Article Marketer Blog

In affiliate marketing, you can employ your writing skills in many ways to promote your particular business. You can engage in article marketing and in e-mail campaigns. You can write advertisements and direct-mail packages that promote your affiliate product. You can also send out press releases to announce the latest news concerning your product.

Press releases are a staple when it comes to getting an important message out to the buying public. They are a public relations tool to give useful information to potential customers. They have a rich history in business marketing. They keep consumers informed about products and services. They can certainly be helpful in making people aware of your affiliate product.

When you write up a press release, you send it off in the hopes that someone will publish it. This may be offline or online. Your best bet for publication is a trade or professional publication in your market niche. Your press release will have a journalistic, news reporting tone and look to it. It will not "read" or appear as an advertisement. Even though it will be about your affiliate product, it will not blatantly "sell" the product.

What are the components of a good press release? There is a general standard format for this type of communication vehicle. They are traditionally a page or two in length. For an example of press releases from corporations, check out different companies' websites. They often post a record of their press releases under their "Investors" tab.

Study a sampling of press releases from different enterprises and look for the similarities in format. You can then write your own affiliate product press releases according to this accepted format. The following are what you will typically see when it comes to a press release:

Company Name, Address, Date, and Release Information

Your business name and your address should appear above the main headline. It will be on the left-hand side of the page. The date of the press release will appear above the main headline on the right-hand side of the page. Above the main headline in this area, you will also type the words "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE." You may also want to delay release until a specific date. In that case, you may type something like "HOLD RELEASE UNTIL JANUARY 1, 2009."

Headline

This is in bold type and trumpets the most important and significant aspect of your press release. An example would be "John Doe and Sons Introduce Environmentally-Friendly Widget."

Origin of Press Release

Below your headline, at the beginning of the first sentence of your press release, you type the location from where the press release is coming from. This will be the city or town from where you conduct your affiliate business. The date can go here again. This area would look like this: Des Moines, Iowa, January 1, 2009.

Body Copy

In your body copy, you want the news out. Here you relate the Who, What, Where, When and Why of your press release. This is where you give all that vital information to your reader.

You can break up the body with sub-titles, bullet points, and short paragraphs for an easy read. Let your readers know why this press release is important in a concise and compelling way. Include interesting facts, figures, data, and statistics that will catch your readers' attention here. Just make sure they are relevant to the press release.

Final Paragraph

In a final paragraph, you can direct readers to where they can find more information about you and your affiliate product. This will be your website, blog, and article writing efforts on the Internet.

You can also include a small paragraph here about your enterprise. In addition, press releases, often conclude with "END." A publishing mechanism that has the weight of tradition behind it, it is still part of many press releases today.

Keep your press releases focused, short, and to-the-point. They are a great way to promote your affiliate business and cost you nothing but the time needed to write one. They can gain you exposure and help you drive you affiliate business forward.

Write On!

Tiva

(Tiva Kelly is the Head of Article Coaching and offers advice to authors at Article Marketer, a highly popular article distribution service. Learn how to market your small business by submitting articles through Article Marketer. )

In business you will always have a myriad of marketing choices. It is wise to employ different marketing initiatives to promote your products. However, you must control each one so they give you the return on investment you desire.

Today we will look at having a controlled article marketing campaign. Article marketing through an article distribution service that has an extensive publishers list is the way to go. It's a great way to get widespread distribution of your article writing efforts and website links.

A controlled article marketing campaign begins with choosing the proper article topics. You do this by knowing all there is to know about your affiliate product. You then link the benefits of your affiliate product to topics related to the product.

For example, your affiliate product may be a software program that helps companies manage inventory better. What are the related topics that fit this product? They are any topic that deals with cash flow, streamlining operations, inventory turnover, and the like. Whatever concerns business people when it comes to ordering, storing, and moving inventory are topics you can write about regularly. From those informative articles, readers can link back to your site where they will find that helpful software program. You will show them how your affiliate software program fulfils needs you talked about in your articles.

After choosing article topics and writing about them, a controlled article marketing campaign means securing proper distribution. As stated at the beginning you want an article distribution service that has an extensive publishers list.

This bears repeating because it is essential to reaching diverse niche markets. Take that inventory-management software program, where should an article related to that product end up. It should not end up in a magazine on general interest fashion and beauty. It should end up at a business trade publication focusing on helping retailers improve operational processes. Your target audience is business people who have a need for inventory management solutions. You need to look for publishers who cater to them.

A good article distribution service will provide you an extensive list of publishers so you can select specialized publications. You are in control of your article marketing campaign when you have many options in the way of publishers. You are not at the mercy of a basic, limited, general, and small publishers list.

How else can you employ a controlled article marketing campaign? You do it by aligning yourself with an article distribution service that allows unlimited article submission. You may be writing on a variety of topics related to your affiliate product. You know the more articles you submit the greater the chance for increased traffic to your website. You do not want your message stifled by a service that limits the number of articles you can submit.

Your target audience has questions and concerns. They want answers to questions and solutions to concerns. Your articles are offering answers and solutions, and those valuable links back to your site. Why would you choose an article distribution service that limits how many answers and solutions you can send out? With Web surfers hungry for useful information you want to be in control of how many articles you can send out in a subscription period.

One other way to run a controlled article marketing campaign is to poll regularly your niche to keep up-to-date on their needs. As time goes on people sometimes change. There needs do as well. They may want enhancements to your affiliate product. They may want information on new data and studies related to your affiliate product. When you know what your audience's new needs are you can begin to search for information to fulfill those needs. You will gear your article writing to topics that address these new needs. Of course, the articles will link back to where your "latest version" affiliate products are.

A controlled article marketing campaign will speak to your target audience's concerns. You will provide them relevant information and a direct link to where a certain affiliate product resides. This is your affiliate product, which they now know about because of a controlled article marketing campaign with a clear message offering solutions.

To your success,

Brad

Brad McGovern is the Marketing Manager at Article Marketer, and offers advice and news of note to article marketers. Watch for more from Brad in the coming days!

Affiliate marketers today must understand the power of keywords when it comes to promoting their products. Keywords are as essential to affiliate marketers as main traffic arteries are to bricks and mortar businesses. In other words, they drive people right up to your doorstep.

It's important to employ keywords in your article writing efforts. It's equally important to employ them in your web page content. In what ways should you employ keywords so they become an effective marketing tool? The following are a few ways:

Article marketing

Consider your article promotion campaigns first. You spend time creating articles that give readers useful information on topics related to your affiliate product. You do so in hopes that readers will see you as an authority on a subject. You want them to trust you as a reliable knowledge provider. Further to that, you want them to trust you as a credible affiliate product seller.

They will never know any of this if your articles do not contain keywords. The reason is they will never find your articles in the first place in the wide expanse called cyberspace. Your article writing efforts must contain keywords in the title, opening paragraphs, expository content, and ending paragraphs.

However, they must be the right keywords. Effective affiliate marketers place popular keywords in their articles that pertain to their affiliate product. They presume that people will type these keywords into search engine boxes when searching for products. If your articles contain keywords that potential customers enter into search engines there's a good chance they will end up at your article.

Therefore, it's imperative that you know your customers wants and needs thoroughly. When you do, you understand their thought processes. When you know how they think, you will "think-up" keywords that they would use in their searches. Make your keywords match theirs and watch your article marketing efforts produce results.

Web Page Promotion

When you write content for your web pages employ the same principles you do in article writing. Make sure you place those same keywords in the body content of your web pages. Place the keywords in headings and in even in some sub-titles that you write for your website. Placing keywords in the Meta Keywords tag is not enough.

Search engines regularly "crawl" the Internet checking Web sites out. They take information from each site's content. This information determines the category a particular site will be under in search engine results. This information also helps search engines describe the Web site properly. They will then rank sites and base their ranking on keywords in your content.

That's why keywords are so important. The keywords and phrases that people enter, that are part of your content, mean you receive a higher ranking. The search engines recognize your keyword information. They formulate that this matches popular search terms. They then rank you higher accordingly.

Like your article-writing efforts, choose the proper keywords for actual web pages. If your affiliate product is red alligator shoes, your web page content had better contain "alligator shoes", and "red alligator shoes." It should also contain "quality alligator shoes", "premium red alligator shoes", and "imported red alligator shoes." In other words, be specific. Your web page content must not only contain the word "shoes" or "quality shoes." Your potential customers will be looking for specific shoes and will type in specific words.

In addition, your text ads and banner advertisements should have keywords in them. This is especially true in advertising titles. Make sure your ads are concise and precise with the keywords strategically placed in them.

It also doesn't hurt to have sidebar text and navigation bars keyword optimized. It's all about making your total website attractive to the search engines. Do not overstuff the web pages with keywords, though. Have just enough on each page but not too much. Too many keywords will make the web pages read unnaturally and will not give your website that professional aura.

Using keywords effectively in article marketing and web page promotion will bring visitors to each platform. Let effective keyword usage be another tool in your affiliate-marketing kit. After all, the more tools you have to grow your business, the faster that business will grow.

To your success,

Brad

Brad McGovern is the Marketing Manager at Article Marketer, and offers advice and news of note to article marketers. Watch for more from Brad in the coming days!

We are going to continue on with finding and supplying products for a niche market today. We have one more installment in this section, so be sure to come back next week.

Supply & Demand

Nothing happens until something moves. Marketing is a zero sum game of give and take between a buyer and a seller. Both sides must be present in a niche to successfully prosper there. You may have the finest, automatic blue fuzzy widget in the world, but it's useless if no one wants blue fuzzy widgets.

On the other end of the same stick, if the demand for blue fuzzy widgets is high, but none are available, there's not much opportunity to prosper there either. That doesn't mean, however, that it's a lost cause. Many marketers who find a demand for a product will often create a supply of them to fill the void.

Everyone has their own way of doing things, but I typically look for the demand before considering an actual supply. If there is no one searching for a product, there is no opportunity to sell it to anyone. It's as simple as that: you must have a demand for it. How many tales have you heard of great bargains made on warehouses of stuff, only to discover why too late.

Supply, on the other hand, is easier to accommodate. If the demanded product does not exist, the opportunity is there to create it yourself. Supply can come from you if needed. You see this often in ebooks and software packages.

Using keyword tools is great way to find out whether demand exists or not. Here are some good tools:

1. Google keyword tool
2. WordTracker.com
3. Alexa.com

Let's say you find a niche market that receives good traffic but no product is offered out there to promote. You have two options: create a product or miss an opportunity. There are two types of products that may be built to satisfy a demand: digital products and tangible goods.

A digital product, usually e-books, software or a membership site, allows you to charge for information or services. Tangible goods, things like baseballs, candles, or iPods, are sold through storefronts or private ecommerce sites.

Creating A Digital Product

Many informational niches are extremely difficult to find good for, unless you know where to get it. People will gladly pay information when they can't easily find the information for free, or maybe not at all. Software that would benefit a large segment of a special group is also an option.

You don't have to necessarily saw the boards and drive the nails to build a product. There are many services to outsource work. They are usually available at great savings over high-dollar copywriters or software developers. Here are several you can check out:

* Elance.com
* Rentacoder.com
* Scriptlance.com

To market your product, offer it through network services. They will handle all the backend responsibilities and you get to set the price. You will still be responsible for the marketing aspect of it though. Here are some services to use for digital products.

* ClickBank.com
* Paydotcom.com
* RegNow.com

Creating a Tangible Product Business

There is always a high demand for certain niche tangible items. Find the demand first and then a supplier or producer for the product you need. Many of them make and ship them for you. Once all of that is set up, you're in the retail business. The first and probably best place to go with a tangible product is eBay. It's the largest online marketplace in the world and perfect to sell tangible products through.

That's enough for one day, I suppose. Be sure to come back next week when we will discuss niche research and research tools a little more in depth.

To your success,

Brad

Brad McGovern is the Marketing Manager at Article Marketer, and offers advice and news of note to article marketers. Watch for more from Brad in the coming days!

When it comes to article writing, you want to make it easy for Web surfers to find your useful content. From there you can direct them to your affiliate products website. Your article writing efforts must contain the right keywords for people to find your content in the first place. In addition, proper integration of those keywords into your text is vitally important.

Choosing the right keywords for your article marketing efforts requires understanding your target market. You must know what words your potential customers will enter into a search engine. For example, say your affiliate product is quality organic teas. When choosing keywords for your articles think of the most popular words and phrases a tea aficionado would use.

They would typically search using terms like "tea," "organic teas," "herbal teas," "green tea," "black tea," "oolong tea," and "quality teas." They may further use terms such as "decaf tea," "chai tea," "white tea," and "chamomile tea," among others. Your job is to place into your articles the ones most closely related to the type of tea you sell.

However, proper keyword usage means strategically placing these chosen keywords in your articles. Over stuffing your content with keywords to attract search engine attention is the wrong strategy. Your article must read easily and flow logically for the reader. Just tossing keywords in wherever in your articles will annoy your readers. This annoys search engines as well and they look out for this.

Your mission when it comes to writing search engine optimization (SEO) articles is a very basic one. Your content has to read smoothly and persuasively, without looking stuffed.

Articles overloaded with keywords, makes your articles seem stilted. The "read" becomes choppy and even incoherent in some cases. The unnatural flow of words just to fit in keywords can break your readers' concentration. They will not focus on your topic because they are concentrating on making sense of the piece. Trying to fit in too many keywords may mean you are illogically placing these words. That leads to reader frustration.

That's the worst thing that can happen to your article marketing efforts. Frustrating readers means they will click away from your content. When you lose their interest, you lose them as potential customers. In essence, your article promotion efforts were for naught.

Here are some tips so that proper keyword usage is always a vital part of your article marketing efforts:

Choose the right keywords: Selecting keywords that are obscure and that no one will employ in a search gains you nothing. You waste time and effort because you will drive little or no traffic to your content and hence your website. Choose the most likely keywords that a person looking for your affiliate product would choose.

Use keywords in your article title: Using the above organic tea example, your title may be "Five Ways Organic Teas Promote Good Health." Be creative with your titles but make sure they make sense. Make sure they immediately let the reader know the gist of the article they will be reading.

Use keywords in your first paragraph and your last paragraph: You want to open and close your articles strongly. Readers will often read the beginning of an article, skim, then read the conclusion. You want your keywords in each area to spur readers on to your website. You want to let them know at the beginning, and at the end of your article, what you are focusing on. Keywords let them know.

Use keywords at planned intervals throughout the body of your article: This is where that strategic placing comes into effect. If you use five or six paragraphs of expository text, use your keywords six to nine times. You get a good representation of keywords in your content without forcing them in too often. Your text will read properly. Your readers will not even notice the strategic way you placed the words.

Proper keyword usage is a vital component of article writing. You ensure that people find your articles when you use keywords in the right way. You increase the chances they will then link to your website. Keywords are the key to an article marketing campaign that produces results.

Write On!

Tiva

(Tiva Kelly is the Head of Article Coaching and offers advice to authors at Article Marketer, a highly popular article distribution service. Learn how to market your small business by submitting articles through Article Marketer. )