Article Marketers, Lend Me Your Ears - My Steps To Success

There are a ton of people on this forum that write articles as a way to promote their business. However, I don't see or hear nearly enough successful stories, so I thought I would share a little bit of what seems to work well for me.

I've been writing away for just about the last year and have found a lot of joy in watching the fruits of my labor bear cold hard cash Hopefully, some of my experiences that I share with you today, might help you get to where you want or need to be.

Niche Research - To me, this is the simplest part of the process. I really don't care what it is. As long as it is a legitimate product and not a blatant scam and offers some positive benefits to the end user, I will promote, sell, and profit from it. Some people will say that there is something wrong with that. I say, to each his own, but not over thinking the process has helped me to be both productive and profitable in the last 10.5 months.

Go to any affiliate network and just start writing product niche Ideas down in notepad or a piece of scrap paper that you think might sell well. Often times,they show some type of information which will help you determine this. For example, ClickBank has gravity, others have a different standard, but either way, you should be able to guage whether or not the product has been successfully sold. If other people can do it, so can you.

Keyword Research - Now, many people will run right to Google or WordTracker and start randomly typing words in. That's great if it works for you, but let me share with you what I do. Give it a try, you could be surprised by the results.

Head on over to any article directory, whether it be EzineARticles, Goarticles, ideamarketers, or website-articles.net and start looking at the articles in the niche you are interested in. When you are looking at the articles, simply right click to view the source of the page and you should be able to see exactly what keywords are being used in the tags. Copy all of the keywords into notepad. Continue going through articles until you have a fairly sizeable list. Now take that list and head on over to the Google Keyword Tool and Copy that whole list of keywords into the box, making sure you have the "use synonyms" option checked and run the search. You should get a ton of keyword ideas in the results. What you have to do next takes quite a bit of time sometimes, but good preparation is well worth it in the long run. Take the keywords and then check them in Google to see what the competition looks like. I usually keep any keyword with under 40,000 competing pages in quotation marks as long as the keyword meets a couple of criteria:

• They have Google Ads Running for the keyword
• The first page is not loaded with authority sites
• There is at least one article directory result on the first page

There are many reasons why those are my criteria, but to get into them all specifically would make this post into a book instead of a post. Hopefully, you can look at them and know the reasoning behind them.

Once I repeat this process until I have 10 or more keywords, I'm ready to get to work.

Brainstorming - Yahoo answers and sites like it are great for this. If you type in a popular keyword for your niche you will find a wealth of ideas to write about and questions to answer in not only your articles, but your website as well. I have yet to find a niche that Yahoo Answers didn't have a ton of information on. From Church to Gambling, they really run the gambit. Article directories are also great for this. Check out what your competition is writing about and focusing on. Make note of good article titles and angles that different authors approach the niche with. This will give you a ton of different directions to go and help keep writers block away

Analyze Your Competition - Pay close attention to what the authors that have a ton of articles in the niche are doing. They could be doing any number of things, try to pay close attention to exactly where they are driving their traffic.

• Is it going to an opt-in page?
• Are they monetizing traffic with adsense
• What affiliate products are they pimping?
• Are they redirecting to a sales page?

While it might seem goofy to do, looking at the situation from all aspects and different ways of monetizing traffic could give you some great ideas. For example, if you see that nobody is collecting email addresses, ask yourself, why? Is it because they just don't know any better or is it because chances are good it's not a good niche for email marketing? If you see several of them are monetizing their traffic through adsense, ask yourself, why? Is it because their are no affiliate products? In which case you could have a great opportunity to create one or is it because there is so much free information available that it is more realistic to make money from people clicking ads than to sell an affiliate product.

Getting down to business - Once you have done everything above, it's time to put the serious work in You now have to put all of your efforts into creating content and driving traffic with it. The best way I have found to do this is to go the slow and steady route. I try to get 2 or 3 articles out per day to places like EzineArticles. I only do 2 or 3 because I don't want to compete with my own articles on the front page or recently submitted categories. If you blast 10 articles through, you are going to bump yourself from those places and your traffic is going to suffer becuase of it. It is very important that you look at the directories that you submit to and know exactly how they work. This will allow you to get the most benefit from the work that you do. Work smart, not hard

Getting the most from your articles - Try a couple of different methods with keywords. I usually just drop a keyword in the beginning, middle, and end. However, I recently found out that by slamming a keyword a couple times in the same paragraph has given some really solid results. I found that out from a post by another warrior, I think IM Reporter is the one that posted about it. I tested it and it worked for a couple of my niches, so testing really does make a difference.

MultiPurpose your articles - While many people think that the only use for an article is an article. You couldn't be more wrong. There are a ton of ways to repurpose your content to make you more money and help you stand out in your niche. You could just post your articles or you could do one or a number of the following things:

1. Make videos of your articles
2. post your articles to your own site
3. Make audios of your content
4. create free hosted sites with your content
5. use your content to answer questions places like yahoo answers

There are a ton of other things you can do as well, just use your imagination

At the end of the day, many times our success comes from our process. What I've outlined above is my general process and strategy that I use. Things get easier when you start making some money and can outsource a couple of things like having a couple articles writen or giving someone your steps for keyword research and have them collect all of the data for you.

If you approach this as a business and run it as a business then there is no doubt that you can be successful. Take a look around, you will see that there are people that have gone from Bankrupt broke to millionairs, people that have gone from minimum wage to not having to worry about what they spend their money on. The opportunity that you have really is only limited to where you set the limits.

To Your Success,

Jeremy