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.

Allright guys, so I had a great week with clickbank. Total income this past week was $127.31

Screenshot:

Total sales this week: 8

Goals for this week:

• Make 18 Sales (2-3 sales per day)

Where did sales come from?

• 4 came from Mailing List
• 4 came from SEO

Now that I have a better understanding where my sales are coming from, I can create a better plan of action. I recieved a total of 2,827 hits this past week. If 2,827 hits brings me 8 sales, then I need around 6,360 hits to bring in 18 sales.

My conversion rate is still around .2-.3% Still pretty bad, but I’m not sure what else I can do to find a more targeted audience. So, I’ll focus on amazing content, and increased traffic.

6,360 hits per week is equal to around 908 hits per day. In essence, I’m trying to double my traffic. How? SEO. My SEO is powerful, so I’ll be pumping out a ton of content targeting some brand new keywords.

I’m not dealing with article marketing anymore. Lets focus on what’s working.

I haven’t updated in a few days, pretty much because there’s not much to say. This past week was the worst sales week ever. I only earned $35.

Last night I made a huge change to my blog. I put any blog post that resulted in a sale on the front page. How did I do that? I just looked at my CB transactions, and matched the dates with the blog post.

Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a blog post resulted in a sale, becuase I didn’t start putting tracking codes in until very recently. However, it’s a clue.

I also made sure those posts were actually decent. So, I think I have a nice spread of posts on the front page. By the way, there’s 50 posts on the front page.

This should be magic for SEO. In fact, I woke up this morning and found a sale. It wasn’t from my email list, so someone probably found my site through search.

The sale was from my side bar. Meaning that someone clicked on the product through the side bar and purchased it. That’s the magic of tracking codes – You know exactly how the customer got to the product.

But what you don’t know is what triggered the sale. My cousin asked me the other day about this. He gave me some ways to track this, but it didn’t work.

I’m not an expert in google analytics, and I’m going to spend some time to try and find an answer to this questions – “What actually results in a sale?”

- Is it a series of posts that they read?

- Are they looking for a review of that product?

- Where they already searching for that product?

A lot of my posts that are made through my email list can be easily traced back to a particular post. However, when it comes to search traffic – it’s difficult.

It’s going to be search traffic that’s really going to allow me to live the type of lifestyle that I wish to live. This thing needs to be hands-off.

Right now I’m putting in around 30-40 hours per week. Eventually, that number should go down to 4 hours. Most of the tools have already been set in place:

- High Traffic blog

- Targeted Maling List

- A selection of affiliate Products

So, it’s only a matter of time. I need to be smart, patient, and willing to experiment.

Last night I started a screenplay. It’s been over a year since I’ve written anything that is not related to Shah Training. It felt really good. I forgot how therapeutic scrpt writing can be.

Future plans are naturally to just keep working on Shah Training. The goal is to optimize the site for search. I want to see at least 10 sales per day just through search.

I just looked at my analytics and notice 33 hits from Google already. It’s 8 am so far. That’s not too bad at all. I usually so only 20-30 hits overall in the morning. RIght now my total hits are 87 from a variety of sources.

Alright, lets see what happens the rest of the day.

I seem to see two different sets of marketers on this site: a) People are making consistent sales, and b) People who’s sales are sporadic.

I’m not an expert, but I did some article and PPC marketing, and I must say it’s a lot harder than sending out an email to someone. I see it to be really strange that people are not generating a mailing list. I send out mailings on a daily basis.

Most people get into this because they want “freedom.” I don’t want to work 9-5 and make some other jack**s rich while I toil away at making HIS company successful. No, I want to be successful with my own project.

That’s the first reason. The second reason that I’m personally doing it is because I need a way to finance my lifestyle. There are lots of things that I want to do with my life that will not be possible if I end up in somedead end job.

So here are 2 reasons why your CB sales suck. And I hope this helps people out:

1) You’re not retaining potential clients

Do you really think people buy on the first visit? How many times have you gone to a mall, or store, or looked up a product and said, “Hey! I need this. I’m going to buy it!” Never. I’m not an impulse buyer. I’m really really frugal. But at the same time, I purchase at least one fitness product per month. Why? Because I’m interested in it. Which brings me to my second point -

2) You’re not attracting the right clients

What you want is someone who needs that product. The people that come to my site are people that already workout. I’ve had people buy multiple times from me because I showed them a need through my blogging. I had one guy buy 5 products from me!

So in conclusion, what you need to do is start an opt-in list. Don’t do bum marketing. Instead, write your articles and target keywords that arespecifically for your target market. Make the articles really good so they click on it. The idea is to win their trust as quickly as possible so they sign up to your list.

I had one guy buy from me 2 days after he signed up after my email list. Now that’s how you convert people. Not by sending people to a vendors site and hoping for the best. Yesterday I spent around 6-7 dollars onPPC and didn’t get a single sale.

I realized this morning that I need to what’s working and stop listening to all these people are supposedly experts – but I’m making more sales than they are. I’m officially putting a hold on allppc marketing.

It’s going to be solely about growing my list as quickly as possible with relevant people. Don’t be afraid to send out email everyday. The only people that will unsubscribe are people that will not buy from you.

Hope this helps people out!

I been getting a few questions through the Digital Point Clickbank forum. Here’s one that came in this morning:

Just wondering, are you making good money with adwords ppc ? you mentioned you made 1 sale. Is that good? May I know how do you choose your keyword and any tips for adword

Here was my response:

Not that difficult ****. People make a big deal out of nothing.

All I do is go to the google keyword tool, put in a keyword that relates to my product, then grab all the 50-200 keywords that they suggest and put it into my list.

I make a few ad groups and see what happens. Start with 10 and every day, slowly get rid of the worst performing one untilyou’re left with just 3.

This is when you start testing out the actual ads.

Also, make sure you use the demographic feature. I cut down on the number of countries I was targeting to 13 because that is where i recieved my sales from.

I also made sure that only people between the ages of 25 – 50 clicked on my ads. No one else has money.

The sale I made was good, becuase I only spend $2. I’ve made mistakes and spent $20 to make one sale for a product that gives me $20 commissions. I’ve either broke evven or lost money.

This time, I sold a product that give me $8.90 commssion, so my profit was $7.90. Don’t always go for the high paying products.

Hope this helps.