Article Marketing Strategy

Article marketing is the art of writing articles and posting them for free or in very low cost places to promote affiliate programs and make money without having a website. It can be a good way to start if you don't have the money to invest in a website or taking a class on how to create a website.

(You can also use article marketing to promote your website and get backlinks to your website.)

You start basically the same way as you would if you are starting a website. Start with thinking about the things that you know a lot about or are passionate about. Start looking for affiliate products to promote. There are many companies that manage affiliate programs. Clickbank.com is a company that manages sales of ebooks and digital products like software. Commission Junction is also another well know affiliate company. You can look for companies with products that you want to promote. The best affiliate programs are ones that will have reoccuring payments like when people renew their products (like Site Build it!) and one's that pay a decent percentage of the sale to you.

Once you choose a product you can then start to create an article marketing strategy to write articles and submit them to various directories or free websites. What you do is create articles that have links to your products or you can also create a free website or use Squidoo.com to create what they call a lens and refer people there to purchase the products.

The articles must be optimized for the search engines and must use the most sought after keywords so you have to research keywords to try to find the ones that people would be using to buy your product or service that you are promoting. The basic article marketing strategy will look like this:

Choose an affiliate product to promote
Write a few articles a day and submit them to various free article directories online. Use this format for creating articles.
Put a link to the product in the article if direct affiliate links are allowed or create a landing page to link to in your articles using a free website or using something like Squidoo.com that does allow you to have affiliate links in your posts there. You can also create a low cost wordpress blog (less than $10 a month) and use the blog as a landing page. I like this method better than using squidoo because you have much more control and influence on the search engines. Squidoo takes a lot of time to create lenses so you may as well spend the time writing directly on your own blog. I have a whole section on wordpress and how to set it up to get found. If you would like to use squidoo.com you can also download this free guide to using squidoo and you may also be interested in the One Week Marketing Ebook that explains more in detail how to get a squidoo lens found and create an article marketing campaign.
Keep doing this until you find keywords that will convert visitors and attract search engines to your articles and you start getting sales.
You could also place ads with the various search engines if you do have some extra cash, but if you do have extra cash I recommend that you start with a website first because you can waste a lot of money on pay per click ads if you don't know what you are doing and the website can also do some of the work of getting you found for your chosen keywords.