Like many sites, I have covered all you need to know to get started in article marketing, but unlike many sites, I am now going to show you how to start developing a marketing plan for article marketing.

It is all well and good giving people the tools to start marketing, but it is completely pointless doing that if they are not shown how to use them. I can already hear you saying “well hang on a minute, haven’t you done this already for us?”

Well yes I have, but I have not given you a marketing plan to use your article writing to create money. This following strategy does work, as I use it myself all the time and I continue to get regular results from it.

Step 1 – You need to go to an affiliate network such as Clickbank and choose a product that is in your niche that you have chosen to be involved in. The product you choose needs to be paying you above $20 for each sale you make.

When choosing the product you need to take a look at the sales page and ensure that it is professional and that at the foot of the page there is a link for affiliates. If there is an affiliate link then there is likely to be a page with banners and graphics you can use to market the product.

Gravity – In most affiliate marketing guides you will be told to choose a product on Clickbank that has a gravity of over 50, or they will tell you to choose one that has the highest gravity. This is all well and good if you are in the make money on line niche or one of the top 3 niches, but as soon as you step out of those popular niches you will find nearly all the products are very low gravity.

Having a low gravity in less popular niches just means there is less competition and you may well find it easier to make sales. In fact using this same strategy I made many sales from a low gravity product and continued to make sales on a regular basis.

Step 2 – Create a review page about your product or an information page about the topic your product is involved in. So if your product is about learning to swim, you could create a page giving tips on how to learn to swim safely, and then have links on the page for the product you are promoting.

When setting up your web page you can use sites like blogger.com or squidoo and create a page for free. When creating your page use graphics and images to break up the text on the page. This is where you can make use of the affiliate tools you get from the products affiliates link.

Do not overdo the links to the product, use a hyper link at the beginning of the page, one half – way down the page, and then use a strong call to action at the foot of the page. Make sure you check the page for spelling errors and typing errors.

Step 3 – You need to write 25 – 30 articles about your topic or niche and put the link to your free web page you have created in your author’s resource box at the end of your article. You can type all your articles one after another, or do 3 per day, or even just 1 per day. It is entirely up to you how fast you want to get your articles done and how much time you can commit to this each day or week.

When writing your articles use some of the techniques for keyword research I have covered in other posts on here. Create a strong call to action or offer in your resource box and put 2 links to your page in there as well.

Once you have completed an article post it on to www.ezinearticles.com once that article has been accepted and posted live, then you can take that article and post it on other article sites. If you prefer you can wait until you have 3 or more articles completed and then post them all at the same time.

Once you have written 25 – 30 articles and have them posted live on ezinearticles, start checking the results of each article and choose those that are getting the most views to create links and traffic to them.

Now you can repeat this process using another product. Then it is just a process of rinse and repeat.

If you want to choose 3 products at once then this is how you can do it.

1 First create your page promoting the topic

2 Write and post your first 3 articles for product number one

3 Whilst waiting for ezinearticles to post those 3 articles live create the page for the 2^nd product.

4 write and post 3 articles for the 2^nd product.

5 Create the page for the 3^rd product

6 Write and post 3 articles for the 3^rd product

7 Now this is where you can create your own strategy for writing the articles. You can do one for each product each day, or maybe you want to do 5 articles for product 1 on day one, 5 articles for product 2 on day two and 5 articles for product 3 on day three, and then repeat the process by writing 5 articles for product 1 and so on.

Doing 5 each day for each product will mean that in 15 days you will have 25 articles for each product driving traffic to each of the products pages.

You would by this time hopefully have started to see some sales coming in. If you find one or two of the products are getting sales and the third one isn’t, then you can concentrate all the marketing techniques to promote those 2 products. You can then choose another product to promote and repeat the same process again.

You are not guaranteed to make sales on every product you choose but you can choose to promote as many products as you wish as this method is not costing you anything. Once you start making regular money you can look at outsourcing your article writing whilst you concentrate on choosing other products and/or promoting the products that are selling by other techniques.

Moderating your article conversions is essential. By doing this simple task you will learn what is working and what is not. If you are getting lots of views, but your article does not get many click through’s to your site then you need to do something about it.

You could start by changing the call to action in your resource box. Try different techniques to get people to click on your links.

Some of the things you could try are,

• Use different layout for your resource box
• Test by using url links and hyper links
• Look at what other article authors in your niche are doing in their resource box’s.

You need to test different techniques but only one at a time. When you find something that increases your click through rate apply it to earlier articles you have posted.

I have read somewhere that the average click through rate for articles on ezine articles should be 24%. Personally i am not happy unless I am hitting at least 30%.

The only way to increase your click through rate on your articles is to keep testing different methods and calls to action.

This is also true with article marketing, the more articles you write the better you become at it. Your click through rate is probably better now than when you wrote your first couple of articles.

You should be getting more views per article than you did when you started article marketing, if not then you need to retrace your steps and rectify this. The problem is that as we learn, in most cases we cannot go back and change things. Article marketing is probably one of the few places you can actually change things and mistakes you made in the beginning.

What I want you to do is go back to your earlier articles on the article sites you posted to such a www.ezinearticles.com and update them. Change your author’s box, put in 2 links rather than just having one. If your keyword is not mentioned in the article, edit it and put it in there.

If you have not used 2 or 3 different keywords throughout your earlier articles edit them and put more keyword in there. If you find in your earlier articles that you have not used your resource box to its best potential, change it and repost the article.

By doing these simple things that you now do in your present articles can lead to more views being achieved and therefore more traffic to your site.

When you learn new things about article marketing stop and think if that is something that you can edit in to your earlier articles that you produced. By constantly perfecting your technique and where you can up dating your old articles, the more traffic you are ultimately going to get to your site from article marketing.

Every now and again you will get some guru saying that article marketing does not work anymore, or they say it does not work as well as it used to. This is only true if you are using the same article marketing techniques that you used 3 years ago.

Article marketing is just like any other form of internet marketing, it changes with time, and you have to move with the change or get left behind. A few years ago you could post an article on Ezine articles and get a lot of traffic from just doing that. Now days you can still gets loads of traffic from an article but you have to do a bit more work to make it happen.

If you now post an article to any article site and just leave it there don’t be surprised if you do not get traffic from it. There is a golden rule to increase article views, and the rule is to send traffic to your article. Once you employ the golden rule to increase article views you will see a big difference in the traffic you get.

But  that’s crazy I hear you saying, surely the whole point of posting an article is to get traffic not send traffic to it, Wrong!

Let me explain what I mean here, lets for instance take a look at ezine articles. When you post an article to ezine articles people may read it if it is written well and contains great content, and then they may click on your link and go through to your site or blog.

If you go to any section in ezine articles for any niche and click on an article to read it, you will see below the article a section that lists the top most viewed articles for the category the article is in that you have read. If you can get your article on to the most viewed articles list your article is going to drive a lot more traffic to it.

There is a little trick you can use to get your article into the most viewed section. You can use a site such as Donkeymail.com to drive very cheap traffic to your article. Every time someone goes to your article it will be classed as a view, but beware, as ezine articles are wise to this trick. There are however ways to do it correctly.

Instead of sending 1,000 visitors to your article you want to send the traffic in small bursts and to do this you are going to need a URL rotator redirect set up on your site.

A url rotator is just some code that allows you to set up a number of url’s so that when someone is sent to the url rotator it will send them to url number 1, the next person directed to the url rotator gets sent to url number 2 and so on.

You can get url rotator code easily for free on the internet, Just try googling it, You will need your own hosted website.

How this works is that you write and post say 10 articles. After a week check to see which articles are getting the most views and select the 3 articles with the most views.

Usually you have to open up one of the files on the url rotator using a text document. You then need to set the url for the first article you have selected as url number 1, the url for the second article you set up as url number2 and set the url for the third article as url number 3.

You will need to set up your url rotator on a blank page on your site or blog, and make a note of the website address for the page the rotator is on.

Once you have joined a site like donkeymail.com you purchase some traffic. I would recommend just 1,000 to start with. You then enter the url for the blank page on your site where the url rotator is located. What happens now is that a third of the traffic will go to each of your 3 articles in turn.

You need to check how many views that the 2^nd to lowest article in the most viewed section has had and then add 50 to the number. This will give you the amount of traffic you need to send to one of your articles to make sure that it gets into the most viewed article section on ezine articles for your chosen category.

Whatever you do, do not send a thousand visitors to one article all in one go as ezine articles will see what you are doing and may take your article down.

Using little tricks like this and following the golden rule to increase article views can make all the difference to your traffic.

Let me show you a little trick that can save you loads of time by you not having to do keyword research for article writing.

First you need to find your niche or keyword that already appears as an article on ezine articles. To do this you just need to type the following in to Google search

Keyword site:ezinearticles.com Article Submitted On:**,2009..2010

Now obviously you need to replace the term “Keyword” with the keyword or words you are trying to target. This will bring up a list of articles to do with your keyword that has been posted on ezine articles from 2009 until 2010.

You then need to open each of the listings in another browser tab or window, and check each article in turn. First scroll down to the foot of each article and see how many views it received. If the articles you have found have not received many views, you then need to check below each article and look at the articles that are listed in the section,

“Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Keyword Category (60 days)”

This section appears on every article page and lists the top 10 viewed articles in the keyword category for that specific article.

If you have found an article with a lot of views take a careful look at the article. Look at the structure and wording of the article, what information has been given in the article? What is the wording of the title.

You can even find out what keywords the author used when submitting their article. To do this just back click on the article page and select view page source. This will open a new window that shows the html code for the page.

Don’t worry you do not have to know how this code works. All you need to do is look at the first few lines of code which look like this,

<title>List Building Techniques for Your Article Marketing</title>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en-us”>

<meta content=“article marketing strategy,list building tips,email list building,article marketing success,article “>

The line you are looking for is the one that is always indented and says meta name= “keywords” content=

This is where all the keywords are listed that the author used when submitting their article. Now here is where you do the interesting bit.

All you need to do is look at the title and think how you could rewrite it using a more eye catching title. Then rewrite the article giving very similar content and in the same style as the original article was written, but in your own words. You can also use the same keywords as the author used.

What you are actually doing is giving yourself a head start on getting possible views to your article. The most important step is to get back links to your article. You can do this by blog commenting on others blogs and create a link to your article. Post the URL of your article to bookmarks sites. Post about it on twitter, and fan pages or groups on Facebook. The better the back links the higher up in Google your article will appear.

So before wasting hours on keyword research why not try this method first. You may well  be surprised how effective this can be.

The problem with article marketing is that the more people who read your articles the more traffic will find its way to your site. So why not send traffic to your article.

What you can do is take your article and create bullet points for the important points in your article. You then will want to create a 4 or 5 slide presentation using a program such as Powerpoint or you can download Open Office for free and create a slide presentation using Press which is the same as Powerpoint.

Once you have completed your presentation you need to film it and speak about the bullet points and capture  it all using a screen capture program such as Camtasia. Now I know what you are thinking, you are thinking Camtasia is really expensive, and you are right, But there are other ways to do a screen capture for free.

You can go to CamStudio and download the free screen capture software and use it for free. The only expense you will have to do this is you will need to purchase a microphone to record your voice but these are very inexpensive these days. You can pick up a head set which includes a microphone for under $20.

Once you  have recorded your screen presentation all you need to do is upload it to Youtube. When you have your video on Youtube just below your video you will have a description box. You need to put in the title of your video and then the URL to your article posting.

Do not just use Youtube though, by uploading you video to Tube Mogul you can distribute it to other video hosting sites as well.

If you decide to give this a try please put a comment below letting others know how easy it was to do or what results you got.

There are many different ways to get more views for your articles. To make sure that you are not missing out on any of the great tips I share with my subscribers you need to sign up for my newsletter.

Use Google: If you are struggling to find content for your articles then type in to a google search box, “Keyword + Blog”

This will bring up pages of blogs to do with your keyword. Just head over to some of the blogs and take a look at what other people are writing about. You will find lots of ideas for content, and if you come across a post on someone else’s blog that is really good, if you approach the person who owns the content I am sure they would have no problem with you reproducing it in an article, but make sure you include the details of the original author.

Google Alerts: Another great way to get content and one that I use myself, is to set up Google alerts. If you go to http://www.google.com/alerts you can set up the search terms you want to be notified about. You can even choose to be notified as it happens, once a week or once per day.

When you type in the search term, whenever anything is mentioned to do with that search term Google will send you an email containing the links to what has been posted or published. I would advise that you set your alert up for daily notification, but if you have set up a news site you may want your alerts sent as they happen. You can set up as many alerts as you want on any subject or subjects of your choice.

Ezine Articles: You can find great content by going to ezine articles and type in your keyword and see what other authors are writing about. As long as you do not copy their articles word for word you will be fine. If you are going to do this though, I would recommend you take a look at their articles and optimize your article so that you get more views for your article.

Just following these 3 methods I am convinced you will find more than enough content to write hundreds of articles. If you have never wrote an article before you can learn by starting here.

I know you know the symptoms but what is the cure?

Belief

When you first start writing articles you may believe that you do not know enough about the subject to advise or guide others. This is not true, you are in actual fact more of an expert on the subject than you may at first think. You have no doubt read up on article marketing and done your research on it. You have probably read everything you can get your hands on to do with the techniques that work with article marketing. What you have to realise is that what you already know is much more than the millions of people on the Internet that are new to article marketing, or have never used it before. Having belief in yourself and your own ability will give you the confidence to write good articles.

The Middle Start

Don’t start at the beginning of your article. I know that goes against whatever you was taught at school when you had to write essays, but it works with article writing. Start writing the middle part of the article first. Note down the main point of the information you want to get across and then expand on the main points. Once you have the body of your article completed you just need to explain what you are going to show the reader in your article, the introduction. Then explain what you have covered and how it will help the reader, the conclusion.

Practice

The more you practice your art the better you will become and the easier it will seem. Make a point of having a couple of practice sessions each week by setting a timer for a period of 10 minutes. In that 10 minutes write as much as you can about your niche or topic. It does not matter if you end up with loads of paragraphs of information that do not flow naturally together. Brainstorming in this way is a great way to practice writing at speed and you will be very surprised at how many ideas you will come up with for articles when you read over what you have managed to write in 10 minutes.

Do It!

Yes you know what’s coming, my favourite words “Take Action” Don’t just read what I or someone else has explained to you, Go and Try it

Do it right now, open up a blank word document or text  and time yourself for 10 minutes as you write everything you can about your niche or topic. Don’t try and use the excuse that you do not have a timer, if you have a mobile phone most of them have some form of timer or app to use. I really do believe you will be astonished by doing this, at how much you do know about your niche. When you have finished leave a comment below and let us all know how you got on.

In fact RSS feeds and article views go hand in hand if you know what you are doing.

RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication and essentially it is a way of delivering content that is changing regularly, such as news sites , blog entries and articles.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds, and when you do that you are actually telling that feed to let you know when that sites adds new content. It is almost like getting a email to notify you but it also contains a brief summary of whats been added.

If you want to start doing this you will need to get a RSS reader and the best place to start with is Google Reader.

What we are interested in here though, is how to use RSS to increase article views.

For example: Using ezinearticles.com you would log in to your account and go to your expert author page where you will have all your articles listed. This is what my RSS URL would look like

http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Garry_Booton

So what do I mean by that?

In a nutshell, you need to know what articles are driving traffic to your web site or your product or landing page. It is no use turning out article after article if the articles are not doing their job correctly.

Use Google Analytics or Going Up to monitor where your traffic is coming from. You will then be in a position to work back and analyze not only which article gets the best results but also alter future articles to recreate the same sort of style that you used in your more productive articles.

You will also be in a good position to find out which article sites are best for your articles. If you find that Go Articles is performing better for you than ezinearticles.com, you can then make sure you post more articles on Go Articles.

I am sure you can see that by tracking what articles are getting the most traffic for you will make it easy for you to really maximise your traffic generation.

This also works for using articles in affiliate marketing. By tracking the types of articles that bring you more customers to your landing page should hopefully increase actual sales for you. You can even work out how many articles on average it takes for you to make a sale for a certain product.

Tracking your articles is very important and so easy to do, but there are so many marketers just not doing this simple step. Do not become one of those marketers, track your articles.