Your 2-stage Article Strategy

Running on from my previous post on ‘Your Free Traffic Strategy’, one of the comments by Linda P. Morton reminded me of a 2-stage strategy that I find particularly useful for affiliate marketing.

For this strategy to work you don’t need a website, nor do you need a domain. All you need is a blog or a Squidoo lens.

On this blog or lens you write a post which is essentially a review of the product you are promoting. Don’t make it one of those hyped up, scammy reviews that you see so often on Squidoo lenses. Either review a product you have bought or buy it before promoting it – if you do your review well then you’ll get your money back with just a couple of sales!

Your ‘review’, which should read as an article (not a sales letter!), should point out what you have personally found useful about the product and how it has helped you. Write with enthusiasm and write from a personal viewpoint (that means don’t try to write using ‘marketing speak’). Put it this way, if you write from the heart instead of thinking about ’selling’ the product you’ll make sales. Finish the ‘review’ with a recommendation and your affiliate link. This is actually Stage 2 of your strategy.

Next write an article on the same subject or niche that your product is in. Find something that will intrigue the reader and that the reader of your article will find useful. You may be able to extract something from the product you’ve just reviewed and rewrite it in your own words.

Make sure that whatever you’ve chosen as a subject leads into your review. In other words the end of the article shouldn’t seem like an end but more that it should continue to your ‘review’.

Then finish your article with words like ‘If you’d like to know more about (subject) then click here’ and finish with your resource box also pointing to your blog or lens ‘review’. This is Stage 1 of your strategy and, having done this, publish your article.

It will help enormously if you write another article around an aspect of the subject or niche belonging the product and publish that the next day, and perhaps one after that. Within 5 days you should start seeing traffic and sales which will grow as your articles proliferate across the Internet.

If you want to know more about how you can use articles to deliver free traffic to your blog, lens or site, and how to bring sales with the traffic, then take the same ecourse I did at Article Domination. Start writing articles today and you’ll build your traffic and sales exponentially!