How to Use Article Marketing to Make Money Online

This article is guest posted by Darren Chow.

There are so many ways to drive traffic online that it can be confusing for new marketers. If you are just starting out learning how to make money online, you may need to focus on traffic generation methods that have been proven to work. One of the most effective methods of traffic generation is article marketing.

What exactly is article marketing and how is traffic driven using this technique?

Article marketing is the process of writing and distributing useful articles that is related to the website you are trying to promote. When you write and interesting article and publish it on an article directory, you get both short, mid and long term traffic.

The short term traffic comes from the directory’s existing reader base. For example, if the article directory has a newsletter, your article headline is likely to be published in the newsletter. That way, you get an immediate surge of traffic. The more popular the niche, the more short term traffic you will get.

Mid and long term traffic will come from the search engines. Once your articles have been published, it’s only a matter of time that the search bots will come and lap up the yummy content. Since your articles remain online indefinitely, you stand a chance to have visitors find your articles and click on the links in your author resource box to visit your website.

In addition, many article directories also syndicate their content through RSS feeds to other blogs and websites. That means your articles get published in related websites. Remember, these articles have your links in them. The more they get noticed, the more traffic you are going to get.

Having traffic is really nice. But in order to make money online. You must have something to offer on your website. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take it that your offer can mean anything from clickable ads to leads registration to product sales (i.e. anything that makes money). The very first thing you need to do is to setup your own website.

Setting up your money making machine.

If you are using article marketing to drive traffic, I highly recommend that you buy your own domain name and setup your own website. Sure, that means a little bit of work on your part. But you’ll be glad that you did it, for a few reasons.

Firstly, not all article directories accept affiliate links. Affiliate links are simply URLs that point directly to the affiliate website. Secondly, what happens if the offer that you are promoting goes offline? You would be driving traffic to a webpage that is not making you any money.

It’s best that you have control over the traffic source. If you direct the traffic to your own website, you can always replace the offer with another active offer and continue to make money online.

If you really don’t want to buy your own domain name, you can always consider using a free blog from Blogspot.com or WordPress.com to promote your products and services.

To ensure that you get a high approval rates from the article directories, make sure that you have some solid content on your website. Add a few articles to your site. They don’t take too long to write. The reason why you have to do this is because Ezinearticles (the top article directory on the Internet) rejects URLs with nothing but advertising on them. In other words, don’t just paste a bunch of ads and affiliate links on your website. Add some images and content to make your site look like a real site with content.

If you have your own products to promote, you may add these products to your website to promote. But if you don’t, you can always grab some killer products from the Clickbank marketplace or the CPA networks.

Joining Clickbank or one of the CPA networks is free. It’s a little harder to get into CPA networks these days and they usually require phone verification. Once your account has been activated, you can promote any of the offers you see in the CPA network.

CPA stands for Cost Per Action. This means that you don’t have to make an actual sale to make a commission. It may be a download, a lead registration, or someone adding their ZIP code to a form. For every lead that you capture, you are paid a small sum of money. Of course, for offers that require a sale, you stand to make a much larger commission.

Now that your money making machine has been setup, it’s time to start driving traffic.

Driving traffic with article marketing.

Driving traffic with articles is an effective method to get targeted traffic. But you do need to know what you are doing. Start by preparing your articles for submission.

• Working on the headline. – The headline of your article must be creative and be able to capture the attention of your target prospects. What are some problems they are facing? Do you have the solution that they want? For example, if someone is facing a hair loss problem, they will probably respond to a headline that offers a hair loss prevention home remedy. If your headline is not interesting enough, the rest of the article becomes useless.
• Write a good article summary. – Most article directories accept the first two or three sentences of your article as an article summary. There are a couple of approaches that you can adopt. You can write a teaser that entices the reader to read the rest of the article. Or you can sum up your point to make sure that the reader gets the message that you are trying to convey. Both ways have been proven to work very well.
• Provide some meat in your content. – Note that your articles cannot be blatant self promotion. They must contain useful content for the readers. Otherwise, they tend to look more like press releases and may be rejected outright by the article directories. A well written article makes you look good, and you do want to look good in front of potential customers. Whether they want to do business with you depends very much on that first impression. Position yourself as a true expert and give some genuine tips and advice. Then at the end of the article, invite them to learn more at your website.
• Inviting readers to visit your website. – At the end of each article, you are allowed to promote yourself and your website. This is where you can promote your products and services directly. Keep it to about 300 words or so. A good author resource box uses proper anchor texts of between 3 to 5 words. You can also provide additional information about your website.

The key to success for article marketing is consistency and patience. As mentioned earlier, the search bots will find your articles sooner or later. After a few weeks to a couple of months, you will notice your rankings in the search engines rising. That is when you get a steady stream of traffic. If you continue to work on your link building, there is no reason why you shouldn’t expect to receive the traffic month after month.

Having traffic means the visitors are now coming to site, looking for solutions to their problems. Provide them with killer products and services and watch your conversion rates go through the roof.

Darren Chow is a full time article marketer. He founded a successful article submission service, and has been offering high quality article writing and submission services to hundreds of Internet Marketers worldwide.
http://www.fastsubmitarticles.com