Article Marketing, Blogging, and the Real Truth About What You Should Promote and How
November 7, 2009 - Written by Gyutae Park
This is a guest post by Donny Gamble. who writes a blog about creating wealth by combining Internet marketing with network marketing. On it, Donny explains why Internet marketers should have an MLM business.
Article marketing is a very effective way of bringing in sales and many affiliate marketers are already taking advantage of the method. Article marketers submit their articles and reviews to the following places:
1. Article directories
2. Blogs – their own and other related ones
Both are good options, but since this is more or less a blog about blogging, I’d like to give some tips to those of you writing articles on your blog.
Affiliate Marketing for Blogs – Product Reviews
As a blogger, you start off with a big advantage – especially if you’re a blogger who’s been around for some time. You have the benefit of having a readership that trusts your opinion and thus making money is much much easier. Your readers respect your opinion and you should be able to get them to take out their credit card when you recommend something.
Of course this will only be true if you’re a trustworthy blogger who has been around for a long time and have consistently published valuable content. But if this is the case, then your endorsement can be enough to get readers to buy a product. Use this power with caution!
The perspective that you take in your product and service reviews should be that of a user or critic. Nobody wants to hear infomercial material biased towards only the hyped up features of a product. Go over the pros and the cons so that you come across as a legitimate reviewer instead of just another salesman. If you’re honest about a product that you truly endorse, then people are still likely to buy after reading the review.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that you can’t promote low quality products! Your readers will abandon your blog and begin to distrust your opinion. All those authority points that you built up by writing post after post with quality content will just go down the drain. So again, do not promote bad products! You will lose your readership and it’s just not worth it.
However, that’s not to say that some marketers do promote bad products are still able to make money. For example, I recently saw a blog that was clearly intended only to be a shady Clickbank money earner. Basically the site had 15 reviews of scammy paid survey products. Although the owner’s readership was zero, he worked on getting traffic to each specific post using article marketing for backlinks and he made a decent amount of money.
I can’t do that because I want a blog – with readership, comments, and interaction with my readers.
When marketing with article directories, people don’t necessarily know who you are and so you can promote bad product after bad product without anyone knowing. You could potentially find some scammy forex product that gives you a $100 commission, start writing related articles on sites like EzineArticles.com and start earning money. All you really need is a domain name and an affiliate landing page.
And you know what, some marketers do use this questionable tactic to earn money. But it’s definitely not a good long term strategy. In fact, if I was earning money by writing fake reviews, I’d be very worried right now. If you haven’t heard, the FTC is starting to crack down on this market. People were writing fake success stories for certain products only to promote them and make a commission. As a result, many people bought into it and were obviously scammed (and sometimes even experienced negative health consequences). The acai berry diet is notorious for this. With the new FTC rules, the bloggers themselves will be held responsible for false reviews and fake testimonials.
Writing false testimonials is illegal and pointless. Sure, you can make a quick buck but you end up hurting others and it’s just not worth it in the long run. The real money is in promoting quality services and it always will be that way.
My advice: Promote quality products. You’ll be able to write real honest reviews, get sales, collect large commissions, and not have to worry about being sued one day.
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Great Post.
I’ve never tried article marketing, but will try it out very soon. I’ve heard that article marketing is dying out though. It’s much easier selling products is the honest way as you can review better and you gain trust. If you have ablog with a high readership it will make things even more easier.
The way I look at it, article marketing is simply the syndication of your content to other related sites in order to gain more exposure – guest blogging included. In this case, article marketing will never die. Sure, spinning content and submitting it to a bunch of directories might lose its effectiveness pretty soon, but reaching out to new areas for new potential customers will always be a valid tactic.
While I agree with Gyutae, I’ve seen the search engine rankings boosted through article marketing as well. Besides, the articles you write today, if well-researched and clearly-focused, could later be used as your content arsenal to create ebooks and similar info products.
I am trying to do article marketing but I find it hard to do. I might not be doing it right but I will keep trying. It should work at the end. Greg Ellison
Greg, what are some of the troubles that you’re having? Maybe we can help you out here.
Majority of my marketing campaign was done through article submissions, I’ve been doing a lot of blog campaign too. Especially for content concentrations with the most viable keywords from google adwords. I think this is an effective method on generating back links especially for bulk websites.
Do you use any tools for your article submissions? I imagine that you would be if you’re generating back links in bulk.
Gyutae,
Great post about what it means to market authentically. Article, Forum, video… they are all powerful mediums that can get you a lot of exposure. I agree that this exposure should be accompanied with responsibility. When marketing ANY product your reputation is always on the line and your credibility gets around a lot faster than most think.
Thank you for fighting the good fight and showing us how it’s done.
Ken Pickard
The Network Dad
Hey Ken,
I absolutely agree. Nothing is more important in business than your relationships and your reputation – especially if you’re in it for the long term. You could scam people to make money now, but really that isn’t a viable business nor would it be very fulfilling.
Credibility is key. You can’t market crap on your blog or you might lose it. I never tried article marketing either but is seem a lot talk about a lot in the industry. I think it is interesting that if you search by author on some of the popular article directories. You see very few that do a lot of it.
Indeed, credibility is key. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of some of the automated article marketing tactics – i.e. spinning content and submitting to a whole bunch of article directories. Sure, it might work in building up traffic, but at the same time it could lead to a hit in credibility.
Very good read Donny.
I liked how you explained what could potentially happen if you did it a scammy way or a better way.
Hey Donny,
Great post, I also tried article marketing and had some success.
I noticed that you have to be very consistand in writing articles on regular basis or you won’t have much success.
Cheers,
Jeanette
Gyutae,
Just want to add that to be a responsible marketer is so important to our business.
It is not always about the money, we should provide a service first, then money will come as a result.
Cheers,
Jeanette
I totally agree, Jeanette. The most successful businesses and websites come from people who are truly passionate about what they do and want to help people. People pay companies that they trust – that’s the bottom line.
Bloggin is great on any subject. Great Job!
Wow, amazing po$t!!!, I have agreed with what you mentioned about blogging and article. I strongly believed on blogging, According to me we should write niche topic and unique content what others are not providing. I’ve never done article marketing, but after going through your article, I will try it.
Build Traffic!
Here is an old rule! If you want to be really successful in affiliate marketing, you ought to drive traffic to your website. The more visitors to the website, the higher the probability of click through. Many affiliate guides forget to mention that it is always prudent to build traffic first and then consider affiliate marketing. There is no magic potion. If there is no traffic, there are no profits. Don’t worry, if you haven’t got hordes of visitors, even a few visitors will do initially. Once these visitors start trickling down the web drain, you can place banners and advertising in appropriate places to get the results. A good affiliate marketer doesn’t care about the number of clicks but on the average number of clicks per visitor.
Such techniques, slowly but surely brings success. And with it comes a potential for much higher rewards