By now, you should be pretty convinced that content is virtually everything when it comes to online marketing. And believe me, there’s no faster way to get your content noticed and promoted on its own than to blog. And this isn’t just my opinion; just look at the sheer amount of blogs out there today. What used to be a simple tool for webmasters to log their on-site activities is today the most popular self-publishing technique online!
The reason I wanted to tag blogging along with this section is because I believe article marketing (as you see it taught all over the web today) is next to worthless if you keep syndicating your articles out to directories and other websites, instead of putting them on your own. This is like baking a delicious banana cream pie, and throwing it out with the dishwater!
Basically, you’ve got two options:
- Buy a brand new domain and turn it into a full-blown blog;
- Add a blog to your existing affiliate website.
For me, the second option is, hands-down, always the better choice. This is because it’s way easier to promote one website jam-packed with interesting blog posts, product reviews etc. than to promote each of these on separate sites. I trust that you’ve fully grasped the previous section, and can dish out good, natural-looking product reviews for your promotions.
While that’s is a vital ingredient in your affiliate marketing recipe, it isn’t the only one. I’ve studied several highly successful affiliate websites (which don’t even look commercial!), and I found on each one of them, that they either have a fast-growing blog or a separate section dedicated to useful niche-related articles.
Blogging, in general, outperforms ‘article sections’ because blogs are optimized by nature. This means that whenever you make a blog post, you are actually producing content that is both optimized for readers as well as search engines. This is so because blogs are both interactive (as people get to involve in the discussion), and they’re constantly being updated (as you make new posts and people comment on them).
Let’s move on, now, to the meat of the section. I don’t want to go into detail about how to setup a blog and so on because most web hosts today provide free “one-click” Wordpress installations. Even if your host doesn’t, all you need to do is go to http://www.wordpress.com, and follow their instructions. I strongly recommend wordpress because it’s the best out there. There are many others but they’re usually not that popular with search engines, or they’re plagued by technical issues.
The Baby Steps
Before you start adding content to your new blog, I have a small checklist for you. These steps are important because they’ll allow for maximum optimization of your content, both in terms of SEO and readership. This requires a little bit of tweaking, so you might want to consider reading some manuals on using your blogging engine.
Alternatively, you can also find someone to do it for you. Head down to a place like http://forums.digitalpoint.com or http://www.warriorforum.com (which are both webmaster forums with a “marketplace”), or a bidding site like http://www.getafreelancer.com, and you can get someone to do the tweaking for cheap.
Here are the steps:
- Set up your blog in a way that readers (especially those subscribed to your RSS feed) will only see a snippet or a summary of your articles, and not the entire thing. You don’t want them to just read your posts from within their email clients; you want them to visit your site.
- Remove all the links in your blogroll, and instead, put your own affiliate links in there.
- Use custom titles for your posts. Most of the time, you’ll find that your blogging software automatically names your posts with an ugly string of characters. You should adjust your settings to make sure you personally get to name every one of your posts.
- Browse, and install helpful plugins. Nowadays, there’s a wordpress plugin for just about anything you want to do with your blog. For example, one fancy plugin will automatically tag your posts with suitable keywords; another will generate a sitemap and add your latest posts to it automatically.
Quick Blog Writing Tips
When you’re going to write a blog post, you basically have three options:
- Write from scratch.
- Rewrite existing content.
- Outsource.
There’s no right way to do it; I’ve done, and still do, all three of these, and you’re going to have to strike a balance between constantly churning out well-researched, essay-type content (writing from scratch), to producing fillers to give you time to prepare for more work (rewriting), to just passing the weight on to someone else altogether (outsourcing). Let’s explore each of these options briefly.
Writing from scratch.
When you’re going to write from scratch, what you’re looking to do is create top-notch material that has never been authored before. Ideally, this type of content would be good enough to get linked to by top authority sites in your industry, so don’t expect to do it overnight. You’ll need to do plenty of research, brainstorming, getting it critiqued etc. to come up with the finished product.
While I can’t possibly teach the art of content creation in these few pages, I’ll assume that you’re willing to work hard, and write up useful and interesting articles; so I’ll give you a few tips on how to best optimize and monetize your content:
First of all, see if you can theme most of the stuff you write around tips, techniques, case studies, how-to’s etc. You essentially want to capture the kind of topics that people would eagerly refer their friends to. Next, be sure to have really compelling titles on all of your articles. Usually, titles that are strange and novel win the most readers.
If you have a regular topic, make a twist on it for your article’s title. For example, I recently saw a news item titled “Sunbathing with the dead.” Completely appalled with the idea, I quickly proceeded to read the entire story. It was actually about two teenage girls that had drowned in the sea. Their bodies washed up ashore and were left unnoticed for a few hours while people were sunbathing beside them.
Imagine if this article were titled something like “Two girls drown in sea. Bodies unnoticed for hours.” I don’t really think that would have made as big an impact as the really disgusting title that came out in the end.
No matter what kind of article you’re writing, you can do some searches on news sites to see if there’s any news or statistics from recent times you can use. This will boost your credibility tenfold. You can also do regular searches, and when you do, you want to look at more than just the top 10 results. Many good articles get buried in the depths of search engines and take some effort to find. Blog search engines like Technorati are also worth a look.
Rewriting existing content.
What I’m actually talking about here, is rephrasing content that other people in your industry have authored. This is a pretty easy job to do but you have to be very careful not to violate copyright laws.
So what you do is go to a few popular article directories like http://www.ezinearticles.com, http://www.goarticles.com etc and also any niche-specific directories you can find, and search for keywords that you’re going to write your articles on. Pick out a few previously submitted write-ups and rewrite them completely. Then throw in some of your stuff, and you will have a fresh, brand new article in your hands.
To make the article completely different from its source, you can also inject some of your main keywords in there after you finish all the rewriting. Since rewritten articles are not going to be absolutely unique or useful content, you can multiple variations of the same, and submit them all to different article directories.
When you do that, include a link to your website either from within the content itself, or from the resource box.
Outsourcing
This is the easiest way to have content created if you have some money to spend. The cheapest of article writers can usually be found on forums relating to copywriting, internet marketing etc. If you need a long term writer and are willing to pay a little more, you can go for outsourcing sites too.
No matter where you go, be sure to check a person’s credentials, writing samples, reviews etc before making any sort of down payment. I suggest placing orders of 2 or 3 articles to see if the deal is working out. You can later move on to more bulk orders.
Find out about Mass Article Submission and Automatic Re-writing Here
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