Are you using article marketing to drive targeted traffic to your sites? If not, you certainly should be. As has been demonstrated time and time again, article marketing is the single most powerful tool for driving targeted traffic to your Internet marketing, affiliate marketing and niche marketing websites, blogs and affiliate links.

Now there’s even more reason to start article marketing - a new article directory with a difference has opened up, and you can make affiliate commissions, Adsense money and even earn advertising credits from referring others, submitting articles and even from the articles submitted by those you referred.

And, of course, that’s all on top of the targeted traffic you drive to your sites with the links in your articles’ ‘About The Author’ box. So you get all the article marketing benefits of the traditional article directories, PLUS earn money and get additional traffic through the advertising you earn - sweet or what?

Just some of the articles I’ve submitted there in the last week include:

• Affiliate Marketing Domination - Winning The Affiliate Wars
• Article Marketing Meets Search Engine Optimization
• Internet Marketing 2.0 - Woofers Becoming Tweeters
• Internet Marketing Blogging Tips
• PLR, MRR, RR… What Are Your Rights?
• 7 Tips For Affiliate Marketing Stardom

Now obviously, as soon as you can afford it, you want to go with a professional article marketing distribution service like Article Marketer. But until then, whenever you write an article, even if you’re using it your e-zine or on your blog, be sure to submit it to the AffSphere Article Directory too.

Note that I said an ‘article’, not a ’salespitch’ - while you can embed links in the body of your article at AffSphere, it does you no good if your writing sounds ‘pitchy’. People go to article directories to learn about various areas or to look for good articles to place on their sites or in their blogs. Obviously, no one is going to post your link-laden salespitch on their web properties, and those looking for info won’t be clicking your links either - they’ll be off to other articles in the directory. Since the reason you’re doing your article marketing is to draw targeted traffic to your sites, you have to be sure you have good, solid content in each and every article you submit.

So start by signing up to AffSphere, then search your hard drive for any articles you’ve already written and load them up. Post a link to the site on your blog, let your list know about the new directory, and away you go - your article marketing just got that much stronger. And along with all that targeted traffic, your article marketing activities is also now making you money directly - a very pleasant twist indeed!

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Internet marketing coach, mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is the author of several e-books on generating Targeted Traffic, writes the Top Traffic Tips blog, and has published the Doug Champigny’s Beginners’ Key To Understanding Article Marketing e-book. Doug Champigny is an avid fan of article marketing, and highly recommends both Anik Singal’s AffSphere Article Directory and the Article Marketer service, both of which he himself uses in his article marketing.
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Technorati Tags: article marketing, article marketer, AffSphere Article Directory, submitting articles, making money with articles, AffSphere, blog traffic, web site traffic, targeted traffic, making money online, Internet marketing, affiliate marketing, niche marketing, Anik Singal, Doug Champigny

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21 Internet Marketing Success Steps

©2008 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved.

Like others in the upper echelons of Internet marketing and affiliate marketing, I’m asked one question by Internet marketing and affiliate marketing ‘newbies’ more often than any other:

“I can’t seem to make money online - What am I doing wrong?”

When my Internet marketing mentoring students ask me that, I can give them a detailed breakdown specific to their online operations - but they’re paying top dollars for my time investment, and I only mentor those who already have a viable presence online. So what about those new to Internet marketing - what advice can we offer them?

Time constraints prevent anyone from checking into the current operations of everyone starting out in Internet marketing, and after 11 years of being online full time it’s easy to forget how frustrating even the simplest of Internet marketing activities can be to the neophyte.

So in response I put together this list of ‘21 Internet Marketing Success Steps‘ to try and help guide both those new to Internet marketing and those with some Internet marketing experience who find their online marketing profits stalled or declining.

Pretty much ALL Internet Marketing success breaks down very similar to:

Basic Internet Marketing:

1) Choose affiliate or your own products;
2) Build some type of web presence for it;
3) Get targeted eyeballs to that page or blog post;
4) Start building your list from those targeted visitors;
5) Use every free method to bring more people to the site;
6) Use your list to bring people back to the site and to new sites;

Intermediate Internet Marketing:

7) Add related backend offers to your site;
Set up an affiliate program and get others pushing your site;
9) Put about 30% of what’s coming in back into getting more visitors;
10) Participate in giveaways to build your list and visitor numbers;
11) Find related products for new sites and do 1 - 10 with them too;
12) Attend live IM events, for knowledge but mostly for networking;
13) Convert related PLR resources to unique products to put online;

Advanced Internet Marketing:

14) Set up a backend linking all your sites together & automate the processes;
15) Build e-mail e-courses to make available in each niche/area you cover;
16) Outsource much of your visitor acquisition;
17) Do Joint Ventures with other advanced Internet Marketers;
18) Outsource your product creation;
19) Evaluate and improve your automated backend efforts;
20) Speak at industry events & seminars;
21) Give back - mentor others to help them achieve their dreams.

For most people starting out it’s safe to assume the following as averages other Internet marketing newbies have achieved…

First sale: 2 - 6 months.
First steady trickle of sales: 4 - 12 months.
Full Time Earnings: 2 - 5 years.

Those Internet marketing timelines can be influenced up or down by the amount of time and money you can put in, your background experience, your focus, and mostly by the amount of concentrated, continual effort you put into following your plan in a tightly-focused manner.

The 3 Biggest Biz-Killers…

1) Lack of focus (too many different, unrelated activities).
2) Giving up too soon (lack of perseverance).
3) Half-hearted effort (It takes a lot of time and/or a lot of money - you have to be willing to invest one or the other (or both) on a constant basis for the first few years at least. Everyone I’ve met at our level or above has a passionate commitment to their Internet marketing business.)

Do an honest appraisal of your Internet marketing efforts to date. Are you following the above steps in order, or jumping around? Starting at #1, how far into the list can you go, confident you’re performing that task diligently? Re-evaluate your plans based on what that tells you, and use that current limitation as the guide to what you need to learn more about, to focus on more, to put more effort into - and to eliminate anything else you’re doing that is straining your focus and your money and time constraints.

Decide what your goals are online. A few extra bucks? A steady inflow to help with the mortgage or to get a new car or a cottage? Enough to do this full time? Or sustaining a level that lets you achieve all your dreams and desires? Each level is being achieved right now by people online - just know which you’re after so you can gauge the amount of time and effort you have to commit to your desired level of Internet marketing success.

Don’t be swayed by stories of meteorical rises online - while they do happen, they’re extremely rare. Usually they don’t make all the details public - I know a lot of ‘overnight successes’ who spent 3-5 or more years in the trenches first - just no one knows that. And others who put 6 or 7 figures into their Internet marketing businesses before you first heard of them.

And watch out for people who had one or two big launches 3, 5 or 10 years ago and are still teaching that same system - Internet marketing practices changes too quickly and too drastically for that info to still be accurate. When evaluating advice you get in this biz, always think to yourself:

“Yes, but what have they done lately?”

If the answer is ‘nothing new in the last 6 months’, take the advice with a grain of salt and stay focused on your own path, only using the bits from it that fit in with your own Internet marketing strategy. After all, only YOU know where YOUR biz is right now, and what YOUR end goals are, right?

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The best advice I’ve seen in this biz is to focus on making your first buck. Not a lot, just your first buck. Achieving that shows it can be done. Then focus on making one more. That shows it wasn’t a fluke - it can be repeated over and over successfully. That eliminates one of the biggest stumbling blocks to building your own Internet marketing business by showing that a) it can be done, and b) YOU can do it. Then just use the 21 Internet Marketing Success Steps above to build your business by continually repeating that process in larger volume for larger returns, and you’re on your way!

About The Author:
Internet marketing author, mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is an online success coach who, with his wife Teri, owns and operates over 100 web sites, a dozen blogs and highly-popular Internet marketing and Affiliate marketing e-zines. You can download 50 PLR articles for free from his latest site, PLRForSale.com. For more help in getting started online, visit his Training For Newbies web site.

Technorati Tags: Internet marketing, Internet marketing success, successful internet marketing, online business success, getting started online, making money online, Doug Champigny

Effective Article Marketing For Affiliates

©2008 Doug champigny. All Rights Reserved.

Article marketing has been around long before online media was been invented. Business establishments have been known to promote their products and services through the written media even before the internet was invented. And with the onset of the internet, online article marketing has become an easier means of promotion compared to its older predecessors.

Not only can online article marketing be free (like most of its predecessors), it is non-seasonal (meaning, people can read your articles the whole year round, without exception as to what season your article is most applicable to), and can exist for even much longer than you will.

Many online business pursuits, affiliate marketing among them, have made use of the ease and the accessibility which online article marketing offers them. However, this same ease has jeopardized many qualities good ol’ fashion articles used to have: fun, quality, and creativity, among others. Many article writers have apparently forgotten the fact that their articles are trying to serve real life people, and not virtual search engines.

If you are into affiliate marketing, you are reading the right article. If you are into online article marketing to help you promote your products, all the better. This article will help you outline the qualities your affiliate marketing articles should have to provide the best profits for you, without sacrificing your potential customers’ trust.

INFORMATIVE ARTICLES

The main focus of online article marketing is to provide prospects with information at the click of a button. Your prospects do have a tendency to be impatient, so make your articles concise. Focus your articles on the product features and benefits your readers would most probably want to know about. If you feel you have enough skills as a writer, you might wish to omit some really good information about the product, and write in such a way that your readers might want to read more.

And never forget that not all information are created equal—some information are more beneficial than others, depending on the type of product you are promoting. Some products require a thorough discussion of the features, whereas a simple discussion of a product’s benefits might be enough for other types of products. The prospects should benefit from online article marketing, too, and if you have to, place yourself in your prospects’ shoes and try to imagine what kinds of things they would rather get from your articles.

QUALITY ARTICLES

Article writers nowadays are beginning to forget just how important quality is when it comes to written material. This isn’t to say that you have to be a major in journalism or a Nobel Prize winner in Literature to get to write well. The internet is bombarded with article-writing tips, a lot of which are even focused on online article marketing. If you still aren’t confident enough, you might wish to hire someone else for the job. Always remember that quality, and not quantity, articles will be best for your affiliate marketing venture.

WRITE FUN ARTICLES

How many crowded parties have you been to your entire life? And in how many out of these parties did you actually remember the names of all the strangers who attended? See how easy it is to remember the guy with the great sense of humor, or the girl with great conversational skills? Leave the same impression with your online article marketing efforts. Make your affiliate marketing prospects remember you. They may not buy anything off your hands right away, but the moment you sell them something they feel they need, the chances of them hesitating given their knowledge of your written humor is quite small.

POST IN ARTICLE DIRECTORIES

This might just be the best way for you to get your articles read by as many people as possible. If you do decide to post your articles to as many article directories as you can handle, please have the decency to write articles that deserve that much exposure. Reading a badly written article is, well, bad enough, but having it posted all over the World Wide Web?

No one needs, or wants, a badly written article, all the more, hundreds of the same thing. Do yourself a favor and don’t simply kiss your success in the affiliate marketing world by posting hundreds of useless words online.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZE YOUR ARTICLES

Article marketing is entirely useless if you can’t get people to read your articles. Make your articles easier to find online. Imagine what keywords your prospects are most likely to enter when looking for your products. Establish them in appropriate places throughout your article. And don’t forget the quality of your articles. Never ever forget.

Affiliate marketing has now become a much easier venture to undergo, especially with article marketing aiding its efforts. You can be successful in either of these ventures (affiliate marketing and article marketing) if you work hard enough. Following the tips mentioned won’t hurt as well. Always remember that in the world of business, success is never too far away.

TOP ARTICLE MARKETING RESOURCES

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Article Directory For Affiliates:
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Make affiliate commissions and earn advertising credits
from people who read the articles you write:

Article Directory For Affiliates  

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8-Minute Article Program:
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Free program that helps you write new articles
in just 8 minutes:

8-Minute Article Program  

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Duplicate Content Report:
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Free report that helps maks sense of the whole
duplicate content controversy:

Duplicate Content Report  

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Professional Article Submissions:
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The article marketing submission service the big dogs use:

Professional Article Submissions  

To your success in Affiliate Marketing using Article Marketing,

Doug Champigny,
DougChampigny.com

For more Affiliate Marketing help:
Team Champigny Affiliate Blog  

For more Internet Marketing help:
Internet Marketing Blog

Technorati Tags: article marketing, submitting articles, article marketing help, affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing help, affiliate marketing resources, free resources, free software, free reports, Doug Champigny