Article (Bum) Marketing For Beginners - How to Make Money Online

The purpose of this article is to help you learn exactly how to make money online using article marketing for free. There are many reasons why one would choose this method of marketing and I’ll cover a few of the main reasons here in this article. To sum things up in a nutshell you need traffic. Lot’s of traffic to be correct but it has to be targeted. You can’t write about dog food if your trying to sell computers. You have to target your audience in your articles to content in your article that relates to computers. In any case one of the best and fastest ways to get traffic is by article marketing. This is also known as Bum marketing. Here’s how the process works in a nutshell:

Traffic -> Affiliate Link (I’ll explain later)

You need to get people to your offer that you’re promoting. Period. That’s really all it’s about. Writing articles to get traffic to your offer, product, or service. The concept is not that difficult to understand but, there is a little more to it than that. Keep reading to find out.

Step One - Choosing an Affiliate Network

The first step to making money with article marketing is to choose an affiliate network like clickbank.com, paydotcom.com, or what ever you like. Basically you get paid for promoting someone else’s product. When you find a product that you want to promote, you get what’s called an affiliate link for that product. For Clickbank they call this a hoplink (that’s what I use, but whatever you like). Now once someone buys a product through your on your affiliate link you get paid a percentage of the sale. Simple enough?

In any case you promote these hoplinks in your article that you can submit to different article directories if they allow affiliate links (more on that later). Or you can promote them on your website. If you don’t have a website you can also use a free Hub (Hubpages.com), Lens Squidoo.com, or Blog Blogger.com as well to put your affiliate links in. They’re really easy to use and they’re free. Blogger.com is probably one of the easiest to use when first starting out..

Step Two – Promoting your Affiliate links

Basically the whole concept of article marketing is to get traffic from the article directories to your affiliate links. Thousands of people read these article directories. Sometimes if your article is well written, it may show up in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN or BING (this actually happens more often than you might think).

But for now the best bet is to try and concentrate on writing the articles for the article directories and if it shoes up in the search engines then that’s just a bonus. Anyways you want to start out by just concentrating on making what you write in your articles for the directory readers first. Make sure that the content in your articles are high in quality and not boring and at least 250 – 500 words an article. The best place to submit your articles to is ezinearticles.com. That’s where you should start for now. But there are other directories that you can use as well like goarticles.com, articlesbase.com, hubpages.com, etc.. If I had to choose another directory I would choose hubpages.com (not really an article directory but similar) as a second place to submit to along with articlesbase.com third.

Step 3 – Putting Your Affiliate In Your Articles

The next step is to place your affiliate link in your article. At the end of the article you write a small related ad about the product or service you are offering in something that’s called a resource box. Something like if you like this article then go to http://youraffiliatelink.com to learn more, or something like that. Some article directories like ezinearticles.com, will not allow this. This is a small problem when you first start out. But there is a way to get around this.

So you have 3 options:

1. You can do a 301 redirect with godaddy.com. It’s easier then it sounds. Just buy a domain name similar to your product like youraffiliateproduct.com. Dot .com’s and .info’s and .orgs are good to start. You can search for discount codes for the domain names online by the way. :) After you’ve bought your domain name log out of the system for a minute or two and then log back in. It takes a minute or two to update. Once you log back in go to Clickbank (in another window) to get your affiliate link (aka hoplink) of your product. Copy the hoplink.

Then go back to godaddy.com and go to the “manage domains” section. Look for the forwarding option and choose it. Then you will see a pop up box that asks for you to enter the information for the forwarding URL. Paste your hoplink URL or Affiliate link in the appropriate field and submit it. Now your URL youraffiliateproduct.com will automatically redirect your affiliate link product page! Test it out. Go ahead and past the domain name you purchased in your address bar (in another window). So all that you’ll need to do next is to place youraffiliatelink.com in your resource box of your affiliate link. Hope this makes sense. Don’t worry about masking for now, but if you wanted to learn how to do that it’s easy. Just look it up.

2. You can find another article directory that does allow affiliate links like Goarticles.com. Write another article with Goarticles.com (note: articlesbase.com might also allow affiliate links as well but not 100% on that) that is similar reviewing the main details of your product or service that you’re offering and include your affiliate link within it. Then put your goarticles.com article link in your resource box at ezinearticles.com.

3. You can use Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, or Blogger.com as landing web pages to create a web page in which you can include your affiliate link. Blogger.com is the easiest of the 3 (Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, and Blogger.com) to use in my opinion.

When putting your link in your article you can choose to include the “http://” like this http://youraffiliatelink.com or you can choose to link it in anchor text like this. This will make a clickable link like this “Your Affiliate Program” . This is important once you’ve started to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In short SEO is how you can help to get your site on the top pages of the search engines. But I’ll have to cover that in another post.

Step Four - Choosing Your Niche - Market Research

It’s best to choose a niche in an area that your familiar with. Clickbank has over 10,000 products for you to choose to promote. It has everything from weight loss to Forex Trading software, so it’s pretty easy to find something that you are familiar with to promote. Once you have a product it’s on to doing your market research. First you want to see how many people are searching for a particular term (or your demand for the product or keywords) You can do that here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This gives you an idea of how many people are searching for whatever you are trying to promote or whatever keywords you think they might be using to find your product or solution to there needs.

If there’s reasonable demand 1000 or more searches a month then it might be something worth pursuing. In most cases it’s better to go for long tail keywords (longer search phrases). For example instead of using “extra cash” you might want to target “how to earn extra cash online”, which would be considered a long tail. It’s been proved by many marketers to be more profitable.

It’s easier to start in a niche that you are familiar with because you will be able to have a better understanding of what you are writing about. In other words you won’t look like a complete idiot if you know what your talking about. Believe it or not people can tell if you know what your niche is about. In any case back to what I was saying. Think of what words people might use to find your product. What problem does it solve? Ask yourself what you’d type in if you were searching for that particular solution that your product is giving.

If you need more keywords then use the adwords tool I mentioned above. Start with a smaller keywords and it will give you a list of tons of keywords that you can use to start promoting. If you need ideas of what to write about or if you are having a hard time writing then you can go to ezinearticles.com and search for similar articles for ideas or rewrite those articles in your own words. It’s very important that you do not copy!

When writing your article you also want to include your keywords in your title, the first paragraph and if possible in the last sentence of your article. Additionally you want to include words that are similar to your key words or phrases that you’ve chose to write about. This will help the search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN or Bing) find your article.

Next you want to find out the number of competing sites that have optimized for that particular term as well. If there’s too much competition your article will have less of a chance of competing. Generally around 5,000 to 200,000 competing sites for a keyword is ok to consider competing against. Too much and you won’t get found. To do this you can go to Google and type in your search in quotes. For example if I were to check to see how many competing sites there is for the term – ways to earn extra cash online – I would type in the Google search box “ways to earn extra cash online” to give me the amount of competing sites.

Now I covered Market research last but in general many marketers would do this first to see if the product is even worth promoting. For example if there isn’t that many searches for a keyword, or if there’s too much competition (if the supply /demand ratio isn’t there) then some may not waste there time with a certain keyword or product for that matter.

Additionally you want to see if the product that your considering is selling. Now you can get a general idea of if a product is selling by looking at the gravity of the product. The higher the gravity the better. That’s (the gravity) listed on beneath the product your considering promoting with clickbank. Some clickbank products have a gravity of 300. Others have had a gravity score of less than 1. You have to use your own judgment, but generally speaking the higher the gravity the better.

Another way to research what’s hot is by going to Google for the key word that you think might sell and seeing if there are any paid or sponsored link results. The paid results are the advertisers that are showing up on the right hand side next to the organic results. If there aren’t any ads there it may not be an niche you would want to consider. Additionally if there were ads there it’s a good Idea to check and see how long those ads have been there. Ads that have been showing for the same keyword for a few weeks (or even better a few months) are a good indication that the advertiser is making money with that particular keyword. If you have time to sit there and track the ads that show up for the next few weeks or months then that’s one of the best ways to make sure that you can make some sales with those keywords. It might be worth doing if you have the patience. After all you don’t want to do all this work for nothing right?

If you need help with keyword research there’s a tool that can also help you to track these sponsored ads. It’s called Keyword Elite 2.0. Imagine that what you could do if you were able to see exactly what keywords these sponsored ads were using to make there money, what ads they were using, how long they were promoting using those particular keywords, what products they were promoting, and other keywords that they were using to make money as well for the last six months. It’s almost like printing money.

Now it’s not a required to use Keyword Elite 2.0, you can do some of what it does manually (like what I’ve mentioned in this article), and you can make some sales. But if you're serious about making some real money then it’s worth it’s weight in gold. It’s literally the only product you will ever need to make money online. Period. If your interested in learning how you can get 5 Additional Bonuses you can go to my Adwords Strategies Blog here.

In any event, back to keyword research. In a nutshell it comes down to a few key elements, which are competing sites (or supply),the volume of searches for your keyword(s), Ratio between competing sites vs. Volume of searches (also known as KEI or KEYWORD EFFECTIVENESS INDEX), Advertising Competition cost,keyword relevance, price Point (Price of your product) and sometimes the human touch(how likely you feel the keyword will perform). And for the most part that's pretty much it. Hope this helps someone make some money.