must haves in article marketing

I suspect that doing market research in advance will be helpful for a direct link affiliate.

Consider at least, the option of a pre-sell landing page, they seem to work better i some markets, and importantly, it will allow you to track conversion and switch products if your stuck with a loser, while your stuck with the affiliate links in articles.

Short sweet and to the point. I don't have any experience with article marketing...yet, but i know from my ownself(i have a short attn span) that an article that's short but to the point is 10x better than a long, drawn out article.

Some sort of site/blog (even a one-page one) between the article's resource-box link and the affiliate offer. That's clearly the most fundamental one. Affiliate sales are based primarily on two things: (i) effective pre-selling, and (ii) list-building.

I think there are CPA offers you can realistically promote without doing those things, and maybe even Amazon products you can promote if you have a way of catching real buying traffic for specific products by writing "reviews" of them which are really thoroughly keyword-optimised.

But it's not going to be easy. Or flexible, as Webapex rightly comments above.

You say you want Must haves "besides a good article" and then say you're not interested in doing a website. But, the problem you're going to run into is that your "good article" isn't going to pre sell everyone as you would like.

In most affiliate situations, the article is just the first step in the pre-sell. Sending them to a well written landing page is the second must have step. This landing page can be a website or blog, but if you want to really do bum marketing effectively, you need this second step.

Your third step is learning how to write effective product reviews of the affiliate products you plan to promote.

The review is another pre-sell that convinces the reader to click on the affiliate product page. I believe this is the bare bones of what you need to master in order to make money as an affiliate.

You can search this forum for topics like article marketing, bum marketing, article writing, affiliate sales, affiliate promotion, etc.

For me clear and concise articles.

You also need to get your articles and blogs seen so try pinging them using sites such as pingoat, bookmark them using sites like twitter and stumble upon.

I think you can do two things. First of all, you definitely want to invest in a nice keyword domain.

Let's say your niche is guitar lessons, you are an affiliate for a guy who sells guitar lessons ebook online or something like that right?

1. You want to first of all buy a keyword domain, like "online guitar lessons", which gets about 14,800 searches a month (granted, this one's probably already taken, I'm just using it for example purposes). You'll be lucky to find a keyword domain that gets that many searches

2. Now you want to write articles with ezinearticles.com and point them to this domain, since ezine doesn't allow direct affiliate linking

3. If you do not want to build a website right now, you can simply have this domain to be a redirect to "affiliateproduct.com" website, and you simply write articles and follow this step.

4. In the future, let's say you want to build a message list or website, you simply cancel that redirect, and now you have tons of traffic going to your own product, message list + the SEO benefits; you'll end up ranking pretty high for that keyword overtime no matter what from my experiences.

5. You can also try backlinking to that website using bookmarking demon, manual blog commenting and backlinking, forum posting with keyword signature links (example below), Unique article wizard, and things of that nature.

Just try it out and see what happens.

That's my bum marketing method, it's helped a little bit!