A few years back, all you had to do to make money online was sign up to Clickbank and Ezinearticles, write a few articles with a link to your affiliate product, and wait for the cash to come in. Really, it was as simple as that. Times have changed, though.

These days, it has to be more thought out than that. I admit that a lot of times, I didn’t even bother choosing a keyword for my article – I simply created a flashy title, wrote a 300 word article, included a decent resource box, and managed to make sales from the initial burst of traffic from the article directory itself.

Back then, most of my articles direct linked to the affiliate offer. To this day, I still get an appreciable amount of sales coming through from that content. Here is my reasoning for direct linking: I believed that the more people that actually made it to the vendor’s sales page, the more sales I’d make. Well, that is true to an extent. If you link to your website, you are introducing another step that the potential customer has to take.

That’s why you have to warm them up on your site first.

The key to warming up your customer is to write in such a way that you create some sort of connection with them. This will build trust and they are more likely to click through to the vendor’s page and buy something. But it doesn’t always work that way and sometimes it depends on the niche you are in.

Keep in mind that if all you do is lead them to another similar article on your site from the article directory, you are only going to get a 20-30 percent click-through to the vendor’s page. You have to  warm them up or you are not going to get the same amount of sales as you would from direct linking. If you fail to warm them up and your site’s page converts at 20%, then you have to write 5 times as much – either that or you have to magically get a sales conversion rate of 5% on the vendor’s page in order to get the same amount of sales.

Now, direct linking isn’t as bad as some people would have you believe. Keep in mind that if the vendor has done his/her job, then the sales page has been split tested for maximum conversion anyway. What more are you going to do to increase conversions unless you have a loyal following on your blog, you have a really good landing page, or you have created and nurtured a list and built a lot of trust?

Certainly, there are other factors involved here if you decide to warm up your prospects first. If you direct people to your website first, there is a good chance that they are going to come back at some point if the material is good. They may add your RSS feed to their reader and be alerted when you make a fresh post. In fact, you may have them as a loyal reader for a long time if they enjoy the content. Each time they come back, there is a chance that you could sell them something. It is almost like having a list, in a way.

Speaking of lists: Sending the reader to your website and getting their name and email in exchange for something valuable, is an excellent way to start building a relationship with them. This tactic actually produces the best sales conversion over time, but it is a little more work to get up and running initially – and it produces results slower, typically.

The other benefit to sending them to your website is that you are going to get some backlink juice from EZA. But before you get too excited, Google tends to discount a flood of links from the same source. So, having hundreds of articles pointing back to your site from your cache of Ezine articles does not mean that you are going to get hundreds of times the backlinking power to your site.

Okay, so what I am saying is that there is nothing wrong with direct linking to a vendor’s sales page. If the article is good and you lead them naturally to the sales page, that may be all the pre-selling you need to do. This will vary from niche to niche, as some will perform better then others using that approach.

If all you want to do today is start making money, then I would not hesitate to recommend direct linking. Once you have a little income coming in, you could start a blog or website and look at taking a more long-term approach at things. Work on increasing your blog readership, build some backlinks to your site, or start capturing their email addresses. In the long run, this is going to surpass direct linking in terms of overall exposure and sales.

Okay, so back to the actual process I use.

These days, things are a lot more competitive. There are thousands of new article writers out there and they have flooded the market with tons of content. If you simply submit your article without doing some keyword research, your article may get a few views initially as it sits on the recently submitted page, but it is going to trail off fast and may never get another view.

These days, you have to include the words that people are entering in the search engines to find the information you are looking for. Sure, you can take a guess at what they are, but you are likely to be way off. You need the actual keyword phrases that people are using.

Here is the process I use:

1. First, I decide on a niche and a general keyword (say, MEETING WOMEN, as an example). I enter that phrase into MARKET SAMURAI and it gives me hundreds of similar keywords and some very important information about each one within minutes. I can gauge the competition at a glance and determine which exact phrases I want to tackle, and also which ones I can realistically rank for. You may also decide to use something like MICRO NICHE FINDER to find your keywords.

2. Once I have a list of good candidates, I write the articles using the keyword in the article title, in the first paragraph, in the middle, and in the conclusion. That is all the onsite SEO you need to do. A general rule is to keep the keyword density at 1-2 %.

I will include a link at the end of the article (resource box) leading to my site or the vendor’s page.

3. Lastly, I will backlink a little to make sure that it sticks in the serps. Keep in mind that I didn’t have to do this years ago, but this is the new article marketing…sigh.

I avoid using blog spam and profile links for my backlinks because I think that companies are going to crack down in the near future (namely, Clickbank and Ezinearticles). All it takes is for someone to report you for spam and you may lose your account. I use LINKVANA for backlinking. Yes, it is pricey, but it more than pays for itself with the money I make on each article.

That is it, basically. If you really want to go full tilt into this and you want every minute detail, I wrote a report HERE that is around 116 pages.

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Filed under: Article Marketing

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