Article Marketing for Affiliate Marketing Success

The use of article marketing is a great way to increase traffic to your website, establish yourself as an expert in your field and get people on your list. Writing and distributing articles online may seem simple but it really can do all of that for you. This is an important lesson for affiliate marketing newbies.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind if you use articles to help with your affiliate marketing:

• Write quality articles. Don’t write articles just for the sake of building incoming links. Sure this is a great reason to write and distribute articles but you also want your article to be more than that for you. By writing a quality article you can get those incoming links and other business owners to place your articles on their websites (even more incoming links, not to mention good traffic).

And the quality content you write can become the icing on the cake if your article gets picked up and published by a large offline or online publication.  Now that’s the way to get in the spotlight! The bottom line is that mediocre articles just won’t get you the same results. So if you’re going to spend the time writing and distributing articles, why not make your articles really work for you.

• Be the expert. When writing see yourself as the expert. You chose this field and it’s your job to communicate your knowledge to your readers who will hopefully become customers. Believe you’re the expert and let it show in your content. Remember if you don’t establish yourself as an expert in your field, no one else will do it for you.

• Write author bios that sell. Many people may the mistake of writing the same mundane author bio at the end of their articles: Joe Bananas is the owner of a website called joeswebsite.com and enjoys writing. Ugh! Don’t waste that valuable Internet real estate at the end of your articles by putting in a weak, ineffective bio. If you’ve written a good article the reader will look at the author bio. If they are intrigued by what you say, they will click over to your website to learn more.

Be precise and write a benefit-oriented author bio like: ‘To learn more about how to build websites that sell, visit joeswebsite.com” or “For a free 15-page report on building sales-producing websites, visit joeswebsite.com”. See the difference? Even in your bio, always concentrate on the benefit to your reader. Following the affiliate marketing newbie tips here can go a long way to helping your success in making money online.

Ten “Must-Know” Acronyms for Affiliate Marketing Newbies

Affiliate marketing newbies take note. You will quickly discover that visions of acronyms and affiliate marketing terms are haunting your sleep. Relax, you’re not alone. It’s not the least bit unusual for affiliate marketing newbies to experience acronym overload at some point in the learning process. Well we’ve been there too, and we understand the need to have one place to find the definitions of those acronyms that are most relevant to this business.

We’ve discovered that there’s a whole new lingo that all affiliate marketing newbies need to learn. In the following quick reference guide we share the ten most common acronyms. We’ll provide updates periodically, so stay tuned.

1. CTR – Click-Thru-Rate – The percentage of people who actually click on a banner.

2. PPC – Pay Per Click – This is when you get paid each time a customer clicks a certain link.

3. RSS Feed – Really Simply Syndication, Rich Site Summary, Raw Data Feed Site Summary – You have certain reader programs (Google Reader, Internet Explorer has a reader) that allows you to subscribe to the RSS Feeds of different websites and see the updates on those sites as soon as they make them.

4. SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Used to ensure that a website ranks at the top of a search engine result. This is a popular marketing technique that uses articles, keywords and other methods to help ensure the website is within the top results and thus more likely to be seen by searchers.

5. CPA – Cost-Per-Action – Refers to a click, lead or sale. For example, a merchant offers its affiliates $0.30 per newsletter sign-up. Even if the visitor doesn’t buy anything, the merchant will still pay you for the “action” or in this case, the newsletter sign-up.

6. CR – Conversion Ratio – The percentage of clicks, views, etc., needed to achieve a specific action (sale, lead, etc.). Translation: If one out of one hundred visitors to your website signs up for your report or newsletter, your website has a two percent signup ratio for that item.

7. SEM – Search Engine Marketing – Promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). Methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, paid inclusion, digital asset optimization and contextual advertising. This term is also used to describe an individual (Search Engine Marketer).

8. HTML – Hyper-Text Markup Language – the authoring language used to create documents on the internet and to define the layout and structure of web documents using various attributes and tags.

9. URL – Uniform Resource Locator – the global address of documents on the internet specifies the protocol identifier and the resource location name (IP address or domain name) which are separate by a colon and two forward slashes.

10. ISP – Internet Service Provider – a company that provides access to the Internet for a monthly fee. Service includes a modem which allows you to log on to the Internet to browse, and also allows you to send and receive email.

Affiliate marketing newbies: These are important acronyms to know and understand. They are critical not only to online marketing but also to everyday life on the world wide web (WWW) in the 21st Century.