I was tempted to call this post “Article marketing Is dead long Live article marketing” But that would have just been plain ridiculous. Although reading some of the posts in some of the bigger forums you would be forgiven for thinking that Article marketing was on it’s death bed. One post referred to some posts about Ezinearticles and said that it was obvious that people should no longer use EZA and what were the alternatives. I have never so much rubbish spoken by people who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

So lets get this straight Article Marketing is alive and kicking and going from strength to strength In fact 2010 is going to be bumper year for article marketers.

So before I look at what’s to come in 2010 and finish with a prediction lets have a look back at what happened in 2009. The most obvious things that had an affect on Article marketing was Ezinearticles and their bit of house cleaning. To listen to some people over react you would have thought the sky was falling. I admit I was very critical of some of the things that EZA announced and that was said by the management but they now seem to be being sensible about things. I suspect there was an initial knee jerk reaction on both sides.

For example When they initially announced the keyword density changes and the more stringent review policies I asked Chris if domain names would be counted as keywords. The answer I got was yes they would. This was obviously poorly thought out as surely an article about blue widgets pointing to a site about blue widgets was preferable to one pointing to a site about pink fluffy bunnies and yet because my sites are well targeted I get punished. However this doesn’t seem to be the case now so perhaps common sense has prevailed.

None of the changes are cause for concern , the only thing you need to do is to adapt your articles. If your keyword is 4 words long then you need to increase your word count to over 400 words. The great thing that the EZA changes did was to make people look elsewhere for links and post articles at other article directories. Personally I’ve slightly reduced my articles that go to EZA and increased the articles that go elsewhere and where I used to only give EZA unique content I now often include content that has been posted elsewhere. After all Article marketing Is a 2 way street.

So what for 2010?

Well the first thing that is already happening is that There is now more than 1 good article directory, ArticlesBase and GoArticles are making headway and challenging EZA. They are not quite there yet but it’s only a matter of time. Goarticles recently had a big SEO audit done and this can only mean that their articles will start to rank higher in future.

Access to stats will also become more prevalent, EZA recently started showing CTR which is an excellent step forward, I want to know my CTR and which links get clicks.

Articlesbase is an excellent directory and already starting to outrank EZA in some cases. I know very little about the management and ownership but I’ve had a very positive discussion with them after they rejected some articles. The great thing is that they are prepared to listen to common sense.

With sites like Go articles you can currently add links in the Body and also link directly to sales pages if you wish. The more visible links in an article the higher the CTR. So if you aren’t using these directories then it’s time to start.

My big prediction for 2010 is for a rise in the number of article directories who don’t have any adverts and allow 3 of 4 links in the body of the article in return for a small monthly fee. I can see this business model becoming prevalent. EZA state that a CTR of between 2 and 12% is normal, I can regularly get 3 or 4 times that so a site with no ads and well placed links and resource boxes should achieve 50-70% CTR I for one would happily pay for that!

Article marketing is as strong as it’s ever been and is going to get stronger, more competition is a good thing and can only help us article marketers.

Good luck with your article marketing in 2010

Internet Marketing On The Front Line

Internet marketing is easy. There I said it, the genie is out of the bottle. It’s not complicated, you find a keyword, create some content and then drive traffic to that content where some people will buy from your site or click a link. What is complicated is all the layers and layers of complication marketers add to it so that you need to buy their products to decode it.

It’s not just internet marketers who do this , How do you lose weight?, it’s obvious isn’t it eat less and exercise more. Thats all there is to it so why is there thousands of lose weight products released every year.

Almost any aspect of internet marketing can be explained in a few sentances. For example list building, set up your autoresponeder, add some free products, send regular good quality emails.There is probably no need for any listbuilding product to be longer than 15 pages or a 30 minute video…but then it wouldn’t have perceived value and would have to sell for $17 and not the $97 a 200 page manual and 8 hours of video would sell for. The content is the same but you are paying an extra $80 for the fluff!

What can take time to explain is the technical aspect of things thats where products can prove their worth. A good product that shows you how to do something can be very valuable so before buying a product make sure that the technical aspect is well covered and there is support for any questions.

This brings me on to the real reason for todays post. The 2 types of internet marketers you will find. The First is the internent marketers who are actually doing what they teach, building sites, creating products, etc. There are what I call frontline marketers. I consider myself to be one of these. After I write this I’ll be getting backlinks for my blogs and researching new sites.

The 2nd type is the marketers who just create products for the sake of having something to sell. You’ll recognise them because you’ll be getting emails throughout the year where X promotes Y’s product and Y promotes z’s product then z promotes x’s product etc etc. The product will be big ticket items and be incredibly professional.

These guys have teams of writers and designers creating products out of thin air , it’s amazing to watch how they can turn a simple idea written on the back of an envelope into a multimedia $997 exstravaganza. They truly are the Alcamists of the 21st century.

It’s easy to be dazzled by their presentation skills you will believe that you need their products to succeed. But remember thousands of people buy these products…how many have you ever seen succeed? Also remember most of these guys profit comes from selling each others products NOT by implementing what they teach!

So next time before you buy anything make sure that the creator is practicing what he preaches!

2 things before I go.

I sat down yesterday afternoon with 2 of my online friends Paul Forcey and Peter Coughlin and we recorded a call. It was supposed to be a shortish chat about internet marketing but It stretched to over 2 hours. We covered loads of aspects about working in the IM field and you’ll find a few real gems of information in there. it’s also quite funny in places.

I’ve uploaded it as a podcast to http://wpgoldmine.podomatic.com/ where you can listen online or download it

Finally, I have bitten the bullet and decided to build a subscribers list (no it won’t be constant emails saying “buy this”!) I’ll be using it to send out regular tips , advice and updates and release various research reports I have planned. You’ll see the sign up box on the right hand side of this post and as a blatant bribe you’ll get a copy of my Resource Box Report.

Micro Niche Finder Video looking at the new features.

I’ve been recommending Micro Niche Finder to my members and subscribers for several years now. yesterday there was an update that makes it a complete and total no brainer. If you want to make money online Micro Niche Finder will now make the job so much easier. In the video below it takes me less than 10 minutes to find a Niche i can rank at #1 for with very little work.

The key things you need to make money quickly are:

A niche with searches and very little competition.

A keyword based domain name

An indication of how much work you need to do to rank well.

MNF now delivers this with a few clicks of a button. Watch the video below where I find a good niche in a few minutes.

Once you find your niche there are several things you can do , expand it into a site with 5 to 10 related pages and work on getting all of them ranking well or why not try the simple and easy option. Create Micro Micro niches.

Micro Micro Niches are small sites that start out with just 1 or 2 pages. You create them then leverage your content until you rank #1 in google. You can then either leave them or add to them using the keywords that have been used to find your site. They are quick and simple sites that are designed to make you money , base them on the keyword phrase you are targetting and use good on page seo and they will rank well in a short time.

If you’d like to know how to leverage your content then grab my free report from this post Article Leverage Report

Do You Want to make Easy Money?

If you answer the question above in the positive then you should probably look elsewhere. Internet Marketing is not a way to make easy money it isn’t now and it never has been. Don’t believe all the hype you read on salespages they are just that pages designed to one thing and one thing only sell you something and make you spend money.

I personally know of a couple of products with salespages showing large clickbank sales on a daily basis. What hasn’t been mentioned is that the sales are from selling a similar product on clickbank that had loads of affiliates promoting it. How is that going to help you?

Anyway back to the reason for this post Internet marketing is not easy but that’s not to say it can’t be profitable if you build your business on firm foundations. Find a process that works for you, analyse it and break it down into easy steps that can be quickly replicated. That will give you the basis of a business you can build over the months and years to come.

You also need to think long term, hardly a week goes by without someone emailing me and asking me if using the system in WordPress Goldmine will make them $500 a day within a month. When I tell them thats highly unlikely they usually reply that xxx says they can do that. I am to polite to tell them the owner of xxx is probably a lying cheating scammer!

Internet marketing is about building a long term strategy that works and that is flexible, you need to be able to adapt to the changing markets we work in and the regular changes in rules. Google regularly changes it’s algorithms which affects marketers on a regularly basis.Only last week ezinearticles announced changes that have affected lots of marketers. It’s quite possible that in the coming weeks those changes will affect me, however I already have systems in place that make ezinearticles not as significant to my business as they were 2 months ago.

If you take one thing from this post it should be that, Internet marketing is not about get rich quick or gaming the system and it’s not about short term profits. Internent marketing is about finding a long term approach that will work for you.

You need to balance buying every new product that comes out with investing in products that will help your business..(yes it should be a business, if you want a hobby take up needlepoint!). I regularly see people posting in forums that they won’t pay monthly subscriptions, why not? if a subscription costs you $30 and helps you make $100 then whats the problem? You pay monthly hosting fees theres not difference monthly subscriptions and payments for tools should be viewed as business expenses and are ultimatly tax deductible.

There are some tools that I couldn’t do without (Micro Niche Finder, Unique Article Wizard) and some that I waited far too long to buy (Market Samurai). Each of them helps me build a cohesive system and reduces the time it takes me to make a profit from a site. You don’t need hundreds of dollars to start your internet marketign business I started with les than $100 and through hard work got to where I am today, and if a lazy old bloke like me can do it so can you, just don’t think it’s easy!

What aspects of Internet marketing do you enjoying doing? Keyword research? article writing? Building sites? promotion?

We all have our favorites, I was writing a report today and spent 5 hours just bashing the keyboard. I love dong that type of thing It challenges me and forces me to concentrate and generate Ideas on the fly. While I was doing what I enjoyed I had other people promoting sites and creating content for new sites.

It’s all about doing what you do well and off loading what you don’t do so well. When I first started in Internet Marketing I used to build auto generated sites to order for people, they’d pay me $10 and 20 minutes later they would have a site. I liked building sites (well pressing the build button!) and the money I earned helped to pay for me to expand my business far faster than I would have been able to. It also meant I didn’t need to find a real job.

Working smarter is all about doing what you enjoy doing , if you don’t like writing but like keyword research then offer a keyword research service, take the money you earn from that and pay a writer to write your content.

Any idiot can work harder, spend hours researching keywords, and doing nothing with them, creating beautiful looking blogs and not promoting them even buying the next shiny thing to come along that will make him his millions… and not acting on it.

Why not spend the next few days sorting out a business plan that will allow you to build your business and allow you to do what you want to do. If you can’t afford to outsource, build a site and sell it , then use the profits to build 4 sites and sell them. Then take you profit and hire a writer of a site promoter while you build your next sites.