$100 A Day With Article Marketing?

Is it really possible to make money online (to the tune of $100/day) using the power of article marketing? Can you actually earn a semi-passive, recurring online income, even if you do not have your own web site, do not have a list, and do not have a product of your own?

Well, some internet marketing enthusiasts are using this alternative to AdSense approach by combining article marketing with affiliate marketing. Here's how it works...

The main approach is to find products that are being sold online. These can be in the form of ebooks (which you can find in online marketplaces such as Clickbank or Paydotcom), software, or even consumer products (which you can also find in Commission Junction, for example).

If the items for sale have distinct product names, then you know you can attract targeted traffic. For example, if someone is searching for the name of a particular product (i.e., Answer Analyst), then there's a pretty good chance that person is intent on buying that product.

Compare this with someone searching for "online research tools", for example.

Do you now see the difference between a person who wants to buy something versus a person who is just doing a bit of research?

So, once you've identified products (with distinct names) for sale online and have joined their affiliate marketing programs, you will then need to find out what are the different keywords or phrases that people intent on buying the product search for in Google.

Once you have a list of those keywords, you will then write 7 to 10 different articles. Each article will focus on a particular keyword phrase, and each article's title will be worded such that people who see it in the Google SERPs will want to read your entire article.

Since you don't have your own web site (or you do but it hardly gets any traffic yet since it's quite new), you will publish your article in various popular article directories. The search engines usually rank such directories high in the SERPs because those sites have lots of content, and they are also updated on a regular basis.

Article Directories: Where To Submit Your Articles

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.buzzle.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://www.isnare.com
http://www.searchwarp.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.articlecube.com
http://www.easyarticles.com
http://www.articlestomp.com
http://www.a1articles.com
http://www.articlealley.com
http://www.articlebiz.com
http://www.articlecity.com

Those people will read your short article (250 to 350 words), come down to your "About The Writer" resource box, read the "if you want to know more..." invitation that leads them to click on to either another free website of yours (i.e., Squidoo, Blogger or Blogspot), or directly to the merchant's salespage via your affiliate link.

Some article marketers will send traffic from their EzineArticles webpage to their Squidoo page because they want to take some kind of double-traffic approach. Search engine robots often crawl EA and Squidoo, so more articles means you have a higher chance of being found in the search results, right?

Now there are many products you can promote online, which ones will you target first? Target those products whose related keywords get a combined search volume of at least 100 searches a day. On the other hand, some article marketers will go for keywords which get 1000 searches daily.

It basically depends on you and your resources. If you like to write, or you outsource article writing to a virtual assistant (in the Philippines, for example) who can churn out original short articles like crazy, then go ahead and target those 100-searches-a-day topics.

But if you're short on time, or you don't relish the thought of writing 10 articles and make money online from only 1 of those articles, then target those phrases which get at least a thousand queries daily. Might as well attract high traffic to your page, right?

You will also need to consider the competition, though. If there are too many other people writing about those products and targeting similar keywords, then don't expect that just because you submit your article to EA, your page will magically outrank all those other similarly-worded articles in the Google SERPs.

Some article marketers will say that the best way to make money fast and easy is to keep your articles short (i.e., 250 to 350 words). Afterall, the goal is to get your readers to visit the merchant and not spend too much time admiring your article.

It sounds like a reasonable strategy, right? The key assumption, though, is that your short article will rank high in Google. Here's the thing, though: Will Google index your article if it comes across as a thin affiliate page?

(A thin affiliate page does not really add value, because its main purpose is to quickly send people to the online merchant. If it is not valuable, why should Google make it more visible in the search engine results, right?)

I recommend, therefore, that you write and submit a combination of long (400-500 words) and short (300 words) articles, and track which ones actually earn you more affiliate marketing commissions. And if you discover more than one profitable niche topic, or even if you experiment by writing about diverse topics, please consider using pen names to help boost your credibility online.

Yes, article marketing will involve a fair amount of effort and an investment in your time at the beginning. But once this is set-up, you can easily monitor and track which topics bring in the money for you. Then you can either write more articles about those topics, or be satisfied with the amount of money you earn online and then just rely on the passive income those articles give you.

Just remember, though, that if you stand still then others will write more current articles. The effect of this is that your webpages will eventually get pushed out of page 1 of the Google SERPs.

Basically, if you want to stay on the "no need for your own web site" approach, be prepared to keep on writing if only to maintain your visibility in the search engines. Alternatively, you can build your own web site and build a traffic source that is less dependent on SEO or the search engines. But that topic is for another blog post...

Can you really make $100 a day online with article marketing? If you're willing to follow the example of those online marketers who have published around 500 niche keyword-targeted articles, then yes, 100 dollars daily is a reachable target, particularly if you are able to sign up with good affiliate programs.

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"$100 A Day With Article Marketing?"
First Posted: February 8, 2009 | Filed in: Make Money Online

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