Most newbies start off their Affiliate marketing careers by doing lots of article marketing. Most give up because they’re not seeing immediate results from their efforts. However, after 585 articles on Ezinearticles.com, I’ve realized that article marketing is only the beginning of your article marketing, not the end.

What do I mean by this?

Well, there is a popular method out there called BUM marketing, where you write a whole bunch of articles daily to get lots of traffic. This traffic is usually very short-lived, with an article only providing you traffic for 3-4 days (at most).

Hence, setting goals such as “20 articles per day” is pointless if your goal is to make money only through article marketing. Why not instead focus on article marketing only in the beginning of your careers, as a jump-off point for creating a flagship blog – earning a steady revenue over time, like this:

Most of my income now is passive income. Even though I have not yet achieved the level of income that I want to (around 5 grand per month), I’m steadily getting there. But the best feeling is waking up and seeing sales come through.

Also love it when I get lots of sales without working for the entire day, such as the weekends. This is what every Internet Marketer is after: passive income. It all ties into our pursuit of absolute financial freedom.

Anyways, lets get back to Article marking. Here’s what article marketing SHOULD be used for:

Get Traffic for the LONG Term

My top performing article gets around 100 hits per month. And with a 15.1% click through rate, I’m getting around 15 hits from that article per month. That’s pretty good for an ezine article.

I suspect most people’s articles perform at a much lower level than that. But think about it this way, if you can get one article to send you 15 article per month, and you have 500 articles published, you’re getting 7,500 hits per month JUST from article marketing.

Now, frankly speaking, I’ve made the same mistake when I was a newbie – in terms of writing a whole bunch of crappy articles really fast. Some of them did help me get sales, but most stopped working for me after 3 days.

I’m currently not posting any new articles on Ezinearticles.com. But when I do, I’ll be sure to go back and look at my top performing articles and duplicate them. If I can write just 10 top performing articles, that’s 150 hits extra just from Ezinearticles.com.

BOOST your Reputation

Ezinearticles.com works hard to maintain a good reputation on their site. They’ve recently been cracking down on affiliate marketing because of all these newbie affiliates writing dumb articles.

So, your job should be write super high quality articles, and send it back to your blog. You can marketing to visitors on your blog as much as you want, but in your Ezine article, make sure that you are writing 100% quality content.

You will position yourself as an expert in no time, and hence be able to see higher conversions for your products from individuals coming form your Ezine articles.

BUILD Links

At the bottom of each of my article, in my Authors Resource Box, I write the following:

You have permission to publish this article in your web sites, ezines or electronic publication, as long as the piece is used in its entirety including the resource box, all hyperlinks (HTML clickable) and references and copyright info

So if someone is doing research for an article on their blog and comes across your site. They’ll be obliged to either link back to your blog, to the ezine article, or might even decide to reprint your material.

But you need to tell people this. You can’t just assume that just because you’ve written an article, people will start linking to you. You know what happens when you assume.

Bottom line is this: WRITE HIGH QUALITY ARTICLES AND FOCUS ON LONG TERM RESULTS

Analyzing an Ezine Article

Now lets go back to that Ezine article and see why it’s such a great article and what steps you should take to write high quality content. You can also implement these tips in your blog articles.

The article we’ll be analyzing is titled “Interval Training You can Perform at Home.” I wrote this article about 11 months ago, and it’s still performing really good. Look at the traffic it’s getting:

June isn’t over yet, so it’s safe to say that the article is getting 100 hits per month, at least. Here are the search terms it gets traffic for:

So as you can see, I’ve used a long tail keyword to construct my title and topic for the article. The long tailis a socio-statistical theory that suggests that the collective sales of products in low demand can exceed that of popular products and bestsellers.

In other words, focusing on low-search, specifically targeted keywords will yield higher results instead of constantly going after more popular keywords (especially when you’re just starting out).

So, instead of “Interval Training” I chose “Interval Training at Home.” I can also do Interval Training for Women, Interval Training for Obese People, or Interval Training for Athletes.

How do you find long-tail keywords?

Simple, use the same exact SEO techniques I wrote about in my free manual. Once you’ve found which primary Keywords you want to target, start creating 3-5 word phrases that increase the specificity.

For example, lets say I wanted to write about Big Biceps. Big Biceps is a tough keyword to target. So what do you we do? We start thinking of things that people would search about using those two words.

Here’s a few I though of off the top of my head:

• Big Biceps Workout without Weights
• Big Biceps Workout you can Do at Home
• Top 10 Exercises for Big Biceps
• How to Get Big Biceps Fast

The BOLD portions are the keywords people would most likely search for. You can also put in BIG BICEPS into Google and see what suggestions they give you. Here are the results I got:

Using this feature, you can come up with a whole slew of article titles fairly easily. For example:

• Get Big Biceps and Triceps at Home
• Big Biceps Routine for the Gym
• Big Biceps Workout for Women

I’ve been using this technique, along with looking at my Google Analytics data to boost traffic. I’m doing ok. I’ve increased my traffic by 7% so far, so my income might match or slightly increase from last month.

I will give you the full update when ready.

One Last Thing: Keyword Density

Ezinearticles.com limits how many times you can mention a keyword in your post. However, lets look at how many times I’ve used a particular keyword in that article:

• Interval Training – 4 times
• Intervals – 3 times
• Interval Workout – 1 time
• Interval – 1 time

So you don’t need to go crazy and put your keyword all over the place, but you should use them frequently. Try to make the article flow well. Get someone to check it for you if you need to.

Hope this little tutorial helps. For more clickbank marketing tips, grab a free copy of my 2 Grand per Month Clickbank Formula.

A few weeks back, I received this comment on my main blog: “you still havent updated livingchill.com. what a waste of time you are.”

Seriously? So what if I didn’t update this blog. When did I ever say that I was going to write every day or every week or anything? I think one status update per month is more than enough.

Anything else and you’d probably become extremely bored. I will update when I have something to report on. And what about the second part of that comment? I’m a waste of time? What the hell!

Am I making you wait for me or something? Am I making you pay for some service that I’m providing? No. Everything on this site is 100% free. I’m basically sharing what’s worked for me and what hasn’t.

I’m not saying I’m some sort of guru that you should follow around 24/7. Wow. I really hope that who ever that was that made that comment never comments on any of my sites ever again.

What really offended me was the fact that he went to my fitness blog to comment, instead of commenting on this site. I get emails when a comment is placed on this site. Just comment on livingchill.com if you have a question that is related to affiliate marketing.

Wow.

Anyways, a lot of you have been asking about back links. Well, one of the vendors, Vince Delmonte, created this small PDF to help out his affiliates with SEO. It’s a really great read and will most likely answer all your questions concerning SEO and getting back links.

You can download it (for free) here: http://www.vincedelmontefitness.com/affiliates/seo_secrets.php

Wow, haven’t posted on this site since May 7. Well, lets do some reporting here.

So, how much money did I make this month? $1581.14. I’m getting close to making 2 grand, WITHOUT a huge product launches. I’ve come to realize that a huge product launch will help you make a lot of money, but it’s futile to rely on just one major launch.

Major launches only come out maybe 1-2 times per year, however product launches come out almost every week. In the past month alone, there were about 3 product launches, and at least 5 promos that I participated in.

Not all of them were super lucrative for me. But even if a promo helps you earn around $100, that’s still great for your monthly total. Anyways, lets take a look at April and May 2010:

So based on these stats, I’m thinking I can boost my income at least 10%, or $1739.25. However, there were a lot of sales made for members sections and partial payments. For members sections, I would get a percentage of the sale as long as the individual stayed in the members section.

However, for the partial/deferred payment, the individual usually payed a trial amount – like $5 – and then would pay the rest in 21-30 days. As long as customers don’t cancel, I should be seeing all those commission payments coming through in June.

My estimate is $326. 34 in rebills. Add that to my previous forecast, and you get $2065.59. So I’ll finally surpass the 2 grand mark without a huge product launch. If a huge product launch does come around (it is, after all, the summer), then I can make even more money!

Lets compare last year and this year:

So last year, I only made $129.87 in the entire month! Now that’s a huge improvement! But more importantly, take a look at my average income. This year, my monthly average income is $1208.82, compared to $198.72 last year.

June 2009 is highlighted because I made the most money that month last year. Meaning that I should be able hit some pretty good numbers this month overall. The second highest is October. Also realize that I didn’t start SERIOUS affiliate marketing until May 2009.

The point is that anyone who is serious can easily make around $100 their first month. Then you just use the momentum to build up your affiliate marketing business and blog, as I’ve done.

I want to take this time, now that I have your attention, and talk about one thing: back links. A lot of my survey responses were focused around how to get traffic and back links. The back links part…I have no idea.

People link to me on a daily basis. Some of the sites are legit, others are automated adsense sites. But the bottom line is that here I am and I don’t know anything about building links. I haven’t had any formal SEO training, and I’m getting 20,000 hits per month with an Alexa ranking of 328,700.

That’s why I keep telling to start a blog around something they know about and enjoy. It makes the whole process easier. Just use the SEO and keyword research tips I shared with you in my free manual, and keep writing.

Keep blogging, and figure out what you’re good at. The information is out there, for free. Are you good at article marketing, link building, writing content, youtube marketing, social bookmarking, facebook, or twitter?

There are hundreds of different ways to make a sale. Keep experimenting, reading, and studying, and you will achieve your goals.

Anyways, back to the analysis -

So, I’ve only increased my traffic by .97%. .97% increase in traffic equals a 7% increase in sales. It’s quite obvious to me I know how to CONVERT traffic, but I just need more of it. At this point, perhaps simply writing on my blog isn’t enough.

I plan to do more guest posts, article marketing, and introduce more higher end products. I will also take another crack at social media. I haven’t decided whether I’m going to rely on twitter, social bookmarking, or facebook.

Perhaps facebook, since I’m more active on it as it is. I will have to study what trainers such as Craig Ballantyne, Funk Roberts, and Mike Mahler are doing on Facebook.

I want to end this analysis with a huge victory. The last time I posted, I stated that my income had stagnated at around 300-400 dollars per week and I wanted to break past the $500 level. Well, I’ve done it!

Check this out:

Yes! It’s actually past $600. I just hope I can keep this steady. I’m also experimenting with a new way of positioning the products that I promote on my blog using this simple to develop spreadsheet, designed to help you feature your top products at optimal locations.

I used to just place whatever product was last sold at the top of my side bar. But I realized that this was a huge mistake! I started this experiment on Wednesday, so…yea look at those stats starting Wednesday.

Will get back to you soon!