength

I’m sure you’ve seen this as a simple piece of advice on how to find out how much competition you are up against: Type the keyword you want to target in quotation marks, i.e. do a phrase match search for it. This will return a number of results pages that is significantly lower than for the broad match term (see above).

“But,” the argument goes, “nobody searches for anything with quotes!”
True. Most searches are broad searches with the search term just typed in without any quotes or brackets. However, looking at the number phrase match results really is an indicator of competition strength. Why? Because the pages excluded from the phrase match results will be very, very easy to outrank with an optimized page.

If you make a page that features “blue vintage car” in the title and that exact combination again in the text, you’re already outranking all of those pages that have the three words spread all over the place.

That’s it. There’s the explanation for the whole “why phrase match?” question.

Having said that, the argument can be made that it doesn’t bloody well matter how many pages are listed in the results. What really matters is how strong the actual pages showing up on the first page for a broad search are. Lest I digress, I will write about this in a separate article.

For all your audio-visual learners, here’s a short video where I explain the concept of using phrase match for competition evaluation:

In this article, you’ll find all the basic information concerning SEO or Search Engine Optimization. If you are new to this subject, you might have noticed that there is a huge wealth of information of SEO available online and it can be quite overwhelming. In this article, I explain only the most essential, bare-bones factors for optimizing web-pages. In other words: Everything you need to know to start out and nothing more.

What’s All The Fuss About?

SEO is such a hot topic for one simple reason: More visitors means more money for almost every online business. And many, many visitors find online businesses and websites in general via search engines. This is why everyone who is selling something (even if it’s just ad-space on a blog) is scrambling to rank well in search engine results. If you have ads on a website, being on the first page of results for a popular search term or being on the second page can mean the difference between making good money and making nothing at all. [Google Dilemma, link coming soon]

Search engine optimization is the term used to describe all methods that you can use for your website to make sure it gets better rankings in SERP (search engine results pages).

How Does Google Decide What Websites to List First?

Google, and every other search engine for that matter, works with a complex algorithm to determine what sites to show and in which order. The exact algorithm is kept under wraps to minimize abuse, but many important factors in search engine ranking are known.

When reading about SEO, just make sure you don’t lose sight of the most fundamental principle underlying every search-engine: The goal of every search engine is to serve up the most relevant and interesting results, matching what the user is looking for as perfectly as possible.

For this reason, SEO lesson number one is: Real content always has the best chances with search engines. If you have a hollow shell of a site, offering nothing of interest, you can SEO the crap out of it, but you’ll never get many visitors and the visitors you do get won’t stay.

With that out of the way, here are the most important SEO factors to consider:

• Keywords
  If your site contains text that matches the search term entered by the user, then that’s a good basis for getting listed in the results. You can optimize your site for this factor by using descriptive titles and clearly stating what each page or article is about. For example, on a movie review blog, call your new post “Citizen Kane Movie Review” instead of just “Citizen Kane” and title the summary within the article “Citizen Kane – Summary” rather than just “Summary”. You get the idea. You want to give the search engine something to clearly recognize what the article is about. Obviously, neither should you overdo it. Don’t write “Citizen Kane review” twice in every sentence, this will be noticed as keyword spamming by the search engines and readers will leave your site in a hurry because it’s unreadable.
• Backlinks
  One of the most important SEO factors is the amount of links pointing to your domain and each of the individual websites. If your content is interesting and relevant, many people will link to it, recommending it to others via social bookmarking sites, on forums, on their own blogs etc. If your content is original, it might be mentioned (and linked to) as a reference by others. Many incoming links indicate good content and search engines pay attention to that.
  You can optimize for this by submitting your pages to social bookmarking sites yourself, linking to your pages from fora etc. In other words, you can try to do all the link-building by yourself. If your content is any good, it will soon be picked up by others and they will add to your backlink count by recommending your site.
• Page Title and Meta Description
  What you see in the SERP are the page title and the meta description. A good content management system should always make it easy for you to add a title and meta description for each of your pages, so that you can make sure what shows up in the SERP is interesting, descriptive and representative of your page contents.
• Domain Age
  Another important factor, one that is often overlooked, is the age of your website. It’s reasonable to assume that a website that has been around for years must be offering something or other of value. For this reason, search engines prefer pages from websites that have been online for several years over pages from websites that were created yesterday.
  There’s nothing you can do to actively optimize for this, other than build a good website and stick with it for years.

Where To Learn More

Admittedly, the above list is barely scratching the surface of all the SEO possibilities open to you. There are many more factors playing into search engine ranking and there is much more to learn. However, the four factors listed are, broadly, the most important that you need to consider if you want to give your website a chance to get listed near the front of any results-page.

I will be addressing many of the further details of SEO in future posts. Until then, check out these useful resources on SEO:

SEObook – The classic. Check out their Firefox toolbar.
Matt Cutts – Google info straight from the horse’s mouth.
SEO 2.0 – Lot’s of SEO info from all angles. Entertaining read, too.
Wolf-Howl – My other favourite, next to SEO 2.0.

Happy researching!

Affiliate marketing is probably the number one thing that most internet marketers do to make money. As you might have already read in the RQR Glossary, affiliate marketing comes down to promoting and selling someone else’s products in exchange for commissions for every sale made. In this RQR Basics article, you’ll find a more in-depth explanation of what affiliate marketing is and how to get into it.

Example

It’s often easiest to understand a process by just looking at a concrete example, so here’s an example of what an affiliate sale constitutes:

1. You sign up with an affiliate network (more on those below) or sign an affiliate contract with a manufacturer.
2. You choose a product to promote. Let’s say you choose an ebook that teaches people how to improve their golf swing. (There are thousands of products in hundreds of categories to choose from, out there – I’m just picking a random example out of the air here). Let’s also assume that the ebook costs $25.
3. You receive a “personal” link. When someone clicks this link, they will arrive at the sales-page for the golf ebook.
4. You place this link on your blog, in an article, on a website, in a forum or where ever else one can place links. As a concrete example, let’s say you write a post about golfing on your blog and add the link and a recommendation for the ebook.
5. Someone reads your blog-post and is interested in the book you recommend, so they click on the link.
6. They see the sales-page of the golf swing ebook and decide to buy it.
7. Since they arrived at the sales-page through your personal affiliate link, you get paid a commission for the sale. In the case of a $25 ebook, you would probably get around $15 for this sale.

That’s basically how one affiliate sale could happen. It’s actually quite difficult to make a good example of an affiliate sale because there are so many different products that you can promote and there are just as many different ways of promoting them. Let’s take a step back from this and look at the abstract of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing always involves a manufacturer (buildings to the left) with products on offer. The affiliate (A) promotes these products to potential customers (guy on the right). The customer buys the products and pays the manufacturer. The manufacturer in turn passes part of the proceeds on to the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is a true win-win situation between you and the manufacturer of the product you are promoting. You get paid without having to manufacture and ship products yourself. The manufacturer benefits from your marketing efforts, without taking a risk. Since he only pays part of the money he makes from each sale you refer, this is basically risk-free marketing. Compare that to more traditional marketing methods, where you might spend thousands or even millions for large billboard, TV or newspaper ads and not get a buying response from the customers at all, and you quickly see why manufacturers like to offer affiliate deals.

Affiliate Websites

As I mentioned briefly above, you need some place to put your affiliate link, so that people can find it and click through to the manufacturer’s sales-page or shop. There are many options for link-placement, the most popular being:

• In an article.
  You can publish an article (e.g. “How to Improve Your Golf Handicap”) and publish it on an article directory. In this article, you can endorse a product and place an affiliate link (see Article Marketing for more details).
• On a blog.
  Maybe you blog about golfing or you start a blog about golf specifically to affiliate-sell golf products. On your own blog, you can basically place the affiliate links wherever you want. In posts related to the product makes most sense, of course.
• On a mini-site.
  A mini-site is a small web-page built around your affiliate link. In the case of our example it could be a mini-site focused completely around improving your golf-swing. It could be just one page, promoting the affiliate product or it could include a handful of pages, including some free tips, maybe a survey or some other content to keep visitors interested.
• On a forum.
  Most forums won’t allow you to place affiliate links directly in your posts. You can use a forum as a stepping-stone, though. If you post relevant and interesting content in a golf-forum and link to your golf-blog in the signature, you can increase the visitors to your blog. These visitors will then find the affiliate links on your blog.

Volume

Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Any potential customer will need to pass through several “gates” before they make an actual purchase. It begins with the potential customer being somewhere “out there”, with a general interest in the product you’re promoting or perhaps with a certain problem they need a solution for.

The first gate they need to pass is that they need to find you and your site or article somehow. Usually, this happens via search engines. One of your articles, forum-posts or blog entries could show up in the search engine results when someone enters a golf-related keyword.
The second gate is that they need to visit your site/article/blog. After all, the search engine serves up multiple choices and even if yours is among the first to be listed, they might not decide to click on your particular entry.
The third gate is when they see the affiliate link on your website and decide whether to follow it or not. You have to get them interested enough to actually want to click on that link.
Once they’ve done this, it’s up to the manufacturer to get them through the fourth gate: Actually deciding to buy the product.

As you can imagine, there will always be countless visitors who jump off and don’t pass one of these gates. Out of a thousand people who search for a solution for improving their Golf handicap, maybe 400 will find one of your articles. Out of those, maybe 100 will follow through to your blog. Out of those 100, maybe 30 will decide to click on your affiliate link and of those 30 people left, maybe one person will actually buy the product. These numbers are hypothetical, of course. Depending on your market and how well your websites and articles are written and designed, these numbers can vary greatly.

The number of “gates” customers must pass through can vary. It is worth noting that fewer “gates” doesn’t necessarily mean more sales. Often, the opposite is true: Some customers need a lot of convincing and won’t buy if they get directed to the sales-page too quickly. If they get to read up on the subject first, see a couple of pages and many different arguments, they might be much more willing to buy, once they arrive at the sales-page.

Bottom line is: You need to get a lot of people to see your affiliate sites. This is why most internet marketers are also very interested in SEO (search engine optimization) and other techniques for maximizing visitors to websites.

Benefits

• It can be free.
  You can use paid methods for promoting products and increasing traffic, but it’s absolutely possible to rely completely on free methods.
• Saves you a lot of hassle.
  You don’t have to make products yourself. Especially for material goods, this saves you a ton of effort that otherwise goes into production, storage, shipping etc.
• It’s very scalable.
  See my post titled The Nr. 1 Reason to Get Into Affiliate Marketing for more on this.
• It can be risk-free.
  Since you can promote products without spending any money (or with spending only very little), affiliate marketing can be practically risk-free. If your campaign fails and no one buys the products you’re promoting, you don’t lose any money.

Drawbacks

• No guarantee.
  The flipside of the “no risk” factor is that there is no guarantee any of your campaigns will be successful. You might try to promote the hell out of something but never see any good conversions.
• Time consuming.
  Setting up affiliate sites, filling them with relevant content, writing good sales-copy, optimizing your pages for search engines, publishing articles… These are all things you need to do to a certain extent, as an affiliate marketer. They are all more or less time-consuming and it can take a while before you see any pay-off. Expect to put in many, many hours before seeing your first sales.

Where to Find Affiliate Deals

There are so many affiliate networks out there, I doubt I’ve seen even half of them. And apart from the networks, many companies offer affiliate deals individually, if you just look for them. Finally, you can strike your own affiliate deals with practically anyone if you know how to implement them and can negotiate.

Let’s begin with affiliate networks. These are marketplaces where manufacturers/authors can list their products and affiliates can choose which ones to promote. Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate networks. Further popular choices are Commission Junction, Paydotcom and Shareasale.

Some companies offer their own affiliate programs. A good example of this is amazon’s “Associates”, which offers affiliate deals on all their products. Not so great for books (they’ll net you a few cents per sale, at best) but pretty good for some of the other, higher-priced products that amazon offers. To find more affiliate deals, simply look for manufacturers and online stores in your targeted product niche and search their websites for affiliate pages. Or write them an e-mail and ask them about it. If they have an affiliate program, they’ll be more than glad to help you sign up and get started (remember: More affiliates means more money for them).

I will be posting mini-reviews of different affiliate networks and programs in the near future, so stay tuned.

Okay, I think that about covers it. If you have any further questions, let me know down in the comments.

That’s it for now,

In a nutshell, article marketing is the practice of promoting a website or a product by writing articles and submitting them all over the internet. Read up on all the background info on article marketing, the benefits and drawbacks and why you should (or shouldn’t) start with it.

Example

Let’s start off with a practical example of one “instance” of article marketing, so to speak:

1. You write an article about a subject that is related to the product you are selling or the website you are promoting.
2. You add some relevant links to this article. Most typically these would be links to pages on your website.
3. You submit this article to a public, online article database.
4. Rinse and repeat.

That’s basically it. That’s what you do as an article marketer.

Benefits

• It’s free.
  Article marketing costs you nothing but time. Submitting articles to article databases is completely free.
• Links.
  You can place links in your articles. Depending on where you want to submit them, there may be some limitations as to what kind of links you can place or where you can place them, but you can always place some type of link somewhere in the article. If you link back to your own website, it can increase your traffic, because people who read your article and like it might click through.
• Page-Rank.
  One of the factors that will increase your website’s page-rank is how many links from other websites point to yours. Since you can place links in the articles, that number will climb with every new article you publish, which in turn can increase the page-rank of your website.
• Keyword targeting.
  Some article databases tend to rank very highly in search engine results. It might be very difficult for you to get your own website into the top results for your targeted keyword, but a well-placed article can get there more easily. If that article contains links to your website, then that’s almost as good as having your website itself rank in the top results.
• Branding.
  If you put enough work in and generate enough quality articles, you can get known among the frequent visitors of a database. This can help you towards building a personal brand.
• Indexing.
  If you have launched a new website, one of the fastest ways to get new visitors and to get the site indexed by search engines is to publish a handful of articles containing links to your site. Since the popular article databases are frequently crawled by search engine bots, your article will be picked up soon and a bot will follow the link to your website. This is much faster than submitting your site to the search engines and waiting for them to get around to indexing it.

Drawbacks

• It’s time-intensive.
  Writing a good article – one that is really worth reading and that will attract many readers and also motivate them to follow the link to your website – is a time-consuming task.
• It takes a lot of persistence.
  Your first article will not get many views and will not do anything for your page rank. The same goes for the next few articles your write. You will probably need to spend countless hours writing and publishing articles before you ever see distinct benefits from it (i.e. increased traffic and more sales).
• You’re spreading around content that could be a valuable addition to your own website.
  You need to keep a good balance between publishing on article sites and publishing on your own website. If you spend all your time writing for article databases but neglect your own site, you might generate a lot of traffic but the visitors will leave your site again immediately, seeing that it’s practically empty.

Where to Publish

The most popular and most highly ranked article databases are Squidoo and ezinearticles. Goarticles and Hubpages are also among the more frequently mentioned sites. Those are by far not the only choices, though. Click here to see a large list of the most popular article databases online.

Make sure to read the terms of agreement carefully, before you start writing for any of these databases. Because article databases are such an easy and free tool for marketing, they all take measures to prevent spam. You can’t get away with blatant advertising on any of them and most of them don’t allow you to publish any material on certain subjects. So make sure your niche isn’t on that list before you start writing. Generally, you have to provide good, readable, valuable and original content, otherwise you will not be published on the sites.

And that’s all the basics on article marketing. Give it a try, don’t give up after just a few articles and see what it can do for your traffic.

All the best,