What’s the best article marketing Distribution Service online? In my opinion for the last 2 years, it has been Article Marketer. I recently got an email from a reader wanting to know the details of Article Marketer so I thought I would put together a little review.

When I first started using Article Marketer about 2 years ago it was in it’s infancy. I distinctly remember going to the Warrior Forum and people griping about the lack of service and horrible support from Article Marketer’s staff. It was not a few threads posted about it, there were threads being posted every week burning Article Marketer for their lack of support. However, I must have been the luckiest guy on the planet or was just distributing my articles on the right days because in 2 years I have NEVER had an issue with them.

So How Does It Work?

I won’t preach to you the importance of article marketing. If your online and you have a website, you already know that you need traffic and backlinks, and writing articles and submitting them to directories is one of the fastest and whitehat ways to do that. With backlinks and increased traffic you could also establish brand awareness and make yourself a noticeable and authoritative figure in your niche. You could do it in multiple niches if you wanted to. With increased exposure from articles syndicating your content around the web and links to your site, you can also develop word of mouth or “type in traffic” from people sharing with other people about your articles and sites. What is even better, is that some Ezine owners can potentially bring you floods of traffic literally overnight by syndicating an article to thru their Ezines.

I thought I would share my personal method of using videos online to drive traffic to a few sites I own. I also use this simply to drive traffic to domains I redirect to affiliate programs but I much rather send my visitors to a squeeze page. It’s the thing these days you know! Actually, it always has been but it seems the effort it takes to make a squeeze, put in an optin box and write up a well thought out email series is just to much these days for white and blackhat marketers. So since I want to see you succeed I am going to give you the traffic building part of your marketing campaign a FREE massive kickstart in acquiring visitors. Maybe if traffic building was easier (or people were better at it) then maybe making money online wouldn’t be as hard it seems. In any case, I am going to reveal a 4 step strategy to get visitors to your site using online video.

There is nothing really secret about this. I use 4 programs (hence the 4 step process). If I am not mistaken then all of them offer a free trial. Now, on the basis of truly believing in these programs and to give you an unbiased opinion and details of these programs and how to use them to your fullest advantage, I have included ALL outgoing links in this post as NON-AFFILIATE links.

ClickRiveris a new PPC service I have been testing out this past week. I haven’t got to test a lot of it, but the very odd thing about ClickRiver is I half-assed a quickly put together campaign and the son of a gun is making money. I kid you not, I literally put this campaign together in less than 10 minutes. From finding an offer, grabbing my affiliate link, coming up with 22 keywords I thought would go with this offer, writing my ad and submitting. Normally if I were on Adwords, Yahoo, or MSN I am very selective with what offers I will try. The wife is yelling at me for the last two days to get off the computer (holidays), so I had to put the hustle on it.

First if your not familiar with Clickriver it is basically a Pay Per Click service (much like Adwords) but the ads are shown on Amazon. Unfortunately for a lot of people they won’t be able to use this service. It only accepts US right now. The service sort of intrigued me as I read about it. I mean seriously, your going to be showing ads on a shopping site? People have cash in hand and are in the buying mood already, so I said let’s do it.

The bad part…Take a look at where the ClickRiver ads are shown:

This really sucks obviously. They are shown at the bottom of the Amazon pages. Of course, Amazon doesn’t want anyone to take their cheese so it’s only logical to do this but we still get ads on there and that was enough for this money shark to jump in balls first.

Before I even think about entering a market I try to gage as much demand as I can for the product or offer I am promoting. This really only applies to Pay Per Click promotions as I usually just go balls out on keywords I like when generating sites or blogs. When I am paying for my traffic though, this is a different story. I am very strict and disciplined to gage the demand of what I will be promoting. I got burned so many times last year it almost makes me sick to look at the money I just threw away for not engaging in market analysis.

Lately, the forums have been erupting with paid advertisements such as polls on landing pages that sent the surfer to a CPA offer after they voted. I do not know why all the talk is just now going on, as this has been going on for over a year that I know of. I only know this because I was doing it.

If your not familiar with the method, it’s basically watching all the news sites and trying to anticipate a hot story that will likely explode in large amounts of search volume. Take the Michael Vick incident and Paris Hilton going to jail as examples. People were making polls on their landing pages asking surfers if they thought Vick was guilty or if Paris was going to jail. Yes, you can make some money at this but you had be very smart and try to get in there at least a week before the story actually breaks. If you get there when the story breaks, then it really defeats the purpose. If Paris went to jail and your advertising a landing page with a poll asking if she WILL go to jail or not, it kind of kicks you in the tail right? Capitalizing on the buildup and beating everyone to the punch is where it’s at.

I was checking out StumbleUpon’s Ad Campaign Service today and was actually starting to take quite an interest in it. There are many benefits to a service like this, and if you have a blog that is extremely popular you have the potential to pull some really good traffic numbers. I would say that your blog topic and writing style are going to have huge effects on the nature of such a campaign. Is it worth or not? I really do not know as I am just gearing up to run a campaign on one of my Video Blogs (Vlogs).

Here are a few site testimonials from a couple of large sites:

“By advertising on StumbleUpon, Farecast has been able to reach an audience that is actively looking to find new and innovative websites like ours. An added bonus is the ability to target based on a user’s geographic location or interest in a specific category. This has allowed us to land users on highly targeted and relevant landing pages, resulting in positive Stumbles.”
- Farecast.com

“StumbleUpon proved to be a wonderful channel to drive targeted, cost effective traffic to our website. Furthermore, their vocal community helped us to further understand how to better position our product.”
- Sixapart.com

 

“We are a new site that needed some promotion and found Stumbleupon to give us almost instantaneous results.”
- SimplyExplained.com

Pretty lame testimonials if you ask me, but it is an ad service intended on bringing blogs traffic. I don’t know for sure but it is in my opinion that StumbleUpon users are very finicky and particular as to what they like in a blog. I have always found that the “bizarre” tag when submitting a page to StumbleUpon always seems to bring the most traffic. I guess trying to cater to that would be an effective weapon, but if your blog is not catered to that, then I guess your only going to get a fraction of the StumbleUpon traffic. At least that traffic will be better targeted right?

Google Groups is a great way to get some laser targeted traffic to your website. The base over there has exploded tremendously over the last year in regards to the vast amount of people supporting and participating in the groups. I remember very vividly awhile back when I was working over there. While I was making some sweet cash, I knew all the awhile that the amount of work involved was taking away from completion of some long term goals. It is very easy to go over there and type a keyword in and return yourself a list of groups for whatever niche you want.

There are no tricks or gimmicks, as I have seen sites like this or sites with the same idea in mind. The idea is to go into these groups and post well thought out posts. I can assure you now that if you go over there in a marketer’s mindset, your going to have a really rough time. With that said, you should generally pick a niche and have a product for it as well. I personally always had the link in my sig over there. I always had it redirect off a domain as well. You do not want one of those long and hideous affiliate links in there.

I use to go over there with an army of “outsourcers” and post to multiple groups everyday. I was doing great but the fact that my workers knew exactly what I was doing actually cost me in the end. They ended up doing it themselves. To make matters worse, as my income was falling they were reporting that they were still posting. So not only did I lose income from the Groups themselves, I had outsourcers sticking it deep in me as well.

This is going to be a really long post, and it is going to contain a lot of information. I am going to give you a surefire way to dominate small niche markets. The niche can really be anything you want, but I am a fan of specific sub niches of much broader ones. I can assure you though, that putting this traffic plan in motion, your almost guaranteed not to fail. I am going to assume that you can do your own keyword research. If your not up on it, please review the profitable keywords post. I am also going to assume that you can research niches on your own. With that said, I am going to hand over a surefire traffic plan that some lame-wad will probably steal and make a best selling ebook out of.

Without further babbling, here’s a traffic plan sure to make you happy in pants.

Step 1. Your site is all setup and your ready to receive traffic. The obvious thing to do is market and push traffic to it by submitting articles. There are many great places to submit to, but you only need to concentrate on a few things. First, your going to have to separate the articles you want to submit to Ezine Articles and then also set aside the articles you want to set aside for mass distribution. For mass distribution, I personally use Article Marketer as they will submit to over 800 sites and places on the net. article marketing is pretty basic, so I will assume you will know what to do.

When it comes to making your information viral, you need to absolutely know what is going on. I cannot stress how important it is to monitor your information your going to present. If your passing on information with the monetization purpose of gaining on the back-end (links within your information), then here are a few things, you need to keep in mind.

First off, I am guilty of this myself. It was not until the other day that I was reading the “Social Media Daily” by a WELL-KNOWN Internet Marketer that I realized…or actually remembered, that I had just created one of the greatest mistakes you can do with viral information. Once your information hits the net and you start sharing it, there is no turning back. Once your information takes off, if you have not “perfected” the links inside the book, or anything else you wanted in place, it is just too late.

Here’s the mistake:

While reading the Social Media Daily which is a free report meant to go viral, I saw the two biggest mistakes you could make in a viral report. First off, I saw that that all the software’s recommended in the report were all links from the same domain. I cannot stress the importance of you not doing that. Right off the bat, your readers are going to see when they hover over your link in the PDF report, that all the things you recommend are pointing to folders or sub-domains from the same site. While you might think your in the clear because you have your affiliate link redirecting, I can assure you that your not. If you have all the affiliate links situated on one domain, your screwed, plain and simple. You need a domain for each, or else people get the idea your links are for profit, and that is a money killer for you.