Scaling Article Marketing for Affiliates

Last Day of Affiliate Summit West 2010 and this is my first session of the day. I was a few minutes late, so jumping right in.

Scaling Article Marketing for Affiliates

Chris Knight, CEO of EzineArticles.com

The right mix of content:

1) original content you don’t syndicate (min 25% or more) – things you put on your own website
2) original content that you do syndicate (15-50%)
3) user generated content/articles (more the better)
4) reprint rights articles (never more than 30-45%)

He recommends finding a VA that will work with you on writing articles vs. using a content generating software

Who are you competing with?
Anyone who’s involved win content arbitrage
Big guys put out millions of articles
Millions of other using content to attract traffic
Social media UGC

Write more articles get more traffic is the mantra for this session

6 tips for maximum article traffic yield
1) article title determines traffic level
2) don’t sell hard in the body (lead gen)
3) be original (plr = puke)
4) volume required to make impact
5) 400-800 word count – a 1000 word article can be split into two unique articles
6) resource box seals the deal -

Deliver 170,000-200000 clicks a day to their members

Write for syndication in mind
2 links will get you more clicks than 3 links – 1 link may get you syndication
He recommends giving one full out url for when they are reprinted in text

Resource box secrets
Pictures in an add increase click through
Include author photo in resource box
If using pen names then purchase exclusive rights to a photo & keep it consistent
Essential elements:
Author name – ezine feels that you may not have written article
Website url
Usp
Call to action
Optional elements
Ezine subscription
Free report increase click through rate
Anchored text link
Your contact info

Big resource box mistake
Bad example
Visit chris at http://your-company-name.com/.
Good example
Visit chris at http://your-company-name.com/
No period at end

Resource box secrets to boost your content marketing strategy roi
Must include the word free
Click here in your anchored text outpulls everything else
Stay focused, don’t tell your life story

7 dangerous pitfalls to avoid – affiliate marketer version
1) going for quality *alone*
2) too much hype or bragging
3) making your content broad/superficial – get very specific
4) failure to deliver on article title promise
5) buying PLR articles or blatantly trusting your ghostwriters
6) submission in-frequency
7) failure to create systems to scale – have system in place to write more articles a day

He then took some suggestions from the audience about how to write more:

Dictation software can help increase your speed in article writing

Cascading content – re-purpose & repackage your content – write, make pod cast, twitter posts

Group of articles with same topic, but with different focus

Finding writers – hire locally a team to write for you
Use elance and find sahm’s with degrees to write – ask for a specific niche and list what you want them to have experience with

Posting an affiliate link in your ezine articles – you must have a domain name that you point to first

How can I increase my content footprint?
Think multi-year – how will you reclaim lost traffic? – content will be out there forever so use it

Tips for affiliate managers
1) designate 10-100 articles made available to your affiliates – that can be put on website, used in autoresponder
2) provide 3-30 articles a month that they can reprint
3) spell out reprint rights so that your articles don’t show up on bad websites
4) don’t release all of your content to affiliates – 50%

Summary
Highly pre-qualified free traffic is the reason
Traffic= directly proportional to article inventory
Develop an article writing team
You handle article title writing
Scale from dozens, hundreds to tens of thousands of articles
Automate & systematize

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