Category Archives: Article Marketing

Choose Your Topics Carefully and Write to Excite

You know what it’s like to search for some online content and come across an article with a headline that piques your interest. You are interested in what the article promises and look forward to reading it to get answers to your questions on a topic.

However, it’s certainly disappointing when you get to the end of the article and find that it didn’t deliver what it promised. You may have found the content boring and irrelevant. You know you just spent time for no gain. You gained no new knowledge and now must continue searching for solutions and information you require.

You do not want readers of your articles, whether online or in newsletters to experience what you have in the past when it comes to useless content. That’s why it’s very important that you choose your article topics carefully. That’s why you then have to present them in an interesting fashion so you can form that connection with your readers.

As an affiliate marketer, you have to write articles that lead your readers from your articles back to your website. They will only follow the trail to your home if you provide them information that is meaty, not fluffy like cotton candy from a state fair.

Your potential customers get enough fluff from tacky TV advertising, and other cheap promotional marketing designed to get them to buy. You need to design your articles so they convey useful information. You don’t want to give readers that fluffy cotton candy, you want to give your readers meat and potatoes.

Meat and potatoes writing fills a reader up with knowledge and satisfies. When you have articles that truly connect with a reader, they seek out your website. They desire to learn more about what you can offer them.

Choose article topics that are answers to questions you know a typical reader on a certain product or subject would have. Your article, when it answers their questions, provides solutions, and imparts new knowledge, is their doorway to your affiliate site.

If your affiliate product is organic green teas, you want to write an article that provides detailed information on why organically grown green tea is better for tea drinkers. You do not want to write an article that basically says, ” Yes, I sell great green teas, they taste good and are good for you, so that’s why you should drink them”. That tells your reader nothing. It is an article that just relates headlines they’ve seen a thousand times about green tea. It’s hype and offers them nothing of substance that answers questions.

A great article title for this affiliate product would be “Why the Antioxidant Properties of Organic Green Teas May Help Fight Cancer”. That is an article that will have specifics, and will interest the health-conscious tea drinker. When they receive satisfying information from the article and then see your website link at the end, where do you think they will go? A fluff article that doesn’t fill them up will probably be abandoned halfway through. That means your reader will not even get to your link, and hence not to you.

People are constantly scanning the web, magazines, and newsletters, for information. They want to see a headline for an article that sparks their interest. This way they can decide right away if the content will speak to their concerns. Once they decide to move past the headline to the article, they want that satisfying meat and potatoes meal the headline promised. They want the meat and potatoes served attractively, in an interesting way.

That’s why your article is your creation, which you can prepare in your own unique way to satisfy specific readers’ wants and needs. Choose meaty topics and serve them up in a way that makes readers want to dig in. Don’t make the articles dry discourses akin to a psyche lecture at an institution of higher learning. Make them entertaining and informative, with lots of data, facts, and information presented in a breezy way that allows for comfortable reading.

Choose your topics carefully, write to excite so readers read right to the end where your links are. Give them a full meal so they can sit back satisfied and then head for the dessert table. That dessert table is your website where your affiliate products wait for them.

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
.

Increase Your Website Traffic With Article Writing

As is an existing business, or even a new developing one, you can benefit from article marketing. And to maximize your internet marketing opportunities you should have plenty of articles, newsletter, and content offered at your website site. But you will also want get your articles into trade journals, other websites, and directories using your website link. Message boards are another good place to post your articles and newsletters.

Writing all these articles does take time. However, you don’t have to write these articles yourself. There are many freelance article writers on the internet today who can write quality articles for you for a fee much smaller than you might imagine. Many of these freelancers can also do your internet marketing for you by submitting your articles to the appropriate directories, websites, or message boards for you.

You can also insert a link to invite potential customers to subscribe to your newsletter or article, which boosts your internet marketing. People will be able to click onto the link and automatically receive your latest newsletter. Your newsletter or can also contain a discount coupon or other purchasing incentive to encourage customers to buy your product or services.

Another thing you can do to improve your internet marketing even further is to give re-sell rights on your newsletters and articles. Believe it not, this will actually spread your internet marketing further because people will post your information on their websites. If you are concerned that other people may change your article or newsletter you can protect the documents from being change by anyone except yourself.

Your articles or newsletters should create a sense of urgency in your reader. With any type of sales your want to encourage your customer to act now and buy your services or products today. A well written article will draw the customer in and will encourage that customer to buy today. You can also create a membership website to build a solid loyal customer base for your internet marketing.

As an article marketer you may want to consider article syndication. Article syndication means more potential customers will see your article or newsletters. Syndication is basically letting a webmaster who runs a site related to your product and services use your article. Content rich SEO articles give webmasters several options to attract people to their websites, and in return for using your article, these webmasters insert a one-way link back to your website and spread your internet marketing much further than you ever could alone.

Another advantage of article marketing is that it gives content rich SEO pages is that they boost search engine rankings, giving you a better chance of hitting that first search page in a persons search for products and services like, or even similar to, yours. It’s that first page you want your company, products, or services to appear on, not on the fourth page. But this requires you to create or purchase content rich SEO articles.

Here’s another little tip for internet marketing. Be careful with what websites you have your article posted on. If the website isn’t even remotely related to your company, services, or products you could be wasting this resource and could even damage the reputation of your own website.

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Market Yourself, Market Your Business With Word-Power

Why use article writing for increasing your online sales? Well, as any great copy writer will tell you, the power of words is difficult to overestimate. By using article writing you can establish a powerful Internet business presence that will have people streaming in to your websites.

Why is article writing so potent? It’s because with writing and placing articles chock full of free, well-written, relevant information, you make yourself into an expert in your given niche or niche’s industry. People begin to view you as a fount of wisdom, and a generous fount that is always offering free advice that they can use as they see fit, or who is teaching them valuable stuff that they probably couldn’t learn about elsewhere.

On the Internet, content is king. People do a lot of shopping online, but the thing they most search for, even when they set out to do shopping, is content. The Internet is the world’s greatest source of free information. It’s vast, it’s diverse, and it’s much more conveniently indexed and searched through than the best library. Give people great content and they’ll soon want to learn more about you and they’ll become interested in your business just because it’s yours.

To be successful with article writing, you will write articles about a given topic–any topic that directly, narrowly relates to your niche market, that is–and publish these articles at article content sites. There is a wide array of these sites on the Internet already and more crop up all the time. A Web Crawler or Google search will find you plenty of them. They include places like Go, Articles Base, Ezine, Article Snatch, Article Biz, Search Warp, and on and on. These are sites where people go for two reasons: they want to find free information about something or they want to find free information that they can use at their websites.

Either one of these motives is perfect for your end purposes.

To place articles at these places you’ll need to create a free profile and account. In your profile you’ll include a link to your website. Different content sites have different rules about how shamelessly self-promoting your articles there are allowed to be; but at the very least you will always be allowed to get at least one linkback to your website with every single article you publish.

Don’t give away your article’s copy rights to a site. Publish at sites that permit you to publish that same article at dozens of other places at the same time. This allows you the maximum exposure.

Remember, the whole idea with article writing is to create an image of yourself as highly informed, professional, friendly, and potentially useful. Your articles should be grammatically and spelling-wise perfect; written with some pizazz; friendly but at the same time professional in tone; and focused on matters that directly relate to your niche. Have fun, be informative, and write, write, write!

Bruno Auger is an expert in the web hosting industry. I provide professional web hosting, ecommerce web hosting, personal web hosting, and blog hosting plans at Brixhost. Check out my personal blog for promotions and free information.

Target Each Article You Write to a Specific Person

As an affiliate marketer you have to connect with your readers on a personal level. A reader who comes across your content on the web or in a newsletter wants to know you are talking to him or her directly. It’s not something they consciously think of when they approach an article, it’s just something they sub-consciously desire when they read an article. In other words, they know they want a connection without thinking about it, and know it when you aren’t connecting with them. Therefore, the key to connecting with your reader is to write an article as if you were talking to him or her one on one.

The first thing you want to do is figure out who a specific topic is geared to so you can tailor your writing to them. Your affiliate product market may be a broad one. However, you articles will often only apply to a specific subset of your market. If your affiliate products are a line of vitamins and herbal supplements you may want to write an article for a sub-niche interested in Echinacea only. Every article you write for wide distribution on the web or in a newsletter does not have to speak to your entire target market. Being a successful affiliate marketer means knowing who to talk to and how to talk to them.

That’s what’s great about article writing. You can come up with a myriad of article topics by looking at sub-groups within your niche and subgroups within your product lines. That Echinacea article may speak to those of your niche who are solely interested in herbal supplements with purported abilities to enhance the immune system. Others who are part of your vitamin and herbal supplements niche may not be interested in this article topic. That’s okay; you have lots of other vitamin and herbal supplement articles waiting in the wings to fulfill their desires for useful information. Right now you want to connect with the reader who desires an article on the possible immune-boosting properties of Echinacea.

Now that you know what your topic is and who exactly in your niche you are writing it for, you have to make sure the connection happens. You make sure it does by answering questions in the article that you know the reader is likely to ask. Your Echinacea article must have answers to questions like “What do studies show about this plants health- giving properties?” and “What standards, if any, are in place to ensure consistent potency of store bought Echinacea?”.

These are things your reader may want to know when it comes to hunkering down with your article. You have to speak to this person directly and answer his or her questions. You have to talk to this reader as if he or she were sitting with you over a cup of coffee at your kitchen table. That’s how a connection on a personal level will form with this person.
When you understand your affiliate products and all their features you can provide information in your articles that are answers waiting for questions. These questions will come in the form of web searches by those of your niche market seeking information.

Your article has to talk to them directly. Your article has to be the person sitting across from the reader at the kitchen table. That person is asking questions and as they read your article is supplying answers and doing it in a way that they feel you prepared the answers specifically for them. That’s when this person will think, sub-consciously, “Yes, this writer understands me. This writer gets it!” There you go, you’ve made a connection.

That reader will feel they are engaged in a dialogue with you on a personal level and will begin to trust you. This reader will trust doing more research about the topic, and will trust linking back to your website to do so. They will also develop trust in your affiliate product based on a well-written article that speaks to them directly. An article that makes a reader think you wrote it specifically for them so-to-speak is one that will encourage click backs and increase your affiliate sales.

Make that next article you write one that targets a specific sub-niche and write it to appeal to an individual within that sub-niche. Do that for every specific article topic you write about. Write the article as a letter to one person who needs your information tailored for them. You will come across as someone they can relate to. You will come across as someone interested in their need for quality information. You will certainly connect with them on a personal level when you target your articles in this manner.

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
.

Control Your Marketing Plan to Connect With Customers

You have it all worked out, you know all you’re going to do to encourage customers to come your way. Now, you just have to find the time to do it, and do it properly. There are myriad ways to market your affiliate product.

There are many market forces operating that can hinder or even upset your plans completely. You need to choose the best marketing methods for your affiliate product and not let turmoil or fear in the market stop you from staying focused on your goals.

The best marketing methods for your affiliate product are ones that you can afford. While being able to afford it financially is of primary importance, being able to afford the time and energy investment runs a very close second. Why is this? It’s because you have to consider the “opportunity costs” of your marketing efforts. Cost Accountants always look at opportunity costs when they measure business efforts and performance. You need to do that to, informally even, with your affiliate business.

“Opportunity cost” is the potential benefit that you give up when you choose one alternative over another. You may decide to invest time, money, and energy in attending a business show to market your affiliate product. However, rather than do that you could invest the same resources in a direct-mail campaign for your affiliate product. If you choose to go the business show route, your opportunity cost is the income you could have received from a successful direct-mail campaign.

That’s why a successful marketing program is one where you choose the best alternative. This means spending time analyzing marketing methods for the ones that offer the best return for time, energy, and money invested. Choose the best alternative at the beginning, before you even launch your marketing program.

Successful affiliate marketing, where you control your marketing plan, is one where you constantly evaluate your marketing initiatives. When you do this, you learn to recognize rather quickly what is working and what isn’t. If you blindly execute marketing initiatives and do not measure their performance until year-end, you may be wasting that time, energy, and money you’re expending.

However, if you regularly monitor marketing efforts for returns they provide, you will become more efficient. You will drop ones that are not driving customers to your website and replace them with ones that are more productive. Here, you control your marketing efforts; you are not letting them operate unchecked.

Why spend money on pay-per-click advertising for a year and receive no benefit from it. It’s that opportunity cost again. Evaluate and replace initiatives as needed, as your marketing plan runs its course over the year.

One other way to control your marketing plan is by being adaptable to new marketing trends. This is where you keep abreast of new ways to promote your product. This is where you keep in touch with your affiliate manager for new ideas and resources to promote your affiliate product. This is how you stay out of marketing ruts, by not using archaic methods not suited to your product.

Today, your affiliate product marketing can spread around the world at the click of a mouse. Marketing could not provide this years ago. You have to make sure your marketing utilizes these technologies. You have to have advertising content formatted and designed to grab the interest of internet users with short attention spans.

When it comes to market forces that you have no control over, you have to learn to focus. Sure, there may be a recession, or there may be increased competition for your affiliate product. Maybe your affiliate product is dependent on weather conditions for healthy sales. Maybe unwarranted bad press about your affiliate product has materialized.

These are all obstacles you need to overcome through staying focused on your marketing plan. Affiliate marketing is not a walk through paradise. It’s hard work. It’s dealing with customer objections and complaints. It’s letting the market shakedown anyway that it chooses. All the while, if you believe in your product, you have to stay consistent in your effort to promote it. Do not let market forces that you cannot change stop you from marketing a product you know has great potential.

Take control of your marketing plan by focusing on choosing the best marketing alternatives. After you do, constantly evaluate how these marketing plans are doing. Remember to be adaptable so you can try new marketing trends that develop. Know your market, but don’t let uncontrollable market forces make you lose sight of your marketing plan. Be that affiliate marketer who controls marketing, so the market does not control you.

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!

Private Label Rights Are Still Excellent Value If You Are Clever Enough

If given the resale rights by an owner of an article or a book, one has the authority to sell that book to others then keep the profits. Private label rights however goes much further, efficiently granting the ‘private label rights’buyer to do what he wants with the articles or text materials. PLR gives the buyer the benefits of a very own product without the effort of making it.

Having ownership rights to articles, you are allowed to do all the revisions or editing that you want. Likewise, you can incorporate any link that you desire, any illustrations or images and add in any additional content and include your byline after revising the article.

‘Private label materials’include information products, graphical files, software, and more. Ebooks, reports and articles are the easiest to work on.

PLR Disadvantage

The only downside of PLR articles is that these series of articles that you purchase are not unique, since these are often sold to several individuals, although the numbers of articles sold are limited.

However, because you are permitted to alter the articles’content, you have the capability to make the articles unique, and even arrange it in a very different manner and tone that will result to be an original piece.

Simply put, if you have a smart thing with words and the talent for writing, the outcome of the article that you will sell is totally different from everyone else’s and instead of competing with some 400 other individuals who have the very same ‘private label rights’ as yours, by simply changing the content, rearranging the chapters, adding new sections, deleting some irrelevant paragraphs, constructing a catchy title, changing the author’s name into yours, then you have an original article.

PLR advantages

1. Less effort means saving time. For a well researched, informative and good quality article to be written, containing several chapters and comprising of about fifty pages, it can very well take at least fifty hours of your time and effort. With PLR contents, you easily get instant content access.

2. No ‘outbound links’. With PLR articles, you are not obligated to incorporate ‘outbound links’ at the ending of your articles. No third party advertisements means your readers can concentrate well on your unique articles. Take note that you can add links to your website or your affiliates.

3. Cost efficient. Hiring someone to write articles for you can be expensive, costing around $17 a piece; so then if you need a 50 page article, then it will cost about $850. Whereas PLR articles are much cheaper generally available for $29 – $30 for 200 PLR articles.

4. PLR articles can be revised or altered. You can add some chapters and delete some too. You can rephrase words and add your preferred keywords, which is a great influence in achieving high search engine rankings.

5. You can brand your own name. Almost anybody purchasing something prefers to buy from someone they trust and know. With your PLR articles, you are able to display your name in the article as the author then you are supplying clients with important information. Then when prospects are pointed to your site, seeing your name once more, they instinctively have that certain feeling of knowing and trusting you.

6. Complete in themselves. PLR articles are entirely complete. At just a glimpse, ‘private label articles’ articles offer one with the whole ‘view’ of the contents issues and elements involved.

7. Well written by experts. Generally, almost all ‘private label articles’ are professionally written and compiled or collected with the most up-to-date research, investigation and information done by experienced writers. When you purchase and then use ‘private label articles’ from a trustworthy seller, then you are guaranteed that you are purchasing quality. Just keep in mind that you look into the terms, making certain that you are allowed to alter the content, as this is the only way that PLR articles can be used with full advantage.

Private label rights articles and ebooks fill a webmasters requirement because they are written purposely to answer specific questions as well as problems within a position on a ‘well-searched’market. If properly and correctly marketed, they produce steady sales.

Andre Niemand is a dentist,with a love for marketing, especially the latest unique strategies.Find out how you can easily choose the right internet business training program at http://www.4moneymaking.com

Control Your Marketing Plan So the Market Doesn’t Control You

There are myriad ways, old and new, to market your affiliate products. From traditional advertising methods, to viral marketing, to guerilla marketing, the list is endless. You can’t do everything at once each day. Well, you can, but you’ll go crazy in short order.

Effective affiliate marketing means planning your marketing efforts and then systematically doing them. This means developing a marketing schedule and sticking to it.

Your marketing plan may be to sell 1,000 affiliate widgets in the next three months. You have the methods laid out before you; you have money set aside to pay for the various marketing methods.

You also have the product, or access to them, ready to go. Do you have the time to do all that you want to do? If you do, is the right amount of time allocated to each aspect of your marketing plan. On the other hand, are you haphazardly approaching your plan? Is your modus operandi, “whatever I feel like doing today is how I’ll market today”?

That’s the wrong way to approach your marketing plan. With so many ways to market to so many niches you will become overwhelmed. You will not know where to start. You need to break down your marketing plan into bite-size segments. Then you need to allocate each segment to a particular day’s menu.

You may have e-mail campaigns, article writing, trade shows, chat forums, cold-calling, speaking engagements, and information seminars as part of your marketing plan. You may have flyer distribution, online video-conferencing presentations, and direct mail writing as part of your campaign as well.

You may pay others to do some of these things but still need to schedule meetings with them to explain what you want done concerning your affiliate product. You need to schedule time for each of these activities. Then you need to tackle them one-by-one.

The best thing to do is to get out or onto your day-planner and start slotting specific marketing efforts into specific time-periods of specific days. Do this. When you see that such and such needs to be done on Monday at 10 a.m., then you will do it then. Then it is done and you can move on to the next marketing item. Before the month is out you will see many aspects of your marketing plan in operation or completed. The result should manifest itself in greater affiliate sales.

You may want to refine your marketing schedule beyond just slotting tasks into different time-slots of different days. You may want to schedule your marketing activities according to budget allotted to each marketing effort.

You may want to schedule all high-budget marketing efforts first, at the beginning of the month. You may want all low-cost or no-cost marketing efforts to follow them. Get out that planner and your marketing plan and slot in the most expensive marketing initiatives into the first two weeks of the month. The rest take up the second half of the month. This is just an example of how to structure your marketing efforts.

The thing with all this is that you have a schedule in black and white before you and are working from it. You are not letting outside forces, or whims of thought dictate your marketing work each day. It’s surprising how quickly your marketing plan will run smoothly when you schedule aspects of it this way. Look at the time you need for each marketing effort. Look at any help, personnel-wise that you may need for any activity. Then schedule your efforts.

When you organize your marketing activities this way you only do marketing that you budgeted yourself for. Because you are sticking to a plan and a schedule for that plan, you do not branch off into areas that require you to spend even more money. A plan and a schedule for it keep you focused so you do not go over budget. You also do not waste time doing activities you should not be doing. You are not sidetracked because your focused plan and focused schedule do not allow for that.

Keep your marketing plan under control by scheduling every aspect of it. Schedule them by budget expenditure, time needed for each aspect, availability of personnel you need to help you, or any other way. Just make sure you set up a marketing schedule for your marketing plan. You will get your marketing done more efficiently to greater affiliate profits when you do.

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!

You’re in Control of Your Articles

As an affiliate marketer, you have at least two types of products you’re selling. One is the actual affiliate product you market online and offline, the other is the articles you write for wide distribution. You expend time and energy making sure your affiliate product presents well to the public. You have to spend the time and energy to ensure your articles do as well.

You are in control of your articles that connect with your readers. You are the idea originator, the planner, outliner, writer, reviser, and deliverer. The whole process is in your hands. There are basic guidelines you must follow to ensure quality content gets to your intended readers on a regular basis. Here are a few suggestions for you to consider so your article-marketing program remains effective.

Topics

Make sure what you are writing about is going to be of interest to your target market. Don’t just slop together an article without any thought as to its purpose and focus. Your readers want to learn something from your content. When they come across an interesting topic that is loaded with useful information, they feel they have spent their time well.

They will respect you as a writer and authority in your field because you supplied them with needed data, advice, ideas, and facts. When they get to the end of your article and see a link to your website, there’s a very good chance that’s where they are going to go.

Writing Style

Make sure your articles talk directly to the reader. You have to write as if you are writing to one person. Your voice has to be a “you and I sitting down for a talk over coffee” voice. You do not want your voice in your article to sound as if you’re giving a lecture at a packed symposium hall.

You the writer, an individual, are talking to that individual reader sitting in front of their computer. Make sure, especially for web content, that you write shorter paragraphs with shorter sentences. Do not have endless blocks of text that lull your reader to sleep.

Consistent Quality

As an affiliate marketer who utilizes article marketing regularly your name is spreading around the web. Astute readers in your subject area will begin to recognize your name and your links. If they read an article of yours, of high quality, they may look for you again in a web search. They will expect the same high quality. You must deliver this to your audience regularly. This is how you build a following. This following helps spread your name around to their circle of influence.

Eventually they are helping drive traffic to where you are, without you even knowing. If you let them down with sub-standard content you will lose them as readers, you will lose the click backs back to your affiliate website. You will lose your reputation as a high quality content provider. You do not want to be a one-shot deal. You want to be the person your reader relies on time and time again for relevant, useful information. That is how you drive sustained traffic to your affiliate site.

Good Old Spelling and Grammar

You come across as professional and respectful of your reader when you present articles that have proper spelling and grammar. This is true of articles you write for any medium and content and articles you publish on your own website. You know the horrors of finding web articles and content that sound as if the words are having a game of Twister amongst themselves.

Today’s web surfers want coherent information that they can consume quickly. They do not want to stumble over misspelled words, typos, grammatical confusions, and broken or incomplete thoughts. They want concise informative content, presented clearly. They want to read it, understand it, and then move on. Provide them with that type of content and they will reward you by moving on to your website through the link you provide them.

Your article-marketing program will remain effective if you follow the above suggestions. You will give your readers interesting topics that speak directly to them, consistently, and in a clear way. That’s all they ask for from you. You are the one who is in control to make sure they get it.

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
.

Make Your Article Marketing Effective By Controlling These Things

As an affiliate marketer, there are certain things that are beyond your control. You cannot control what your customers’ think. Sure, you can influence what they think, but in the end, they’re in control and make the final decisions.

You also cannot control economic factors, what’s going on in the marketplace, recessions, stagflation, and the like. However, you can control your efforts, as pertains to your business. You can control your article writing efforts, those content pieces you get out to the public.

To ensure that your article marketing program remains effective you have to be consistent with your article output, consistent with the quality of your articles, and consistent as a trustworthy updater of information. Doing these three things will go a long way in making your article marketing program pay dividends for your business.

Consistency in article output means writing articles on a regular basis. It means writing them, to keep your name and links distributed on the web, even when you don’t feel like writing them. The reason for this is you want to get as much exposure for yourself as possible. This also means seeing your articles get into hard-copy newsletters that are widely circulated.

You do not want to send out a few articles that promote links back to your website as a one-time deal. That will not build the traffic you need. You may get a few clicks back to your site with those few articles, but it will not be regular traffic.

Regular traffic you can count on happens when readers see your articles regularly on the web. They get used to seeing your name, your links, and your writing style. They look forward to the information you provide, when you do it well. They will even seek you out. When they see that you are a regular article contributor, they know they can reference you regularly for more information. That’s why you need to be consistent in your article output.

Consistency in the quality of your articles is of paramount importance. Your readers want informative, relevant, timely content that answers their questions. They do not want sales talk, or basic information that they already know. They want detailed information that enlightens and teaches them. Readers know quality when they see it.

They also know when they’re being given a raw deal so-to-speak. When they read fluff, they get cranky because they know they have just spent their time to no gain. They gained no new knowledge, and received no solutions to their problems. They will not seek your articles again, or link back to your website for more information.

Why is that? The reason is that you are not a credible information supplier to them. You have not connected to them with your content. When you do not provide quality information, consistently, you lose your readers to someone else who does. That’s why your article content has to be of high quality. You want readers linking back to your website, where your affiliate products are, for even more information.

Consistency as a trustworthy updater of information means getting your readers the latest news, data, and views on your area of expertise. This is different from being a consistent provider of quality articles in the sense that you go beyond basic quality.

In other words, you can provide articles full of quality content that will always help your reader concerning a subject. This is quality information that is not time-sensitive. Some products and subject areas have detailed information that is always relevant. Readers new to a subject will always need this type of content. You should write great articles to meet their needs.

However, you need others to see you as someone they can trust to keep them “in the know” about new issues concerning your subject area and products that relate to it. When your readers can trust that you will always have fresh content that speaks to them of innovations, findings, and new directions concerning the subject they’re interested in, then you have a reader for life. This is where you are a trustworthy updater on top of a quality content provider. You are always giving readers new information.

Consistency in the above three areas is something you can control in your article marketing program. You are responsible for regular output. You are responsible for quality content. You are responsible for updating that content as often as needed. You control all these things and need to continue to do it to grow your affiliate business.

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
.

Using Articles to Make Money Online

I’m always amazed when I see new internet marketers struggling day after day on the look-and-feel of their first websites. Trying to define the layout, positions, and images as well as work through the HTML and CSS can literally take days or even weeks.

What most people forget, however, is their time would be much better spent creating content and articles. Why would this be the case? Although a great site design can be a benefit in the future, the act of doing the work does nothing to generate inbound traffic – and, without traffic your site goes unnoticed. Even though everyone wants a great looking site the goal should be to build links early while improving the design over time.

If you talk to any experienced internet marketer today he or she will most likely recommend publishing articles and adding fresh content as the best way to get traffic back to your site and make money online. Although this can be at time consuming activity, it will end up being the most profitable one.

People are looking for quality information online all the time. If you have any expertise on the topics for your sites then it should be very easy for you to write 400-600 word articles on specific sub-topics and post them to article directories. By posting to multiple directories you can get backlinks that raise your site’s rankings in the search engines.

There are many free article directories available for you to use. The key is to pick those that have high rankings so the search engines reward your site with quality backlinks from your URL embedded in the article footer or header. You should be submitting articles as often as possible because they will be the best way to get your site ranked in Google and Yahoo as well as get you traffic.

Articles don’t have to be long, drawn out pieces of work. You really only need to create four to five good paragraphs about your topic of choice. But ‘what would I write about?’ you’re probably asking yourself. The best way to start is to pick a step-by-step or how-to aspect to your topic and simply list the steps in order.

If I had a site devoted to yoga, for example, I could write a simple beginners guide to warming up and stretching before starting the yoga positions. Or, I could write about my favorites books that I’ve read on yoga. I could even just write about my own feelings on my progress and benefits. The options are endless – be creative!

Whatever you do don’t copy someone else’s work or fabricate things. If you feel you don’t have enough information to write articles on your site’s topic, see if you can solicit an interview with an expert. Be sure to get their written consent to publish the information on your site. Usually they will be glad to participate especially if you promote their site, product or services.

Going forward, once you’ve started to generate some revenue you can then have ghostwriters write your content. In fact your goal should be to use the money you earn to pay for articles and article submission services in the future. That way you can accelerate your backlinks even faster. This can have a cascading effect boosting your revenue even more.

Whatever way you approach the content challenge just remember to try and build content and articles at the same time as improving your site’s design. Your first goal should be to try and make money online. Once perfected you won’t be sitting idle wondering why there are no hits on your site.

Don James is an internet developer and online marketer. Discover ways to make money online with your sites or blogs using Honest Riches at Holly Mann – Smart Woman vs. Rich Jerk