Affiliate Marketing and Article Writing Overview

One form of affiliate marketing is the method known as Article Marketing (or Bum Marketing as it is sometimes known). The concept is simple enough, write an article based around a keyword phrase in some niche then get your article published somewhere it is going to be seen, preferably on Google. Include your affiliate link to whatever related product you are promoting in the article so some of the readers will click through to the product and hopefully buy it, thus earning you a commission.

Start by picking a niche market you know a little about, this is not actually necessary but it helps while you’re starting out. Lets say you pick on trout fishing for the sake of discussion here. Knowing there are lots of fishermen out there who would like to catch more trout you go and find a suitable product, maybe a book or DVD from Amazon or an eBook from Clickbank that shows people how to improve their trout fishing. That group is now your target market and the products you picked are what you are going to sell to them.

Now do some searches on Google for several keyword phrases that are likely to be used by those fishermen looking for help. For example “catch more trout”, “trout fishing tips” or “trout fishing help”, all without the quote marks. Check out which ones look good, what products they’re promoting, the ideas and tips they give, make lots of notes (enough to turn into your own article later).

Now do those same searches again this time with quote marks “” around the phrase. This might seem odd as hardly anybody searches with quote marks around the words but what we’re looking for here is to get a feel for which keyword phrases have few results from pages optimised for the phrase. Ideally we’re looking to find some keyword phrases where the number of optimised results is fairly low, say under 10,000 at the most and preferably under 5,000. Knowing which keyword phrases have relatively few optimised results gives us every chance of getting listed for those phrases ourselves.

Now, using those keyword phrases that we found suitable, we start writing articles! Our articles should have those phrases in the title, that bit is really important as the search engines give a lot of weight to the words and phrases that appear in the titles of pages. Use the phrase again in the first paragraph, preferably at or near the start. It sometimes helps to highlight that first paragraph phrase in bold or italic type. Use the phrase again another few times in the rest of the article but make sure it fits in naturally and does not look contrived.

Try to make the title look interesting, we want people to read the article after all. One way is to turn the title into a “How to” or “X Tips” such as “How to Catch More Trout” or “The Top 7 Trout Fishing Tips”. Not sure what to write? – just start with those notes you took earlier and start jotting down those ideas. Check for articles already written on the topic and re-write them in your own style. You don’t have to produce the worlds greatest article just get 400-500 words into a sensible looking article and you’re done. Remember the objective – get the article listed where it will be seen, it’s not an exam just an article.

If you’re struggling with the article it might help to think of a structure. So start with an introduction (what the article is about), then the body (the points you want to make broken up into paragraphs) then a conclusion (maybe a summary of the points)

Now put a little paragraph about yourself together and include a link to the product you’re promoting and you’re ready to submit that article to the article directories. With a little practice you’ll be able to write several articles in a day and know where best to submit them for the best chance at getting on to the first page of Goggles search results.

We’ll take a closer look at the best places to submit your articles and some of the tricks to effectively using your affiliate links in the next post.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing