I am currently finishing off the month long ‘article marketing club’ at Wealthy Affiliate and I want to tell you about some of the things I have learned as well as give away some of the juiciest bits of information to help you in your article marketing efforts.
The article marketing club is one of the many resources available to members of Wealthy Affiliate (included with membership). This club takes a small group of people through the process of setting up an article marketing campaign over the course of a month in structured daily lessons. By the end of the month you have the following:
- A professional looking website with several static pages and blog posts (10 – 15 pages)
- An understanding of how to do proper keyword research
- 50 articles written and published online, each targeting a popular keyword with low competition
- Many back links to both your website and your articles to help them all show up in the search results. Several back linking techniques are taught.
- A systematic and repeatable system that you can apply to any online marketing effort you choose in any niche
- Most importantly, targeted traffic visiting your website looking to buy your product
To help you accomplish all this you are given very detailed instructions on a daily basis. You also communicate with other club members as well as the instructor on the forums or through personal messages. This kind of communication was extremely useful as others often provided their own tips and secrets based on their experience. To top it off Kyle and Carson, the creators of Wealthy Affiliate, also participate in the forum discussions offering their own expertise.
Setting up a website
Wealthy Affiliate offers free web hosting as well as easy website setup using WordPress Express. This system installs WordPress as well as the five most useful plugins for internet marketers. Once setup, you can modify the installation however you want – use your own theme, add more plugins, etc.
I already have a post about how to set up a professional looking website with WordPress so I won’t go into any more detail here.
Keyword Research
I’m only going to touch on keyword research here as it is a whole topic on its own which I will cover at another time. However, I will give you this: you want to find keywords that receive more than 300 searches a month and have less than 5000 competing websites.
You can use the Google keyword tool (it’s free) to find how many searches are done a month as well as find related search terms.
To find competing websites enter your search term into Google with quotes. Google will tell you approximately how many other websites are targeting the same search term.
Writing Articles and Getting them Published
You can find more information about article marketing in another post but I will add some important points here:
- Read over ezinearticles’ editorial guidelines. If you can write an article that ezinearticles will accept then you can write an article that practically any other article directory will accept.
- Make a big promise in you article title and over deliver in the article body
- Make sure your keyword is in the title and throughout the article body. Try and use your keyword about once for every 100 words.
- Link back to your website in your resource box to a relevant page on your website using the keyword as anchor text. This will give the reader a sense of continuity.
- Ezinearticles can get your article to the top of the Google search results so focus your efforts there. However, you should also try out other directories to see how well they perform for you and to vary the links coming in to your website. Here are some article directories with high page rank to try:
Now Take Action
Probably the most important thing the article club has to offer is a structured work environment that forces you to take action. Each day’s task typically took two hours or less and would include activities such as:
- Keyword research
- Article writing
- Creating a website page or blog post
- Back linking (through social bookmarking or commenting on related blogs)
Not every day was spent writing and work was only assigned six days a week so the overall workload was very manageable (can easily done part time).
The biggest thing I got from this club is an overall blueprint for how to implement a successful marketing campaign which can be implemented in an hour or two a day.
Update: A few days after publishing this post a comment was posted in the forum that reminded me of the importance of the group of people I’ve been learning with.
I gotta tell ya! This forum, and the members of it are awsome. I just got bailed out by an active member, who didn’t just answer a question simply, he jumped in with both feet and got me straightened out and on track again. Do you realize how much help that is? Not just because my difficulties are handled, and not just because someone is glad to be a team member and help out a fellow WA member, but because he didn’t just help my technical problem, he helped my self confidence. Never, not for a moment did I feel “I should have known that”, or “Oh how dumb of me”. Rather I feel I got help and I got a new friend. That is special. Why would anyone turn down a chance to belong to such a group? And special thanks to my Mr. D!
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