Case Study: How Article Marketing Is Significantly Increasing My Income (Part 2 of 5)

Following are the latest details on my experiment article marketing (does it work, or not?)

Listed below are more of the sites Im consistently submitting articles to. See Part I of this series for how and why these sites were chosen.

6. Alumbo.com: This site has a PR rank of 5 and an Alexa rank of 64,317.

You must sign up for an account to submit here. I find their submission process awkward and a bit confusing. Eg, you have to choose what category to submit to, and this not easy they way they have it set up because youre not sure if youre choosing the right thing based on the way they have it set up.

Also, no article stats are provided here not even a page that lists the articles youve submitted. Without this, it makes it hard to keep track of what youve submitted already. In my opinion, this is a basic because if you write a lot and submit to a lot of directories, you need some type of tracking mechanism to stay organized.

NOTE: In most of the directories, you have to choose a category, but it is pretty simple and straightforward. This is not the case with Alumbo. Youll just have to see for yourself what I mean.

7. ArticleCity.com: This site has a PR rank of 6 and an Alexa rank of 6,630.

You dont need to create an author account to submit here. The process is very easy and straightforward. No article stats are provided though (bummer!).

You can click on your name and find out which articles are live on the site, but there is no way to find out which articles youve submitted already. This is important because they take up to 15 days to approve an article for publishing, and if you dont keep track, you wont know if you submitted a piece already, or not.

One cool feature of this site is that you can submit articles in bulk (more than one at a time). There are stipulations, but being able to do this makes submission so much faster.

8. Zinos.com: This site has a PR rank of 6 and an Alexa rank of 6,630.

Zinos is not an article directory, but a digest of eZines on the web. You must create an author account to submit and provide a list of articles youve submitted, but no article stats.

The one thing I dont like about this site is they assign you an Author ID, which you must use to sign in. I dont like this because most of the time, once youve created your account with a directory, your username is your email address and your password is something you create.

As they assign you an Author ID, I can never remember it, so have to stop, locate it and put it in. Its a small thing, but it interrupts my flow of work. When youre manually submitting to many directories, this is a major time buster.

9. WebProNews.com: This site has a PR rank of 7 and an Alexa rank of 3,980.

This is a news site for e-business professionals. Although this is not an article directory site, I had written an article that fits well with their content and I knew it had a good chance of being picked up.

FYI, this site only accepts articles related to eBusiness, search engines, information technology, or web development. So, I havent submitted every article Ive written to them, because all of my articles dont fit their guidelines.

Tip: To dovetail on the above, only submit relevant content to directories/sites. The one thing you dont want to do is get banned from a site for submitting content that doesnt fit their guidelines and/or submitting poorly written pieces.

Most article directories have sufficient categories that you will easily be able to find one that fits your materials. If a site is not an article directory, then look for guidelines that tell you what they do accept.

10. Buzzle.com: This directory has a PR rank of 6 and an Alexa rank of 5,835.

You must create an author account then wait. With most directories, once you create an author account, you are able to log in instantly, after clicking on a confirmation email that they send to you.

With this site, you have to wait to be approved it only took a few days, but compared to other sites, its a little hitch that makes you go rats!. Worth the wait though with their rank and all.

This directory provides limited article stats and its easy to submit once your account has been approved.

Questions from Readers

Q: Are you posting the same article to each of these different directories?

A: Yes. This is how article marketing is done.

Is this seen as spamming? To be honest, I dont know. All I can say is many times I have found one of my articles in a directory that I did not post to. I can only assume that some directories pull from others.

Q: Are you posting to each directory every day?

A: Yes, which makes it so time-consuming. Many of the directories are similar, but some allow HTML, while others do not. So, I create an HTML-coded version of the article, and a plain text version. Then, I simply copy the version the directory accepts into the box.

How the Money Shaking Out?

Right now, running about 2.5 times/day what I was making before I started this experiment. FYI, Im doing a day-to-day comparison (eg, Sept 30th to October 30th earnings). At the end of the experiment (11/18/06), I will compare 10/18 thru 11/18 to 9/18 to 10/17 for this year and for last year.

Building Your Brand Getting Name Recognition

Before I started this experiment, when I typed my name into Google, the count came back at between 700 to 800. Yesterday, I googled my name and the count came in at 11,200! Last Friday (10/27), my name returned 14,200 results.

Why is this important? Simply put, the more visible you are, the more credibility you build. Remember, most prospects have to see your ad 78-28 times (depending on the source you cite) before they will buy from you.

So, while this may not lead to direct sales, when a prospect is looking for what Im selling (my ebooks if I can ever find time to get them onto ClickBank.com), my name will hopefully be top of mind (at least in the top 3).

Stay tuned for Part III.

May be reprinted with the following, in full: Copyright, 2000-2050, Yuwanda Black, Publisher, http://InkwellEditorial.com: THE business portal for and about the editorial and creative industries. First-hand freelance success stories, e-courses, job postings, resume tips, advice on the business of freelancing, and more! Launch a Profitable Freelance Writing Career in 30 Days or Less -- Guaranteed! Log on to http://InkwellEditorial.com to learn how.

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Your Ebook Internet Marketing Strategy - 7 Vital Components

Do not underestimate the importance of having a good ebook internet marketing strategy. It will make or break your success in terms of the number of copies your ebook sells, and the revenue and profit you ultimately receive from sales of your ebook.

With that in mind, here are eight vital components for your ebook internet marketing strategy.

1. Set up a Web Site

The first and most important weapon in your ebook marketing arsenal must be a web site containing a sales page for the ebook. This needs to be a page dedicated to information about your ebook only. It is even better if you set up a dedicated domain name and site for the ebook. Now that web hosting packages are available for just a few dollars a month, and you can get a package allowing unlimited sites in one package, I strongly recommend giving your ebook its very own site.

Your sales page should be well-designed and contain plenty of information about your ebook. This information should include features and benefits to the readers, and of course, testimonials from your satisfied customers. And if you expect to have credibility with potential customers, your sales page needs to be free of little errors.

2. Build Your Own Mailing List

If you dont already have a mailing list and your own newsletter, start one. You may already have heard that, on average, people need to see a marketing message seven times before they will take action and place an order. A newsletter is a great way to keep your message in front of your audience on a regular basis, and at the same time you will be building up their trust in you as they get to know you and the quality of your information.

You might send out a regular newsletter - for example monthly or weekly - or you can set up autoresponders to automatically send messages at specific intervals. An autoresponder can send a given message at a specified number of days after the subscriber signed up to your mailing list.

3. Sell Your Ebook Through ClickBank

Why use ClickBank? There are several reasons why I recommend that you consider selling your ebook through ClickBank.

First, ClickBank is a very experienced partner to have when selling an ebook. Thats what they specialize in. There are already 10,000 publishers and authors selling information products using their system. But there is something even more important than the number of publishers. Its the number of affiliates. ClickBank have an army of 100,000 affiliates ready to jump on your bandwagon and start promoting your hot new ebook.

Second, ClickBank has a neat payment processing system. If you use ClickBank you will not need to set up an expensive merchant account with your bank in order to accept credit cards online. Setting up a publisher account with ClickBank costs just $50 or so.

Finally, ClickBank works neatly in conjunction with your own web site and newsletter. You simply add the special links given to you by ClickBank into your newsletter and web site, and whenever anyone clicks through your order link, they will be taken to a professional order form where they can pay using their credit card or PayPal.

Whenever one of ClickBanks affiliates refers a visitor who goes on to make a purchase, ClickBank automatically tracks which affiliate referred the visitor and pays their commission.

4. Article Marketing

Article marketing involves writing articles and making them available for webmasters and editors to publish. The greatest exposure usually comes from listing the articles at article directories such as EzineArticles and IdeaMarketers. This allows anyone to publish the article without any fee to you, the author, provided they include your 'Author Resource Box' at the end of the article.

To promote an ebook successfully using article marketing you should write articles on topics closely related your ebook. Your author's resource box should be a small paragraph or two about you including a direct link to the web page for your ebook.

Besides being a good way to generate traffic, article marketing is a great technique for increasing your brand awareness. As people read your articles at various web sites they will begin to recognize you as an expert in your topic.

5. Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your ebooks sales page. It is certainly not the cheapest source of traffic, but it is probably the most effective technique to guarantee a large quantity of traffic, fast.

With Pay Per Click advertising you bid the maximum price that you are willing to pay for each visitor that clicks on your listing and comes through to your site. The more you bid, the more likely your listing will show. Many webmasters obtain traffic for $0.05 to $0.15 per click.

One good thing about PPC advertising is that unlike other forms of advertising, you only pay for visitors who actually click through your link and visit your site. Compare that to traditional advertising where you pay a set price for the ad regardless of whether you receive any response.

6. Regular Advertising

Regular classified advertising is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers and magazines. Many online ezines and email newsletters offer classified advertising spots. Advertising in these can be one of the best sources of targeted traffic, since you have the ability to select those newsletters with an audience that most closely resembles your own target audience.

If you know the email newsletter or mailing list is a very good match, consider sending a solo mailing. A solo mailing is a special mailing sent to all the subscribers containing only your message promoting your ebook. It will cost more than regular advertising within a newsletter, but youll get a much higher response rate.

And don't dismiss offline classified advertising. It is possible to run a classified advertisement in an offline publication such as a newspaper or carefully targeted magazine and get an excellent response of people checking out your ebook.

7. Profit Sharing

Consider approaching other web site owners and offering to allow them to sell your ebook directly from their web site. You should arrange in advance how the profit will be shared. I usually ask the other web site owner to pay me fifty percent of the revenue from my ebook sales. The web site owner usually loves it because they will have a new ebook to promote, and after they pay their own payment processing fees, they should still be able to keep 40 to 50 percent of the revenue.

There you have it. Seven proven ebook marketing techniques for promoting your ebook. You might not choose to use all seven, but you should be using at least five or six of these. Some of these techniques involve using third-party tools or resources. If you are interested in learning which resources are my favorites, I have some additional details on my web site. If you employ these seven techniques carefully they will make an enormous impact on the sales of your ebook.


Daniel Moro has been successfully building online businesses for ten years. Download your free report on '10 Remarkably Effective Traffic Building Techniques' at http://www.DanielMoro.com

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