Affiliate Article Marketing

Affiliate article marketing is one of the most difficult areas of online business to make money in, because you have to find a product that you like and a distributer that you trust and often you will be competing with the manufacturer's and main distributor's own sales forces, who undoubtedly have more resources than you do. If you can overcome these obstacles, then there is money to be made at affiliate article marketing, but it is imperative to pick your product and go-between very carefully in the world of affiliate article marketing.

Affiliate Article Marketing

Affiliate article marketing is one way of dozens of promoting, advertising or marketing products and I do not mean only on line. Ever since Johann Gutenberg revolutionized the printing world, articles have been used to endorse products and their manufacturers.

In the beginning, posters or flyers were written and nailed up in prominent places and later articles were written in news sheets or newspapers. The reason that this centuries-old form of advertising was transferred to the Internet was that it was so successful. Furthermore, it still is very successful and many would even argue that affiliate article marketing is still the best form of advertising.

In fact, many would say that affiliate article marketing is better suited to the Internet than even to newspapers and flyers. This is because of the way that the Internet works and the de facto rules of the article distribution networks that have sprung up to take advantage of affiliate article marketers.

Prior to about 1995, it would have cost any company an absolute fortune to try marketing products to a global market. The only firms capable of doing it were giants like Coca Cola, Pepsi and IBM. The Internet changed all that. Not in the beginning and not even within the first five years. The technology was there but not enough people were on line. Nowadays there are millions more people going on line every week and if they have a credit card, they are potential customers.

It is also practically free to do. Nothing is totally free, clearly, but compared to the cost of a global television campaign, Internet affiliate article marketing is free. You only need time, knowledge and enough money to hire a computer in a cyber cafe for a few hours a day. That puts global markets within the reach of most school kids, whereas before you had to be on billions.

So, how is global affiliate article marketing achieved? The same as 400 years ago. You write an article and post it. The subtle changes that have to be made to convert old-style article marketing to Internet affiliate article marketing are, according to the conventions of the largest and the most choosy article distribution services:

The article should contain at least 400 words. The best article directories or databases insist that the article is original too. It may give a bias, but it should be factual and it should not mention any key phrase, like the product's name more in more than 2% of the words (ie ten times in a five hundred word article).

The article should be informative and not read like a press release from the manufacturer or the distributer.

The article may end with the writer's byline. This is the important bit where affiliate article marketing is concerned. The byline may contain no more than two hyperlinks. This allows the Internet marketer a lot of flexibility.

For example, one link could go to a page containing a link to the writer's affiliate link, so that the writer gets his or her commission on any sales; and the other link could go to the writer's home page, which will contain further links.

This byline, more commonly known as the resource box by Internet marketers is a very powerful tool and has been the subject of many articles all on its own. In fact, there are many people trying different ways of making the resource box work better for them in their affiliate article marketing campaigns.