Adventures in Article Marketing: Easy Ways to Amp Up Your OutPut!

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It kills me how many people I talk to overlook articles as a useful and skillful means by which to generate buzz, backlinks and big bucks from their online marketing efforts.  And I say this with no intended disrespect…but I have done a few free consultations with people over the last few weeks ( all of which I hope are/will be reading this) - via email and telephone - every one of these very nice folks acknowledged they weren't making one prickly penny with any of their marketing machinations…yet every time I would recommend, urge, prod and just a slender shred short of PUSH them to simply write a few articles to pump up their promotional process - they would balk quicker than Roger Clemmens does at showing off that spot on his ass where he liked his decadurbolin shots on game day.  For you non baseball fans - it means they just said no ( not to the 'roids - to the articles..:-)

And with even a bit more restraint I will share…I even had a few people sort of intimate that writing articles was BENEATH them - or too TIME CONSUMING…or they HATE TO WRITE and other excuses to avoid picking up the proverbial pen.  More people spent many moments of our precious time together talking about article spinners, mass blogging tool, RSS re-writers and every OTHER bad worthless euphamism for getting out of creating ORIGINAL content. Look, the bottom line is this:  If you are in the online marketing business, your success is mas o menos going to be very closely tied to your ability to create content.  If you can't do it - you ain't going to make it.  Sell real estate.  Bartend.  Study evolutionary cosmology.  Just do something different, cause - even the most mediocre writers out there who are successful online are creating LOTS of stuff regularly.  I read 10-20 blogs a day - some of these folks who are penning this stuff are making multiples of 7 figures a year - and NONE of them could hold a candle to my English Lit prof's in college.  But no matter - they write PASSIONATELY and with engagement and illumination and information and ALL of the sort of stuff that drives buckets of backsides at their sites.  I don't know 1 - not a single person - who outsources everything and has been successful. I think they are almost oxymoronical in nature - to HATE creating content - and yet be a successful marketer in a field measured by your ability to persuade through the power of the written word, and the poetry of it's presentation.

Anyway - so that long rant is out of the way - what I'd like to share with those of you who are on the fence about writing articles - if you are reading this, ( and this far down) you obviously put some value in my opinion - which shows you have good taste and will most likely have a banner year..:-)  I write articles everyday - I submit articles everyday - and I have NEVER used an article spinner, or PLR articles, or some kind hearted chap in India who will cook them up in the King's english because I have PASSION for my own business.  And content creation is my business.  And I care about the product that I produce.  And I have an insatiable greedy desire to be the best at what I do.  And while MOST of my articles are even in niches where I am using a PEN NAME..ie - no one would even know whose creative craft it was that they were reading.  So if it sucked sorry stones - it ain't my going to be my god given name that's going to feel the pain of a piss poor product right?  Wrong.  I care.  Everyone that I know who is ultra super duper obnoxiously successful in their particular field, sports, business, construction, theology, whatever - simply cares more than the mediocre masses.  It's really quite that simple.

The screenshot below is from todays article marketing submissions in ONE niche - for ONE new site - dated today 1/3/2008.  The site is brand new - and has had very little traffic since I installed the analytics a week or two ago.  This site, obstensibly, is a dressed up thin affiliate site - which means, it has a nice template, and some RSS feeds, some video content and the exact same articles that I submitted here below earlier this afternoon - in combination with a series of ads revolving around ONE particular affilaite offer. Banners, some sidebar text links and some links in the article text itself.  Other than configuring the stylstic elements of the template ( which I invariably spend FAR too much time on because I'm a vain dummy) this whole site construction side of the project represents roughly the amount of time it takes to take a real long nap after one apple martini too many at lunch.  The articles ( in this case - I think I submitted 6 or 7 as you'll see below) took a few more hours to write and submit, do the keyword research on, etc.  Altother 5 or 6 hours lets say for the whole kit and kaboodle.  I submitted these articles this morning - they were approved by mid afternoon - as I write this - about 1 am - 12 hours or so later - this BRAND NEW SITE has gotten over 300 visitors directly from the article directories themselves…these haven't even been picked up, indexed and saturated in the search engines yet.  No social networking "buzzing" has been done.  No bookmarking, trackbacking, et al - this will all happen over the next few days - but quite simply, in this niche, to pay for this sort of traffic on these keywords would have cost me 400-500 bucks.  Just today.  Now, the affilaite program that is being promoted (primarily a clickbank product, with one secondary commison junction offer as well) has already generated over 80 hits on this id.   ( for those of you not following the funnel - from article directory - URL click BACK to my site - from my site TO the affilaite program with my cookie) And considering this program is supposed to convert very well - while no sales have been made just yet - I have ambitious motivations to keep working in this niche for days to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember - this is the infancy of the campaign. Over the next few weeks (often simply a day or two) these articles will rank on the SERPS for the article titles as they were carefully chosen and written …they will get visits from the social networks, etc and for weeks, months…and yes, even potentially YEARS to come these articles will sit out there driving traffic to this new ( then to be old) site, which will in turn send people to the affiliate..who will in turn sell my visitors their  products for me.  And if they dont' - I'll simply reroute the traffic somewhere else that will.  

Why such a long and wordy and pontificating post on writing articles?  Because YOU can do it.  Everyone can do it.  I don't care WHERE you are financially, philosophically, geographically or otherwise - you CAN do this, you can start tommorow - and you will make money. If you don't like to write - that's fine - I don't like to shovel snow, but I do it rather than slip and fall on my face when I walk out of my house in winter.  If your falling - or failing - at making any money, think of article marketing as huge snow shovel. Because it may not be fun to do, but it will save your red rear end if you keep falling on it while trying every other half - assed approach to making money that some people are emailing me about trying.  And while I do try to be nice…suffice it to say - if you are broke as a joke and stuck like chuck about how to create your first autorepsonder sequence, don't ask me if investing $797 a month in some mass blog aggregator tool is worth taking a home equity line of credit for.  It's not.  Get a job.  ( or simply give me the $797 and I'll show you how it's done..:-)

I won't write your articles - but if you need help conceptualizing, framing out or simply organizing your first article marketing campaign, drop me an email and I'll see about making some time to help you out.  But it's easy - foolproof easy actually..and if you get started tommorow, you WILL make your first few bucks within a few days at the most.