More Article Marketing Boo Boo’s

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I was working with a reader on the phone  this morning on otimizing some of his business’s article marketing campaigns in the fat loss/popular diets niche, and considering this is actually a topic that I’ve created many campaigns around, I have a pretty good grasp of the landscape – ie – both on the landing page, and resource box sides of the respective street.

As any copywriter will tell you - 45% of the battle is the headline - and 45% ( in an article the resource box) is the offer - and the 10% in between are just details.  So as we were sort of scanning for great headlines combined with outstanding offers ( a compelling resource box that commands the click) we came across, at the very same time, an article on the diet directory page whose headline just sang a song of sweet success.  Unique – curious, interesting and compelling, and two complete strangers ( me and he) both noticed it independent of the other.

A very promising start for sure, right?

The article itself?  Eh……:-)  Just ok – but who cares – lots of my articles are worse - and it’s all about opening peoples eyes, and then making a great offer that sends them where you want them to go – a free report, a website, an opt in, a re-direct, etc.

Now – while I’m personally NOT a big believer (anymore) of using keyword rich anchor text links in the resource box for SEO ( it works to a degree…..but I get better CTR using a very different approach and  I won’t sacrafice conversions for SEO) there is, absolutely NO reason to use a resource box that says NOTHING whatsoever….as this guy actually does after SUCH a great start.

 I mean…this says NOTHING – nothing keyword related OR compelling – or really trust building either – "this site" about the "above topic" is simply NOT the way you want to promote ANYTHING that you care about….EVER!  It tells me there are LOTS of topics that he/she writes about, this one being only one of them – and this is a plug and play resource box that gets thrown into all of them.  ( and if laziness is NOT the answer here….I’m actually unsure of what it is)

The bottom line is….we BOTH clicked, just to get an idea of they were doing on the landing page, and low and behold….

 

Trust me…..you do NOT want to be selling golf supply reviews, AND the fat loss for idiots on the same landing page - it doesn’t work..:-)  Affilaite marketing is FAR too easy to do well, and FAR too competitive to do half assed.  There are simply too many folks who are good at this process to screw up this collosally in my view – especially with such a kick ass start!  (the great headline they started this whole journey off with) 

I guarantee the authors here are leaving LOTS of money on the table with this effort – and if they are making any at all on this particular campaign – it ain’t much.  Even if they left the mediocre article alone ( again…I’m not passing judgement on the article content – as I mentioned above – I have plenty klunkers of my own..:-) but simply OPTIMIZED the resource box, and segmented the conent on the landing page – i.e. - get RID of the golf content – and ISOLATE the diet content ( ideally, only ONE diet program per landing page – they are running several competing programs on the same page – still a sin in my book – just not one of the 7 deadly ones) their conversions would double, triple or more overnight for sure.

Buy another domain for the golf stuff – and simply swing it all over there – for 99 cents you can buy a godaddy .info and have all your golf content copied over and uploaded for the cost of a bad cup of coffee.  Even better – for 5 bucks – you have all of the diet stuff segmented out into each respective program’s domain – and you’ve got a good way to split test which dieting offers are the best, in a far more elegant and expeditious way.

Very easy to do – and once you set it up – it’s dead simple to maintain to boot!

Tags: article marketing, copywriting