...Click Here for the Main Affiliate Page for this Clickbank Diet Affiliate Program
A Step By Step Guide To Article Marketing
Follow This Guide & Make A Living As An Affiliate Marketer
This is a step by step guide that you can follow to start earning a substantial income as an affiliate marketer through article marketing. And yes, it's possible to make a full time income as an affiliate marketer using these techniques. That's not a claim that it will happen overnight, that is unlikely.
If you follow the advice here and put in some work (creating good landing pages and submitting articles) in you can create an "income stream" that should keep making you money for years into the future without much upkeep (although it is a good idea to keep building more links even after you've got good search rankings, you can probably get away with slowing down significantly once you're where you want to be.)
The good news is that the main investment with this strategy is not money, but time. So you will not need to make a huge monetary investment to get started. Although the article submission services recommended here (Unique Article Wizard, ArticleRanks, Article Marketing Automation, & Free Traffic System) do have monthly fees (Free Traffic System does have a free version available but you should buy a pro membership) - all four of them combined add up to less than $200/month.
This guide is specifically about making money with article marketing as an affiliate for this Clickbank Diet Affiliate Program (which pays 75% commissions) but you should be able to apply these same basic strategies to promote any affiliate program (or your own product.)
Step One: Create Your Principle Landing Pages
I think it's a huge mistake to make a free web 2.0 landing page (such as Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogspot, etc) your main landing page. Why? Because you have no real control over these pages. They could be deleted. And you can't really control what's on the pages, they can put ads all over them and distracting links. Why go to all of the trouble of getting people to your landing pages if they are not set up to help you make as much money as possible?
This is why I think you should have your own domain(s) as your principle landing site. Yes, this will cost a little bit of money but it's definitely worth it. If you're going to be serious about making a living as an affiliate marketer you need to be willing to invest some money into what you're doing.
HostMonster Web Hosting is recommended for hosting your domain as it's a quality service (this site is hosted on it) that you should be able to count on (there's nothing more irritating then having your webhost go down! when that happens it means you're losing out on potential sales.)
How to set up your landing page is actually a pretty big subject all by itself. Obviously the more effective your landing page is at selling the product you are promoting (in this example it's TDOD) the more money you make. And you also have to consider SEO factors as well. There can be huge differences in the effectiveness of one page vs another.
If you don't want to get overwhelmed at this step then I recommend setting up a wordpress based blog on your domain such as this "review site." With that format it's easy to set up individual pages for different target keywords (for example "lose weight fast.")
It's essential that you have your target keywords in the title of your landing page.
I won't go into anymore detail on setting up your own landing page as it's really a huge subject and I want this page to be more specifically about how to do article marketing that works.
Step Two: Create Keyword Targeted Web 2.0 Pages
In Step One I badmouthed using free web 2.0 landers as your principle landing page but that doesn't mean there's no place for them in your article marketing strategy.
I think it's best to use sites such as Squidoo & Hubpages (these are the two biggest players in the web 2.0 world) as pre-landers which link to your main landers rather than as your main landers. This will help those main landers rank better and will give you more pages that can rank in the search engines.
It's great when you have multiple pages in the search results for whatever keyword you are targeting! For example: imagine if you had 5 or 6 of the top ten results for "lose weight fast" - you would make much more money with multiple listings than if you just had one listing because it gives you more chance of getting the searchers to come to your site and buy whatever it is you are promoting.
I also consider article sites such as EZineArticles to be a type of web 2.0 site. The articles you submit to those types of sites (Buzzle is another example) can rank in the search engines and can help your main lander (which they should be linking to) rank better too.
For the type of link building article marketing that this step by step tutorial is based on, it's best to think of these types of article submissions as just another type of web 2.0 pre-lander. This is not what I mean by article marketing!
And this is an important distinction because there is another type of article marketing (sometimes called "bum marketing") where it's all about writing and submitting many articles to sites like EZineArticles (this is usually the main target) and while this can lead to some sales on it's own, I think the system I am describing here is far more effective for creating a long term income stream.