Affiliate and Article Marketing Updates

Hey I’m here in Orange County, California for the weekend, talking to over 400 personal trainers about getting started online. I’ll be giving them their complete blueprint to $100K in 12 months.

More about the seminar next week…

Q from Robin: I am a new subscriber to your newsletter. If you have a moment, please try to explain to me briefly what Affiliate Internet Marketing is all about. On the face of it, it all sounds too easy, too good to be true.

Answer:
Interesting, I’m curious to see what those emails promised you, because like anything in life, anything that sounds too good to be true usually is.

Affiliate marketing takes work, but can bring great rewards.

Here’s how affiliate marketing works.

Essentially, as an affiliate, you would get paid commissions on a sale after you send someone to a website.

Sounds easy enough, except for the fact that 99% of affiliate marketers on the internet don’t have people to send to any websites.

It’s like the ol’ South Park “underwear gnomes” episode. If you have a weird sense of humor, you’ll like this:

The only problem, of course, is step 2.

That’s how it is with affiliates.

1) Get an affiliate link
2) Send people to that affiliate link – How????
3) Profit

I recommend you read my guide to making “$100K in 12 months with affiliate marketing” here.

Let me know if you have more questions.

Q from Thomas: Should I give up on article marketing?

Great question, so I went to Rick Porter, SEO mega-expert, for the answer:

“There used to be 2 reasons to submit articles to directories

1 – traffic
2 – backlinks

“Now you only get backlinks, but I was never relying on them for traffic anyways because the amount of traffic was only a trickle.

“So with the changes, I don’t recommend submitting to dozens of article directories manually because it’s just not going to net a lot of results.

“Now that Google has shown that it can target individually any popular site and knock their rankings down manually it justifies more than ever that you have to keep a diverse profile of where you get your traffic.

“I wouldn’t waste time submitting original content to Ezines anymore because it just isn’t going to rank high.

“However there are article directories now setup on WordPress platforms and they are a great source of backlinks.

“There are plenty of sites out there with higher PR than Ezines that allow a member blog and don’t have stringent rules.

“For example, Blogger is a PR9 and Ezine is only a PR6.

“Setting up a Blogger and getting backlinks from that gives you more powerful backlinks than Ezine, plus you can monetize with your own adsense and there isn’t a moderator that has to approve your posts.

“And since Blogger is owned by Google I doubt they ever give themselves a penalty and make themselves rank lower.

“Free WordPress blogs are also on a PR9 platform, another great source of backlinks.

“Also, if you use a good article directory submission tool then article directories are still worth it to get backlinks.

“Article Marketing Robot is only $77 and is an unbelievable submission tool giving you hundreds of backlinks off 1 submission.

“I use it everyday for my sites and clients, plus since many of the article directories our on WordPress blogs a lot of the articles rank in the top 10 pages of Google.

“I believe if you are going to get traffic from other sources then using Blogger and Youtube are good sources because they are owned by Google.

“But always remember that nothing is set in stone, even though Blogger is a great source of “do-follow backlinks” Google could decide anytime to change the backlinks to “no-follow”.

“Most internet marketers are turning more and more to video marketing to take advantage of how easily they can get a video to rank for a keyword on Youtube.

I would follow suit too because when you look at a Google search, Google always puts Youtubes at the top of the page – and yes they own Youtube so obviously the trend is going
to continue with Google favoring themselves from every angle.”

Rick

**********
Thanks Rick.

Next Week: Advanced Copywriting Call-to-Action Tips and the Truth about Aggressive Marketing

Get stuff done,

Craig Ballantyne

“Always render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.” – Og Mandino