How Do I Post Articles

How I Do Article Marketing And Article Writing

So you are thinking about supplementing your income and you want to be your own boss, you want to set your own hours or you just want to set your own pace .  Well I found one  that fits that bill, it is  called article marketing  and/or article writing.

 Article Writing is where you write an article, blog, web page, etc and discuss a product or a niche.  You do not sell the product  or niche, but you provide links, called affiliate links, to the products pre-sell page.   The pre-sell page further describes the product or the niche, which will provide the potential customer with more information on the product or  niche your trying to sell.

 From from the pre- Read document sell page, the interested customer or reader we provide a link the self page, which is the page where the customers can sign up for the product or niche.

 
 Defining Article Marketing and Article Writing

  
Article Marketing is the process by which you promote a niche or a product by writing articles.

 Article Writing is a process in which you right articles to promote niches  or products.

 As you can see article writing and article marketing go hand-in-hand. When you take up article writing you actually write about niches or products that you want to promote. By writing articles on the niches or products, you can supplement your income by having the reader of your article purchase what you are promoting.

The length of time you devote article writing is up to you. You can write one article a day or even two or more articles a day or one article a week, it is all up to you on how much time you want to spend on it.

If you want to learn more about article marketing, and article writing, read on and I will describe  the process that I use. I have been doing article marketing and article writing for two years and have seen my income grow each year.

 How I Got Started

I had recently retired and wanted to supplement my retirement pay and Social Security plus I get a small VA disability.  I have observed increases in prices of just about all goods and clothing, food, and fuel. So I decided to look for ways that I can supplement my income to keep from falling behind.

 The parameters I set to earn additional money were:

• I want to set my own hours and days that I worked.
• I wanted to work at home  and be my own boss.
• I did not want the new position to be too difficult.
•  I did not want to spend excess amounts of money on this start-up position.
• I wanted to help other people.
• And I wanted to keep exercising my brain.

I found that if I did article marketing  and article writing, I could satisfy all five of the parameters I laid out.  I set my own hours and days I work, I work at home, it's not too difficult,   I did not have to spend a lot of money,I help other people and I exercise my brain.

 My First Challenge

 My first challenge was that I had not written much and  I did not like to write. Also I didn't have a clue on what to write about. So here's how I came over those obstacles.

Learning to write:   Having not written much during my professional life, I thought it would be difficult to write an article.  In fact it took me four days to write my first 250 word article. But now I can write a quality article in 1 to 2 hours. How did I do that?

As the old saying goes  " How do you get to Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice". And that is what I did,  I start writing articles, on things I knew. My first article was on our living in Alaska. This is the one that took me four days to write and get approved by Ezine.

So you get in the habit of writing articles, pick a topic that you are well familiar with and write. Write as many articles as you can about the subject you are aware of, make sure they  over 400 words long, because most quality directories will not publish articles that are less  than 400 words.

To make sure you have quality articles, post the articles you practice with in such directories as Ezine.  Now before you post in a directory, make sure you read their requirements. They have certain requirements to make sure they retain their quality aspects.  you may get some reject their at first, but learn from your mistakes and over time you will improve.

As you write more and more articles, you'll write more quality articles and in a shorter period time.

One thing I use now, rather than using a keyboard, I  use Dragon Speech, which really  shortens my article writing time down and makes for better quality articles.  It takes a little time to calibrate it and learn the short cuts, but it is worth  it.

My Second Challenge

Finding A Niche Or A Product

My second challenge was to find my niche or product I wanted to promote.  After trying various affiliate programs, including Amazon.com, I found I could make more money on a single product than I could on many products. 

 For example, I wrote some articles on Amazon products, but they only pay 4% commission. There are many weight loss products out there, but that market is saturated with many articles  promoting weight loss and it is difficult to get established.  So find out which markets are not saturated and go for that one.

I eventually settled on Market Health  for several reasons.   The first reason is you get almost 50% profit off the product  you sell.  For example, one product I sell I get a  $40 commission and if the customer comes back I get another $40 commission.

The other reason, is that they sell mainly beauty products or things that you can use to beautify your hair, body, skin etc. With the baby boomers advancing into their senior years or middle-age there is a large market for these types of products.

So if you are looking for a product or a niche to promote, I suggest looking in  Market Health and pick from their many  products.

Lessons Learned

•  Write About One Product- when I first started I picked many products to write about. I had close to 100 articles on about 75 different products. I was getting people to read my articles but with only one article and one product, I was making very little sales. Then I learned to pick one product and write many articles about that one product. My views remained the same,  but they were all reading about the same product. Therefore my sales grew exponentially. Lesson learned–pick one product and w.rite many different articles about this one product.

• Don't Worry About Traffic –At first I thought it was important to get traffic to your articles. So I spent lots of time developing back links, and utilizing other resources to get traffic to my articles. But I was wasting my time, if all you need is a quality directory which has a low Alexia number and the traffic will be there. Of my 500 articles I currently have I get about 150 views a day. The more articles I write and post them to quality directories such as Ezine,   the traffic will be there.

•  How To Select A Quality Directory - there are many directory services out there that you can utilize to publish articles on. The main one I use is Ezine, the reason I use this directory as my main one is because they personally read every article and only publish those  that meets or exceeds their standards. Plus they have a well Alexia rating. The Alexia rating determines the web pages popularity against all the web pages on the Internet. Google is naturally rated number one, and Ezine Has respectful rating of 186. you can download the Alexia toolbar and have it available so you can see the ranking of each web page

• Publish To More Than  One Directory– When I first started posting articles, I only posted to user. Because I was afraid of adding duplicate copies out to the Internet. Then I found out I could post to multiple directories, and get more exposure to my articles. Site now hosts three additional directories EzineMark, GoArticles and ArticleCell . I get an article posted on Ezine, and  then I copy and paste that article I just published to the other three article directories. the only caution is, make sure you use the same author's name in the other directors for the same article.

•  Develop A Quality Pre-Sell Page –once you have developed quality articles, the next thing to have the quality pre-sell page. Nothing can lose a customer quicker than sending the customer to a presell page that does not talk about your article was presenting or is crammed with links to other products. A quality presell page should further describe the benefits of your product and excites the customer to want to go to the products sell page. An example of a quality presell page is the one I have on selling men and women's hair loss products called no longer balding.

•   Keywords–your article title and body should have keywords for a product or niche you are promoting. But the article directories will limit your keywords to 4% of the bodies density. The article directories will normally alert you when you exceed this amount, and before it can be publish you must ensure you are 4% or less in regards to density of keywords.

• Blog URL  - One other thing I do is take my keyword, go to blogger and  write an article on it. I then take my key word and turn it into a url using blogger.  To do that go to blogger then click Settings.  Then go to "Publishing" and you will see a link  "Buy a URL".  That will  take you through the process to buy a domain name from GoDaddy and will automatically be placed on your blog.  This will be  your pre-sell page.  

If you have any questions about this process please leave a question or comment in the  comment section