Choose the Article Marketing Option That Gets Your Affiliate Business Booming
Successful affiliate marketing depends on others knowing where you are and what you have to offer. You have different options for achieving this goal. You can engage in e-mail campaigns, banner advertising, and social forum posting.
You can also use word-of-mouth advertising effectively. In addition, you can build a blog promoting your products. The marketing initiatives you can undertake are certainly plentiful.
Article writing and engaging in article marketing is another tool for gaining affiliate business exposure. Of course, within this discipline are several options. As an affiliate marketer, you must choose the option, which gives you maximum return for your investment.
Remember, investments are not always about financial resources. Investments also involve time and energy spent on an activity, initiative, or task. It's a trade-off; time spent doing one thing means time not spent doing something else. You must weigh what activity is the most productive use of your time.
With article marketing options, some cost more money. Some cost very little money but involve a huge time investment. Successful affiliate marketers look at the cost-benefit relationship of each option before making a decision.
They look at what article marketing option gains them the widest exposure. They want this exposure for the best price. They also want their time commitment to be minimal. This is so they can engage in other marketing initiatives while their articles work for them.
The article marketing options you, as an affiliate marketer, have to consider are as follows:
Manual Submission
Manually submitting involves article submission to individual publishers. You perform your article writing activities. You then engage in article submission yourself; no outside agency helps you. You must submit each individual article, one-by-one, to each individual publisher.
Do you want to distribute your articles to one hundred different specialty publishers? Limber up those fingers, as you'll have a lot of keyboard inputting to do. You will save money in terms of subscription fees. However, you will spend a lot of time doing this. You must weigh whether this extra time is better suited to more productive activities.
A Manual Submission Service
A manual submission service involves less investment of time but more investment of money. You submit a particular article once to a manual submission service. They take this article and submit it to a host of publishers. If you have a substantial article campaign in motion, with many articles, you submit each article one time.
Many manual submission services charge you a fee each time you submit an article. If your article campaign involves multiple articles then your costs can increase accordingly. This certainly adds up in a year depending on how many campaigns you run.
Software Programs for Article Submission
Software programs can significantly reduce your time investment. This allows you to spend time in other affiliate marketing or educational pursuits. Software programs require regular updating, though. Failure to do this means you miss knowing of new publishers on the article-marketing scene.
Software has its own set of problems. First, you can only use the PC where you downloaded the article submission software. Second, software is not always compatible with all computers. Third, viruses are a threat to software programs. Lastly, malicious spyware is also a threat.
A Managed Article Distribution Solution
By managed, we mean a completely managed article distribution solution. This is one where you do very little. Quality services exist whereby you submit your articles, and go on your merry way. For a one-time reasonable subscription fee, a service of this type handles the details. You don't have to worry about scheduling time for distribution activities as they do it all.
They engage in widespread distribution of your articles to the top newsletter, ezine, and article publishers. They provide the tools for tracking where your articles are going and when. They provide free academic modules that help you write better articles. These educational resources also keep you current on how article marketing and affiliate marketing work together.
A service of this type doesn't put a cap on the number of articles you can submit. They charge their subscription fee for a pre-defined period and do not lay on additional charges. Some services set a limit on article submissions. They proceed to tack on more fees if you choose to go beyond that limit in a subscription period. Again, this can blow your article marketing budget if you're not careful.
The great thing about a completely managed solution is the minimal time investment on your part. Coupled with an affordable subscription fee, it's a smart way to build an affiliate business. It's a cost-effective option, both time and moneywise, to consider for your next article marketing campaign. It really can get your affiliate business booming faster.
About the Author:
Chris Ellington is CEO of IPNM, the parent company of Article Marketer: first choice for article distribution by article marketers around the world. Learn how to compare article marketing options here.
Article Marketing
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