If you are an affiliate marketer, you cannot afford to overlook the power of article marketing. This article is going to provide you with my article marketing basics to help you write your articles more effectively.

Some people think that the purpose of their article is to sell something to the reader, this is a big mistake. The purpose of our articles in our article marketing basics system is to introduce the reader to you and direct them to a relevant page where they can get more information about the chosen subject.

The reason for this is because when a reader sees your article, they do not know you and you have to build trust with the reader before you can expect them to spend their hard earned cash.

Before you start to write your article, the first step in our article marketing basics system is to research your keyword. You need to target keywords with less than 20,000 competitors in Google if you want to compete.

When you have chosen your keyword, the next step is to fit your keyword into the article title. If your keyword does not make sense, then maybe you need to pick another keyword.

The next component of our article marketing basics system is the headline.

I always think of my article title as the headline. It needs to tell the reader exactly what the article is going to show them.

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The headline is extremely important, because this will be the title displayed in article directories and search engine listings. Read the rest of this entry

On Oct 5, 2009, the FTC released new guidelines about the use of testimonials. If you’re a product creator or an affiliate marketer, you should know about this one.

Here’s the easy-to-read Frank Kern version…
http://masscontrolsite.com/blog/?p=59

Here’s the FTC page…
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

The FTC headlines say “FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials.
Changes Affect Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers, Celebrity Endorsements“.

As Frank says, “New FTC Thing Is A Bigger Deal Than You Might Think”.

Best wishes,
Gary

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Update 10 October:

“The long and short of it is that you need to make sure that you’re
not at risk of being “carpet-bombed” by the upcoming affiliate-squashing
campaign that the FTC is rolling out with its new ultra-unclear guidelines.

And this directly affects ALL affiliates.

And the cost of violation (including inadvertant, well-meaning
violations) rings in at a crippling $11,000 PER INCIDENT.”

That’s from Chris Rempel’s email this morning. You can read his full blog post at

http://www.thelazymarketer.com/blog/2009/10/09/the-sky-is-not-falling-but-this-is-definitely-a-game-changer Read the rest of this entry