Article Marketing for Affiliates
Article marketing is a great tool for fueling affiliate sales. Article marketing, also known as bum marketing, is submitting articles you’ve written to large online catalogs of articles called article directories.
At the end of each article, you get a spot to advertise yourself and your own promotions (in this case, as an affiliate). This area is known as the resource box. Typically, you’ll have a few short lines to add some information about yourself and add some links.
As an article marketer, you can send traffic to your own website to capture the reader’s contact information, or straight to your affiliate offers. A few of the bigger article directories don’t allow you to send traffic straight to affiliate links, but most of the smaller ones currently do.
A benefit to sending traffic to your own website is the fact that you’re getting the PageRank of the article directories, instead of passing it to the affiliate site. Plus, if you send traffic to an affiliate offer, you may regret it later if the affiliate offer is withdrawn.
Imagine having hundreds of links pointing to an affiliate link, and having that affiliate program shut down or change their terms? You’d either have to suck up the loss, or try to find all of those hundreds of articles and edit them to promote a new offer!
Also, if you send traffic to your own site, you’re building your own business instead of just the business of the product owner. If you can get visitors to your site, you have the chance to get them to opt into your newsletter, and you also have the possibility that they’ll bookmark your site and come back later.
Sending traffic straight to sponsors is fine to do if you’re just starting out and you can’t yet afford your own hosting or domain names. Although hosting and domains are relatively inexpensive, some people simply can’t spare anything. If you’re one of those people, you can send traffic to affiliate links for awhile, and then reinvest the profits to get hosting and domain names.
Some people only submit their articles to the major directories, claiming the other directories aren’t worth submitting to. Ezine Articles is definitely the major player in the industry. But their standards can be quite high, and their rules are rather strict. They don’t allow linking directly to affiliate links. In fact, they only allow you to link to a top-level domain. You can’t even link to a blog you have hosted at Blogger.
Go Articles is another major player. But there are hundreds of smaller directories that have good PageRank that they can pass to your site. Even if you’re promoting direct affiliate links, it’s probably best to submit to as many directories as you can. The more exposure your articles get, the more chances you have to make a sale to your affiliate programs.
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David,
Sorry I didn’t get over here to comment on this sooner.
As usual, you are right on the money. I mainly use articles right now to promote my main business. However, in the future, I plan to use articles to promote several affiliate programs I am involved in because it will help me make more money from these programs.
I’ve tried everything in terms of marketing, and nothing has ever done more for my business than SEO and article marketing.
I look forward to seeing more from you on this topic.
Jinger Jarrett