Q&A On Article Marketing, Profitable Niche and Keywords

Posted by Hersh Bhardwaj in Strategic web Marketing | 1 comment

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I received a mail from one of my forum mates the other day. We had a lot of discussion about internet marketing in general. Here is a little excerpt from our conversation. I thought it’ll help a lot of people.

Q-How do I pick a good niche to promote? (In this very thread, Robert said about one of the niches: “that niche is almost dead now”. How do I avoid picking a niche that’s dead and choose one that is popular?)
Me: A niche is not a fashion trend that’ll come and go. In internet marketing and especially within affiliate marketing, a niche is simply a very specific area of interest that will be profitable. So, two things- ’specific area of interest’ for consumers, and it should be ‘profitable’ to you as a product seller/promoter. Affiliates talk about some niches to be ‘dead’ meaning they are saturated with far too many products and affiliates promoting them. Any product getting too much attention looses it sheen over time, as every tom, dick and harry is out there with a one-page sales site to promote it. A niche is magical when there is a specific interest in it but few providers. For example, ‘career and employment prospects for ex-cons’.

Q-How do I pick the “long tail keywords” around which to write the articles? Some e-books suggest picking keywords with over 5000 search results in Google but not too much competition. Still have no idea how to tell if a keyword has too much competition
Me- You have to rely upon a good keyword research tool for this. Wordtracker is pretty good. There is no one tool that gives exact data on search engine numbers but Wordtracker gives a decent estimate. Now, to evaluate profitability of any keyword a term is used- Keyword Effectiveness Index. Higher the KEI, better the keyword, they say.

Q-If you take the total dollar amount you’ve made writing articles and divide it by the actual number of articles you’ve written, how much do you get?
Me-It’s pretty hard to work out the ROI for article marketing. It’s only possible if you ONLY employ article marketing in generating sales/traffic.Still, you’d have to take into account web-site maintainance and basic SEO-hours-spent costs.If you can somehow track every article you wrote and published. If you could follow and track that article wherever it’s published further and work out how much it made for you, same tracking can be done with all the articles and you’ll have a ROI. It can be done with Analytics, just never felt the need to do it myself yet.

Q-Top Internet Marketing expert suggests submitting articles to EZA and bookmarking them for long-term traffic. What specific actions do I take to “bookmark them for long-term traffic”? Is this process really necessary? (doubt raised – see next question)
Me- This is not an unusual approach. Article marketing is not just about writing and publishing articles, but is also about creating multiple entry points to your site via all those places where the article gets.Now, the onus is upon you to give legs to those articles. Whether you publish them on EZA or Goarticles, smart marketers never rely simply on the traffic generation methods of article directories. You have to do your bit and promote your article. Simple bookmarking can include- Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, Propeller, posting on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. The point is to spread the word from your end.

Q- A seasoned Internet Marketer disagrees with the previous statement: “When you build those backlinks all you’re doing is generating a lot of adsense revenue for EzineArticles or GoArticles. Your time is better spent elsewhere”. Who is right? I need to have a system in place before I start.

Me-True, but then what.Think about this- if you generate enough traffic that increases Adsense revenue from the content of your article what does that mean? All those coming to that page are coming via your ‘bookmarking’ after having heard about your article, wouldn’t they read and pay attention to the article first. Or, they’ll simply click on Adsense ads as if they are paid to do that.

Q- Top Internet Marketing expert says: “Do solid keyword research, find 10 high traffic and low competition keywords”.
What is the criteria that defines a “high traffic but low competition keyword”??? I need to define this, otherwise I could waste a lot of time.
Me-Nobody will give a figure for that..The term ‘credit card’ has close to 95 million web results in Google search. Still most affiliates have at least one credit-card program in their portfolio.KEI is the best bet to find out. Generally, a keyword with KEI above 100 is okay to work with.Again, you have to treat each case separately.See KEI is only a ratio between ‘keyword searches’ and ‘available web-resources’, so you can  have different keywords with same KEI but different potential.

Q-Top Internet Marketing expert says: <<Write 10 SEOed keyword specific articles around 400-450 words each.>>
Before I start writing, what is the definion of a Search Engine Optimized article?

Me-Keywords in hand. Sprinkle them in title, heading and body of the article. Keep it within 2% density. Write a killer title and include keywords. Resource-box/author-bio is your elevator-pitch. All the links in the bio should have your keywords as the anchor text.

Q-HOW DO I PICK THE “LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS” to write about and how many keywords should be targeted in a typical article?
Refer to the Wordtracker question above. You can target between 1-3 keywords per article. Normally, I use one main and two long-tail derived from the main.For example, ‘credit card’, “interest free credit card”, “no fee credit card”.

Q-HOW DOES A TYPICAL PROFESSIONAL ARTICLE WRITER actually come up with the content? Is it mainly reading other articles and wikipedia(if available) and completely rephrasing the information? This question assumes the writer has no knowledge of the niche in question.
Me- Internet research is paramount. Making yourself familiar with the content is the first step. Being a pro writer, you’d know how to structure any writing quickly. For example, I work with a summary, an intro paragraph, 5-8 bullet points and a conclusion. Any structuring that you use can be employed to format the info that you have gathered via research.