Another question on article syndication

Please excuse me, Gary: I've just this minute seen your post from yesterday for the first time.

Well, technically only a few days: I'll expect the first sale or two within the first week, certainly. But that's barely "profitable". Beyond that, there's luck in it.

I'll have selected the niche in accordance with my ability to get articles syndicated, so there'll be good ezines to which I can submit articles, and good webmasters to whom I can offer them (after first publishing them and having them indexed on my own site, obviously). But I'll still have luck involved. The first two or three articles may produce comparatively little. Sooner or later one will be a "hit" (for either predictable or sometimes completely unpredictable reasons!) and produce a few thousand visitors, a proportion of whom will opt in, and then "I'm in business".

Before I start, I'll already have a small site ready: prominent, incentivized opt-in on the landing page, "free report" (or whatever it's called) ready to give away in exchange for their email address, three or four articles written, a product review (normally one product only, to start with), a little more "niche information" and the first couple of autoresponder emails written. It'll be a site with about 3 - 4 pages, at first, probably. (Plus legal/regulatory requirements, of course, including an affiliate disclaimer which is specially written to be entertaining/facetious while still legally compliant).

And probably a ClickBank product will be "first up" (and I'll have chosen the niche accordingly).

As mentioned above, plus there'll be another good product available, and it has to be a subject I can write about without needing to go to night school just to understand the vocabulary (so I won't be promoting "registry cleaners" because I barely know what the "registry" is). And there has to be demand and some buyers (I can judge that from the rotation of AdWords ads and their variety: if people are repeatedly spending money to advertise, then there's money there).

Always.

The primary purpose of my website is to opt visitors in.

"More of the same". Meaning "the same" as what brought them to my site. Which is my articles. I can re-use "article information" in an only slightly different format as "autoresponder series" of sorts, or parts of one, at least. Nothing wasted. (Yes, there's the risk that at some point in the series, people will get an email part of which they've already read. It doesn't matter).

Typically, I send email on days 1, 3, 6, 10 and 15 and therafter every 5/6 days, with a promotion in about one email in three, but not occupying the entire email.

The purpose of the syndication of my articles is to attract traffic to my site.

The primary purpose of the site is to opt them in. (I do make the occasional sale there, too, via a hoplink).

The purpose of the "free report" (or whatever it's called) is to ensure that they open and read my subsequent emails.

The primary purpose of each email is to ensure that they open and read the next email (and the secondary purpose is to keep them visiting my site, but not so much to read the articles).

If I can get all that right, the money follows: they'll buy from me, just because I'm the person making the recommendation for what they buy, and they trust me.

I don't.

I'm an affiliate, not a vendor. I let the vendor's sales page ask for the sale, and I choose products whose sales pages will be able to do that for my traffic. How I do that is described here.

The commonest mistake I see new affiliates making is trying to ask for the sale on their own website.

I pre-sell. The vendor sells.

To start with, but I've chosen the niches knowing that (a) there's at least one more good one available, to be added, and (b) there are a few more now, too, or very likely to be in future.

LOL, thank you ... not for now. Thanks for your other kind comments and apologies again for the slow and slightly brief reply. (Further questions welcome, if they'll help).

Depending on the competitiveness but literally i focus on less competitive niche that i usually can rank within a month.

I research my niche first and see if there is an average of 3, 500 global searches a month. I also try to determine mentally if its going to be a buying keyword.

Not for all niches, in really competitive niche building a list is very vital. If you are not famous it is likely that you are not going to make sufficient sales because trust will become a yardstick for measuring where to buy from.

I tell them exactly what the product is all about and what they stand to benefit from it. Benefit sells and features merely describes.

99.9 percent of successful marketers do not including myself.

Regards,

John Benjamin

Awesome stuff as always, Alexa. Count me in as one of those who would love the chance to purchase a WSO of yours about article syndication.

I know you get bombarded all the time with questions about this, it's really kind of you to give such detailed responses to all of them.

Something that I've been wondering though - how long is a typical article of yours? I know it will vary from niche to niche etc. but do you have any ballpark numbers? I typically write daily 500-600 word articles but I'm thinking that it might be more effective to write articles that are a couple thousand words and maybe do them less often. Any advice?

good information here.. I am new to this forum and this might be a stupid question but what is "WSO"?

There are perhaps a surprising number of puzzlingly underutilised comparative and superlative forms to otherwise very common, time-worn adjectives and adverbs.

As an aside, here's a hearty recommendation for an application (free version) called WordWeb. An excellent aid to one's writing, and, in my opinion, far more convenient than both traditional paper and browser-based alternatives.

Alexa,

Do you filter the websites which you contact to by Alexa rank ? I usually don`t contact websites (to publish my articles) with too high Alexa rank (low traffic), because I think I wouldn`t benefit too much of it. Do you think I should do? When I search for suitable websites I find that 80% of them are owned by newbie bloggers and probably the only visitors are their family members and close friends.. I can judge by the poor design of the website, the almost zero pagerank, 10+Million Alexa rank and so on..

Also, may I ask that when did you join to EZA? Do you feel that it`s more difficult to syndicate an article through Eza to quality websites then let`s say 5 years ago? Do serious, authority websites are still publishing articles from Eza?