Article Marketing is Better than Adwords

First, a little background about my own internet marketing career. I am in IM for about three years now and i tasted as good as all aspects of online marketing already. 

I am using Pay-Per-Click (Adwords) for about the same time, about three years, here mainly with clickbank. The other main source of my income is through my own products. I am clickbank vendor and affiliate.

Recently i also started with CPA. I think i can say that i am "pretty" experienced when it comes to Adwords and keyword research.

However - i only used Article Marketing very sporadically. Yes i had my writers and i wrote some articles myself, but i never gave articles and article submission the respect it does actually deserve. Maybe one reason is that people call it "bum marketing" - implying it is something only non-experienced marketers do or implying it is not very effective.

Nothing can be farther from the truth - and i will prove it to you in a second. I will go even that far and say that if you do typical affiliate marketing (clickbank) using PPC/Adwords YOU WILL FAIL. (With one exception: CPA). I will also give you reasons for this later on.

Recently, i heard many people again claiming what nice profits they made with simple article submission on ezinearticles.com. In this month i spend AGAIN approx €1000 on adwords, so i stopped my campaigns because i was sick of the low conversions and high keyword bids.

You see, a very typical conversion rate for a clickbank product is 1:85. I dont pull this number from my ***, it is a very typical and often seen nr. reported by many vendors. 1:85 is "ok", it can be more, it can be less. 85 clicks --- 1 sale.

You can go through the current clickbank marketplace or cbengine.com.

Pick a product, one of the current top sellers, be it weight loss, green energy, acne, doesnt matter. Then go to adwords and see about bids for those keywords. I am not even talking about "insane" niches like weight loss, insurance. Still, if you get a bid below  $0.50 you can be happy.The other problem is that many, many clickbank products paybelow $30...

Now i did an Experiment

I wrote an article about a clickbank product where i assumed that the niche would be very saturated. I published the article on EZA. This article is live on ezine articles now for two days.

From the one article on ezine articles i made $180 on the first day and yesterday $55. In two days.(Note it was a weekend and 4th july!)

145 click outs on the article in those two days resulted in 8 sales. (Whereas those sales are a couple for $23.50 and the rest $35 and $37)

My cost: ZERO

On average, taking a typical adwords/clickbank conversion i probably MIGHT have made one sale, if lucky two - PLUS i would have had to spend 145x whatever Cost for 145 Clicks.

With article marketing this particular one as of now converts 1:18 - for free.

Now, i am talking about one single article which was gone live on ezine article. The article got live, and then there was 4th July weekend so the others are still in queue waiting to go live. I have approx 20 more in queue. 

Furthermore i started outsourcing and i let a couple of people write articles at the moment. My goal is to submit approx 5 articles a day, this can be any niche. Now imagine instead of making $180 in one day with one article...how much would i make with 5 articles submitted every day and with the people working for me and submitting articles also?

Article Marketing has some extreme Benefits

It is free as opposed to Google Adwords.

The whole article can serve as a pre-sell for whatever you promote. You dont need to make it look spammy or overly promotional, but the article WILL presell. Furthermore, in the article you can out yourself as a expert in a field.

Example: You could write about weight loss or computers.

The reader will realise that you know something about your field, and you will generate confidence in the reader.

You can in fact see the article as a giant adwords ad - if you will!

Dont get me wrong. The articles please shall be informative and good! But if you are smart you can convince the reader to click your links. Here we come to the other, deciding factor which will make people click and buy your product.

Many article marketers only use rather "unexciting" ending sentences like

You can get more information about XYZ if you visit xyz.com

I need to say this is a rather un-exciting way to and it wont get you much clicks.

Because you can very well use a SMART call to action phrase without sounding spammy or overly promotional.

For example, if you write about a certain product you can very well finish your article like

We tested many of xyz products in our review, and we found that xyz product is the best product if you want to do xyz.

That way you actively promote and recommend a product and since the article is on exactly that topic there is i a high chance that the reader will check your link out.

There is More (far more) to Article Marketing

There is, indeed, and i will write a second part about more advanced article marketing, in the next days.

The advanced marketing techniques, which are extremely important:

Keyword research!! <--- probably the most important factor.

If you look at the clickout screenshot you will see that my last article got MORE clicks than other articles i had on ezine for two years already - in only two days!!

The key to this is doing some keyword research using the latest tools and methods and write and optimize the article around those keywords. We will cover this in part 2.

You dont need Landing Pages for Article marketing, you can use simple domain redirects.

This makes it extremely quick and simple to promote a product - but the real power actually comes when you do bother to make a landing page. This way the article will give Google Ranking power from the ezine site  back to your site in addition. It will help the SERP (search engine) rankings of your site. The combination article marketing, SEO and social bookmarking/link building is a killer combination.

It is my belief that good article marketing with constant daily submission of optimized articles plus SEO is way, way more effective than Adwords PPC Marketing, it's a gold mine which is literally free.

Watch out for part 2 of this entry in the next few days.

G.

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