Blogging Tips

All last week, I blogged about affiliate marketing. In last Wednesday’s post entitled How ArticleMarketer.com Has Almost Doubled My Affiliate Marketing Sales, I promised to give some tips on how to write effective articles to promote your affiliate product(s). So, here goes.

4 Tips for Writing Articles That Actually Sell Affiliate Products

Affiliate Article Marketing Tip #1: Actually, writing effective articles starts before you ever put finger to keyboard. What do I mean?

Remember in the post Newbie Affiliates: How to Choose Affiliate Products to Market, when I wrote, “. . . choose products and/or services you’re familiar with and/or have an interest in getting to know more about?”

This is what I mean: When you choose products you know about and/or have an interest in, writing about them will be so much easier. If you’ve ever tried to write on a subject you have no interest in, you know what I mean here. And, as affiliate marketing is something you ostensibly do for fun – and to make money – don’t spend this time promoting something you don’t like or believe in. That can be torture and I promise you, you won’t make money at it — because you won’t put in the time that’s needed to market it.

So this article marketing tip is to choose products/services that peak your interest and/or those you have actual experience working with/in.

Affiliate Article Marketing Tip #2: Where possible, write from first-hand experience. Nothing is better than first-hand experience. In fact, potential buyers WANT to know that you know what you’re talking about.

So, give actual experiences you’ve had with the product/service. I do this all the time when I write about freelance writing – which helps to sell my ebooks on freelance writing. I write about actual experiences I’ve had with clients and use questions sent in from other freelancers asking for advice to illustrate my knowledge on the subject of freelance writing.

Believability leads to trust, which leads to sales (I’ve said this a gazillion times, but I can’t repeat it enough).

Affiliate Article Marketing Tip #3: Use outside sources to validate your claims. For example, one of the affiliate products I promote has to do with foreclosures – a hot topic in the news nowadays.

So, I actively seek articles written by major news outlets on the subject to pull quotes from. This gives the articles I write more credence and it makes them more professional as well. Again, all of this goes to believability, which leads to trust, which leads to . . . you guessed it . . . sales.

Affiliate Article Marketing Tip #4: Stay away from fluff articles. A lot of affiliate marketers use crappy, keyword stuffed articles. And this is why article marketing doesn’t work for many of them.

Just look at the article marketing tips I’ve given above. What do they all have in common? They take time. But, just like any investment, you get out of it what you put into it. There is no such thing as a quick buck. This is why I believe that you should write your own articles to promote your affiliate products. Nobody’s going to care about – or get the payoff from it – like you.

Now I can see hiring a freelance writer to write content for you if you are promoting 5, 10 or 15 products at one time. It can be a bit much to constantly write articles for this many products at one time – especially if you have a job and are doing affiliate marketing part-time.

But, be sure to pay the writer a decent rate so that you get good, well-written, well-researched content — NOT just crappy, keyword-stuffed articles.

No marketing method is foolproof for promoting affiliate products because each one is different, with a different target market, with a different market demand. But in my opinion, article marketing can be used to effectively promote any affiliate product/service. But, it must be done the right way – and as with making money from any venture, that requires an investment of time.