If you’ve been around working from home online for even a short amount of time you’ve probably heard of article marketing. In simple terms, article marketing is where you promote products – either your own or as an affiliate – by submitting articles to directories which include a link to the product in the author bio. This link is your affiliate link, so every time a visitor you send buys the product you get paid a commission.

It’s a simple technique, but many marketers spend huge amounts of time doing it without ever making a lot of money. Does this mean it doesn’t work? Far from it. If you know how, article marketing can be extremely profitable.

The problem arises when marketers don’t actively track their efforts. To start with, picking the right product is vital. If you pick a product to promote that doesn’t have a good sales page or is in an obscure niche you will get less success. It sounds obvious, but many article marketers blindly churn out article after article promoting a product that’s almost impossible to sell. This is something you can and should test yourself. When starting to promote a product only write a certain amount of articles, for example 25, and if you haven’t made an acceptable amount of money after those then forget it and move onto a different product.

Once you’ve picked a popular product (you can find many at the Clickbank marketplace) the next stage is optimizing the actual article. There are several key steps to writing a successful article, and each one can make the difference between earning a small amount of money and a huge amount of affiliate sales. If you want to do article marketing properly, you need to test how to make an article get the most views, have a high CTR and ultimately give you the most conversions.

The most important components of an article are:

• The headline. This is arguably the most important of all. You need to make sure it grabs the reader’s attention and makes them want to start reading.

• The first sentence. Like the headline, this needs to intrigue the reader to make them continue.

• The author’s bio. Once you’ve got your reader to the end of the article you need them to click through to the products page.

There are many theories about how to achieve the best CTR, but again if you want to do article marketing the right way you need to examine your own results. For example, don’t always use the same bio box with each article. Instead, try a few different versions and see which gets the best CTR. Once you have found the one that gives you the highest CTR, slightly change it to make variations and test again. By following this process you will zoom in on the most efficient types of bio boxes and know which ones are going to get you the best results, rather than just using the same one repeatedly.

Just by using simple tracking and testing techniques you will have a big advantage over many other article marketers. Ultimately, you want to get the most profit for the least amount of investment in any business and article marketing is no different.

Are you new to Internet Marketing? Have you recently been overwhelmed at the array of choices before you to make money online? If you’re interested in making money online by using your writing skills, then this guide is a great place to start!

Writers are in high demand on the web – quality writers, that is. The Internet is all about content, whether that be content on websites, in emails, in ebooks etc. Businesses are constantly searching for content to add to their websites and products. Sometimes they hire ghostwriters to get exclusive content, and other times they purchase private label rights products (PLR) and further customize them.

If you’re a talented writer, the potential for you to develop a profitable business online is massive.

Here are some ways you can make money online with writing, but please note that this list is just a sample:

Write and submit articles to sites that pay for content:

• http://www.helium.com
  http://www.associatedcontent.com
  http://www.thearticlesense.com
• Create your own niche websites packed full of useful content and monetize them with affiliate marketing or advertising such as Google Adsense.
• Write articles, reports or ebooks and sell multiple copies along with their rights (i.e., sell private label rights products – PLR).
• Advertise your writing services and launch a business as a ghostwriter, writing custom content for your clients.

What are Private Label Rights (PLR)? Certain articles are usually written in a generalized format. You pay a certain amount and purchase the rights to these. The content itself varies— it can be in the form of articles or an eBook or a report. Once you have purchased the PLR, you can edit the article and claim authorship.

Different people can make use of PLR content in different ways. For example, you might have a product which you sell through your website. You might get hold of some PLR articles that is relevant to product’s niche and customize the type of content to draw traffic to your website. Usually, the PLR content that you would buy will tend to be highly generalized. You would have to add and edit it according to the particularities of your product.

Often, you may serve as the intermediate writer. You can purchase the PLR to a certain content, edit it further and then sell it. Yours would be a specialization of sorts, and then other marketers would purchase the PLR to your articles and edit them further according to their needs.

However, not all content writers allow this. Generally when you purchase the PLR to a certain article, it means you can edit it and then copyright it. But for re-selling it, often you need to edit the article substantially. The exact features tend to vary depending on the PLR you purchase. So be sure to check with the terms of use with every PLR product that you buy.