Getting 150% ROI From Your Article Marketing…

Happy 4th of July!

Before you throw stones at me for not talking about PPC, hear me out! Amit asked me to do a guest post today because he’s out enjoying his ridiculous lifestyle while leaving the rest of us to work

The concept I’m about to share today is something I taught Amit a few weeks back, he found it useful enough to implement the very next day. I thought it was a safe assumption that if he enjoyed it, so would his readers…

Most PPC affiliates I know really look down on article marketing. Mostly it’s not enough “bulk” traffic for them and it takes too long to bring results.

Yes, you’re absolutely right. There is no way you’re going to get 1,000 clicks starting day 1 from article marketing, unless by luck you get syndicated on a major website, but that’s highly unlikely. What’s more likely is that you will get 50-100 visitors within the first few days and continue to get lingering traffic from that article that slowly builds over time (as the article spreads through the internet).

So, First of All, Why Even Bother With Article Marketing?

Well…why not? It’s still free traffic. If done right, it can be highly converting traffic while also helping build your brand.

But, here’s the best reason…

You’re not at the mercy of Google or anyone for that matter. Even if I WANTED to shut my article marketing traffic off, it would be impossible. There is no way I can possibly contact over 100,000 websites that have my articles on them and ask each of them to REMOVE my link.

The Biggest Downside To Article Marketing Is The “Work…”

To really get the most out of article marketing, you need serious discipline. When a site is brand new, you need to submit at least 1 article a day to the top directories. Even after a few months, you want to make sure you continue submitting a few a week to keep building.

Compare that to the concept of pumping a bunch of keywords into Google and simply tweaking and checking every day (rather than writing and submitting) and I start to understand why PPC affiliates don’t care for article marketing.

But what if you could automate it all? What if you can make your article marketing into more of a science where you even calculate things like ROI for each article?

Now, do I have your attention?

The Art of Outsourcing Article Marketing

Let me start by saying that when you’re first starting, outsourcing article marketing is not easy. You’re likely to get burned a bit in the beginning as you learn. Why? Because you need to find INEXPENSIVE QUALITY writers who can produce work fast (that’s a lot to ask for).

So, here are some tips:

1. Use www.Guru.com (I find the best quality writers here at the lowest prices).

2. Never use anyone that has no feedback or rating.

3. Always ask for sample work – make sure they’ve written articles SPECIFICALLY for article marketing.

4. Find out if they have staff and if they can commit to X articles a day. People that have staff never tend to work well for me.

5. Buy articles in lots of 10 (at a minimum) – you get better pricing.

6. Supply the writer with the following: article title, keywords and length desired (keep it around 450 words).

7. If they’re late or submit bad work even once, move on – trust me on this one.

8. Ask them to write the articles in NOTEPAD – easier to copy/paste into directories. Word puts in weird characters.

There are other tips too, but those are the most crucial.

Now, for the MILLION dollar question – how much do I pay the writer?

Calculating Article ROI…

Before you can figure out how much you can pay a writer, you’ll have to figure out what your article ROI is. To do that, you’ll have to first write a few articles yourself, submit them and track your success.

It’s really dead simple.

I create a unique landing page for an article where all my affiliate links use SUB ID tracking so I know which article referred the sale. I write about 5 articles, so I create about 5 unique versions of the page.

I submit the articles, give it a few days and go in and calculate my sales.

Typically, here is what I find…

Of course this is going to be very different based on the NICHE, but when I do my research PROPERLY using my own self-created techniques, I’m usually able to achieve the following results…

NOTE: I tend to prefer promoting Clickbank products when I do article marketing OR high converting and high-paying CPA offers.

I usually can count on each article generating roughly 1 sale/lead for me. The sale will typically average $25 (if it’s a CB product).

However, that one article probably creates much more “lifetime” income for me, but I’m too lazy to track that far – this one sale that I’m talking about typically comes in within the first 3-5 days.

So, let’s say each article is worth $25 to me…

If I search well on Guru, I typically can find great writers willing to write each article at about $6-7 an article (given that I bulk buy at least 10-20 articles). Additionally, I have built a small “submission” team that submits all of my articles, I estimate that it costs me about $3 per article to get them submitted the way I want.

So, now I’m spending about $10 per article to get it written AND submitted (all I’ve done myself so far is checked the quality of the article and written the title, not too much work so far).

At $10 an article and $25 commission, I’ve achieved a 150% ROI.

The other thing to remember is that the article will continue working for me for LIFE. The 150% ROI may very well become 300% or even 500% given life-time value.

So the key to making article marketing work for you is to apply some of your PPC discipline to the practice. Be smart when you outsource and know what your articles are worth. But even more importantly, make sure you do research to assure that article marketing will actually work in that niche.

Some niches that do very well in PPC may not be that hot in article marketing (and vice versa).

You Probably Have More Questions…

I hate to leave you at that, but at least I’ve gotten you hungry to start thinking about article marketing. Most likely you have questions like…

1. So, how do I do the research?

2. Where do I submit my articles?

3. What kind of landing pages should I use?

4. Are there any special outlines the articles should follow?

5. What about duplicate content penalty?

6. What other sites can I use to find writers?

If Amit allows me to, I’ll be glad to come back in the future and talk more about all the questions above. The good news is that Affiliate Classroom is working on a detailed report on exactly how to do article marketing that is based on my trials and errors from the last 5 years of doing it.

We’re getting ready to launch our own article directory that we’ve been working on for a year, so we’ll release the report along with that in about 3 weeks (hopefully Amit will let everyone know about it).

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Now, since Amit did not pay me for this post, here are some shameless plugs for where you can read more from me.

1. Affiliate Classroom Blog

2. IwillFIGHT.com – My new “passion” blog (the 2nd domain name I ever bought!)

3. AffSphere.com – The new article directory we’re getting ready to launch (still in BETA).