The top two goals of any marketer are more money and more time. At least they should be their two top goals. That being said, I wanted to integrate both of these things into my Article Marketing business. And, that’s exactly what I accomplished.
I developed this method a little over a month ago. However, I wanted to actually test it for a month before I released it. Here are my final results:
$4,300 revenue (Roughly)
4 hours worked (Roughly, excluding time you won’t have to spend)
I’d say that’s pretty damn good if you ask me. Would you work 4 hours (of easy work) for $4k? And, it’s passive residual. Meaning, it keeps flowing in (passive) and it grows (residual). I guarantee that from the work done in December, I’ll keep seeing income from the articles submitted for probably over a year.
This method is going to be a bit detailed, as I don’t want any people attempting it coming back and complaining it doesn’t work. Even if you don’t complain, I still would like it to work for whoever goes and does it. It’s definitely worth it. If you’re having problems funding PPC/PPV campaigns, this can be your “funding money”…
In a nutshell, you’ll be getting free articles by splitting your commissions with freelance writers. If you’re rich already, paying for articles may be worth it to you. However, most of us aren’t that rich. And even if I was, I don’t know if I’d want to buy 1,000 articles at $5 – $15 a piece.
I’ve also tried “Scamming” people out of articles. That doesn’t work that well, and is definitely NOT a long term solution. You risk the hot headed freelance writers getting “too” pissed off at you and reporting you. Trust me, not a smart thing to do for a long period of time.
So, splitting commissions is the best way to go. Everything is free, so this shouldn’t be a problem. You’re doing very, very little work.
So, let’s get started:
1. You’ll obviously be getting freelance writers for classifieds sites. Craigslist is all that is needed, as it’s a little difficult to work with a large amount of people. I personally only worked with 2 people. However, I’ll be developing my own personal system that will allow me to work with over 100 – 500 people, easily. So, what you’re going to want to do is make a Craigslist ad (preferably in your own area if you live in the U.S.). Always, always keep your ad professional. Proper structure, grammar, use of words, etc. Nothing’s worse than a poorly written ad. Be honest and straightforward in your ad. I’m not going to post the exact ad I used, but it’s fairly simple. You’re looking for a few article writers to write articles for you based on a revenue sharing commission structure. You can lie and tell them that previous writers earn roughly $2 – $5k a month. No cost to get started, and will be able to see their articles published on the web. Keep it short and simple.
2. After the posting, if you’ve done it right, you’ll get a few hundred emails. At least I did. Instead of having an auto-responder, I just copy/pasted a pre-written response. All I did was replace their name at the top and bottom. (Eg. Hey ____ and Talk again soon _____) Obviously, the email response will detail the project more and then ask if they have any questions.
3. After they’ve responded to the first email response, I have a pre-written 2nd response to go with it. Along with that response, I’ll read over their first email and answer any questions they may have. The 2nd response starts with questions they have, and then a “Here’s a little bit more detail about everything”. And again, will ask them if they have any questions to get started.
4. If they’ve responded to the 2nd email, you’ve pretty much got them. At least I did.
Now basically what I’m describing to you now is what you’ll be describing to them. Which start with how you should have them write your articles.
• Offers
However, before you can have them write articles, you need an offer and keywords to go with it. The offer doesn’t really matter that much, so I’m not going to go into what offers/niche’s to target. However, I would advise you don’t target brand new offers. If it’s a brand related offer and the merchant shuts down or pulls their aff. program off the network – you’ve got a problem. Especially if all the articles list the brand name. If you find a “related” product to switch out your links on your site instead, then all the articles will ideally need to be changed to the new brand name. With 500+ articles floating around – that’s a bit of a task. So, stick to things that will be around for at least a year. And a good way to tell is by looking at how long they’ve already been around.
• Keywords
This is one of the most important things. If you’ve done article marketing or SEO – it’s all about keywords. You’re not going to be throwing up random articles and hoping for them to rank for random keywords. You should, and will be targeting each article for specific keywords and specific search engines. One article that ranks on Yahoo! may not rank on Google. All search engines have trends. Follow the trend and you’re golden. But, I’ll get into that a little more down the road. But for now, you need to get keywords for your niche. Ideally, you’d want to rank for heavy searched for keywords. However, those are a bit harder to rank for. So, you need more long-tail keywords as well. What I do is go into Google AdWords keyword tool, punch in the most generic phrase related to my offer and get ALL the results in the first section (which means all the results contain the word(s) I put in the search box. The second section is “related” terms) So for example, if my offer was free grant money, I’d type in free grants, free grant, grant money –etc – and get all the keywords.
Once I have all the keywords, I use a proprietary piece of software to determine the competition for each keyword. I personally like to start from the bottom up. I like seeing results first. And with low competition (which most of the time result in low search counts), you can see results faster. I’ve seen some guides and posts regarding not doing it this way, but I find it best. If you have your writers write 20 articles on high competition or medium competition searches and they don’t show up 1st, that can be “disappointing” to them. Even if you get them ranked #1 for a less searches for term, it’s still awesome to them to be #1 on the search engines. Remember, they know nothing about SEO, so THEIR content as #1 for a search is “amazing” to them. It fascinates them.
For those that don’t have software to use for analyzing competition, you can download a “FREE trial” of SENuke at SEnuke.com You can use the competition analyzer for free – forever. Without ever having to actually buy the program. It may shut down on you, but all you have to do is restart the program – but that’s only if you’re going to use the software for more than about 10 minutes.
• How to Write Your Articles
It’s not “all about” ranking #1 on search engines. Unfortunately, you can’t really split-test 2 different articles. If you change your content, there’s a good chance the search engine(s) will knock you down. I’ve done it maybe a dozen times, and every single time I was knocked down the page, or knocked it off completely. That being said, you should have a general knowledge of what a good article looks like. Unfortunately, I can’t provide you with a blueprint article to go off of. You do have to do some things yourself, and it’s not hard to find a well written article that sells something. In a nutshell, the article should be part review, part description and part sales. The articles that perform the least are heavy sales articles. They get flagged as spam – by real people. No one wants to feel like they’re trying to be sold on something. Good articles are informational and provide value. The type of article that you’d send to a friend. A lot of my articles are pure information on a basic subject. For example, I may write an article about how to fix your slice in a golf swing. I won’t promote some magic tool, but at the end of the article I’ll have a link to “Buy pre-owned Callaway golf clubs at 50% off!”. You’d be surprised how many people click through to your offer. Same goes for any other niche. As another example, I’ve written articles about “weight loss tips” for random things, and at the end of the article I’ll link to a weight loss offer. I’ve gotten thousands of dollars just using that technique.
That, in my opinion, is what the general pitch of the article should feel like.
Now, you have to structure your articles properly for each keyword. For very low search count and competition, it’s easier to rank because you don’t necessarily have to target the exact keyword density and word count of the other top 5 – 10 results because they didn’t target in the first place, and there’s no “trend”. However, you’ll find that with the more competitive keywords search engines have a trend for the top 5 – 10 results. For example, a keyword like “food” – the top results will have generally the same keyword density and word count. Sometimes there will be flukes (eg. The top 5 have an average of 663 words, and the 6th result has 7,000 words on the page) Same goes for keyword density. Some pages will have a 1 – 3% density and then one of the top results will have a 0% or 5% density. That being said, I usually ignore the “flukes” to get a better idea of the average keyword and word density of the pages that are currently ranking. And, each search engine will have different trends for different results. Which is why for the most part I have my writers write 3 articles for the top 3 search engines.
Now that you have a list with the competition levels for each keyword you grabbed, I then do batch research of averages for each keyword to send to my writers. To do this, I use SEO Studio from trendsmetrix.com which can be found at:
http://www.trendsmetrix.com/website-promotion-optimization-software/website-promotion-software.php
It took me about 3 weeks to find software to do exactly this. And even after I found them, I had to ask the programmer to edit the way it does the research. What this program does is “perfect” for what we are trying to accomplish.
It does the searches for each keyword inserted (just like a human would), and then gives you the averages of that keyword, as well as other data if you wish for just about any search engine(s) you want. Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, AltaVista and a bunch of others.
I then export the results, and send them to my writers. After of course explaining to them how to read the report and write the articles.
For the low competition keywords, as mentioned the averages don’t matter that much. I generally say 400 – 700 words, using the keyword ONCE in the first paragraph and ONCE in the title. That’s what I’ve found to work best for the long-tail – low competition keywords.
• Link building
After an article is submitted, I bookmark it on all the top bookmarking sites, plus a few more if it’s higher competition. Digg, stumbleupon, mister-wong, etc. You can get a list of the ones I use inside the SENuke program under Social Bookmarking.
For a few of those submissions, I use the keyword targeted in the title of the bookmark. And for the rest, I use related keywords.
I always give my writers 50/50 profit. They don’t know you’re actually really doing all the work with buying the domains, designing the site, hosting it, having the aff. network hookup – bumped payout, etc. So naturally, even if you tell them, they think they’re doing all the work. Even though they couldn’t do it without you. But, 50/50 is very fair, as you’re spending very little time publishing the articles and doing the linking to them. As mentioned, I made about $4,300 – half of that went to my writers based on their own generated commissions. I used Prosper202 to track each individual writer. I added them as “PPC Account” in step 1 in the setup. I keep in touch with the writers (but in the future when I work with 100 – 500 I obviously won’t be able to do that). And when you’re first getting started with them, you need to treat it as JV. And if you already haven’t guessed – you should have SEO sites for this. If you have 500 articles linking to one site – that’s a nice amount of links to just throw away on direct linking. Have an SEO site to go with this and you’re even more golden.
You should be submitting your articles to top article sites like GoArticles, eZineArticles, HubPages, Blogspot, Wordpess, other sites listed in SENuke, as well as a few other ones you can find with high PR’s.
Since this is such a long tutorial, I’m sure I left some small details out. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask away. And if you have good results, post back letting everyone know how you did. I’m sure if I can generate $4k in one month with only two writers, anyone who goes nuts with this method and works with 10+ can make a lot more. Good luck!
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