To put that into perspective, the overall average CTR for author’s resource box links is just over 4%, and there is also a fair sized group of authors/marketers who regularly get between 10% and 15% CTR’s.

Obviously, seeing one author hover around the 40% mark for so long we wanted to speak with him and ask his secrets.

Unfortunately, he has been reluctant to agree to any sort of interview or profile piece because as he puts it, “the nature of Internet marketing is so cut-throat, the minute marketers see someone doing something new or interesting that works they pounce on it and beat it to death.”

We certainly understand his position, and would never ask one of our members to ’shoot themselves in the foot’, but in further talking with him he did agree to share a few general pieces of advice on how he writes his articles and resource boxes and gave us permission to quote them here on the blog.

There are some real nuggets of gold here, and they come from somebody we can verify is ‘walking the walk’ and getting results, so read, enjoy, and take action for yourself:

1) Tabloid titles rule. There’s a reason that tabloids and magazines use the same type of titles month after month, they just work. Use list titles like “7 Ways To…”, or juicy and sensational titles to grab attention and get readers to your articles. Just make sure you deliver in the article on what your title promises.

2) Think of the summary area as a place for a strong sub-title. With most article sites, what you use as the summary will end up being what the search engines use for the link description in the search results, so if you have an attention grabbing title, use the summary space to expand on it more and hook readers in from the search listings.

For example, if a title is “7 Ways To Lose 7 Pounds This Week”, then a good summary (or sub-title) would be something like “These methods aren’t the usual suspects and 3 of them will surprise you”. That’s a strong hook on top of a solid title.

3) Make a personal connection right away with your article. I’ve always been taught that you start a writing with an opening statement about your topic, but that doesn’t work very well online. It’s better to start by talking about a person, or group of people, who are using or affected by your topic. This creates a personal connection with readers, your article becomes a story and they want to know what’s going to happen to the people. Whatever your topic is, if you can make a real person the subject of the article it will resonate better with readers.

4) Give facts, figures and sales messages in tiny chunks through the body of the article. Use short paragraphs, and remember that people take in the first and last idea of each paragraph better than they do any ideas in the middle, so put your wow facts in the first and last sentences of paragraphs, and bury the fluff and any contradicting ideas you want to gloss over in the middle of paragraphs.

5) Longer articles work better than short ones, but keep the body text in short chunks and full of white space. A 1000 word article is better than a 400 word article, but you have to keep the paragraphs short, about 100 words each.

So, a 1000 word article should be about 10 paragraphs, or better still, 10 paragraphs and 2 bulletpoint lists. Online readers like to skim text, by keeping everything short you allow them to skim and still get all of your major selling points or the heart of your message.

6) End your article with an update on the person or people you mentioned in the opening. Readers want a conclusion to ‘the story’, so tell how the person or people have been changed or affected by your topic, whether it’s a product, a service, or an idea doesn’t matter, it works either way.

7) Write your resource box as if it were a P.S. [postscript] to your article. Forget about you, nobody cares about your backstory or experience, and telling them won’t get you any clicks to your links. Instead, now that you’ve wrapped up the article by telling how your topic changed someone’s life, create a question in the reader’s mind of how their own life could be different with your topic, then offer a link “for more information” or “for more about topic”. It shouldn’t sound like a sales pitch at all, but rather be offered up as a choice the reader has to make for themselves.

By posing the question first about how your topic could change the reader’s life, they’re already stimulated to know more about it, so then it’s best to present the link as a choice between getting what they want and walking away from what could be. So long as the reader doesn’t feel pressured or like they’re being sold to, this works great.

8) Finally, write for quality over quantity. It’s easy to think that by writing tons of crap articles and saturating the web with them you’ll get better coverage and results, I used to think that too, but the opposite is true. It’s easier to write 2 articles per day than it is to write 10, but you have to put a little more time and thought into those 2.

Still, I could write 10 cheesy articles per day that get me 1 or 2 daily clicks each, or I can write 2 articles per day that get me 15 to 20 daily clicks each, there’s no decision to be made there. With less writing and work as far as researching topics and submitting articles goes, I’m getting more traffic now, and that traffic converts better for me on the backend because I’ve established some trust with visitors when they first meet me through my quality article.

It’s a hard shift to make, I was there and I worried that my traffic would drop off the map when I cut down to less articles with higher quality, but I found the opposite happened so I say go fo it.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, articles, traffic

Sure, you can write and publish an article online without paying a penny, but to create a quality article requires at-least a modest investment of time for the researching and writing–and isn’t your time worth something? So, for that reason I think it’s misleading and unfair to describe article marketing as “free” traffic.

Perhaps it would be better if everyone started referring to article marketing as an easy source of “premium” or “great” traffic, because that’s where article marketing really shines when you do it right.

With just a few paragraphs of well written and crafted words you can pull in boat-loads of highly targeted, quality traffic.

To demonstrate just how valuable the traffic can be with article marketing, let’s look at an actual example from Content Caboodle. Here is a screenshot from an article published on our site:

Notice that I’ve highlighted the first link from the resource box. The anchor text of that link is “printer cartridges” and this specific link has been clicked hundreds of times by visitors to this article page. I know the actual number of clicks the link has received, but without the actual author’s permission it would be wrong to disclose that here, so we’ll stick with the general and generic “hundreds of clicks” for the sake of this posting.

Now, lets look at the average CPC (cost per click) that Google charges for that particular term:

$6.31 per click. Now, of course that reflects the cost when bidding in Google’s search network more than from content page displays, but even still you can easily estimate that it’s going to cost you over $1 per click for that term even in the content network. You could bid less than $1, but I doubt your ad would ever get displayed if you did.

So, at a minimum of $1 per click in value, and with hundreds of clicks to that link, it’s easy to see just how valuable article marketing can be when done right.

And just by the way, this specific article has a 2nd link in the resource box as well with a different anchor text term, and though it hasn’t received as many clicks as the first link, it has received hundreds of clicks to date too.

The key to this article’s success is that the author spent a little time to create a very good and engaging piece of content that naturally guides readers from the article body to his resource box links.

Article marketing is easy, and it’s a great (but not exactly free) way to grab premium traffic, if you do it right and give quality content then you will get quality returns.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article writing, engagement

I don’t normally post here, I’m more of the “operations” guy behind the scenes with Content Caboodle; but I spend a lot of time reading almost all of the articles that get published on this site (I’m an information junkie) and something I saw this week literally triggered a lightbulb moment for me, you know, when the lightbulb flashes over your head like in cartoons…and I decided immediately that I wanted to share this with the contributing writers here as a way to make what you’re doing better and easier for you.

Article marketing is a tricky craft. The system is simple, write articles and then publish them everywhere you can to get the maximum exposure for your resource box call-to-action link(s).

Being such a simple system, it leads to a lot of people trying it, typically with very mixed results because they haven’t studied the mechanics behind the craft of writing an article that will entice a reader to take action.

I call it a craft because that’s exactly what it is. It isn’t hard to do or learn, but it’s a vital ingredient if you want to have real success with your articles.

It’s easy to write a couple hundred words on any topic, but if you haven’t crafted those words properly to engage and entice your readers than your message isn’t going to be memorable and those words aren’t going to be working for you or your business at all. They may be informative, but informative alone doesn’t translate into memorable or action from readers.

So, how do you take your words and craft them into something more memorable or that will entice action from your readers?

There are a lot of ways to do it, but one I saw this week when my monthly National Geographic arrived was very impressive and can serve as a great starting point for writers looking to improve their article marketing craft.

Right on page #2 of this latest issue of National Geographic (August 2010), opposite the Index page, is what on first glance appears to be a single-page feature on Cuban Iguanas. A well targeted story for Nat-Geo readers, right?

I didn’t want to step on any toes nor break any laws by scanning the actual page, so here’s a design representation of the layout of the single-page piece:

Layout Design

Now, let me break it down for you:

Single-Page Title: “Wildlife As Canon Sees It” (Canon runs similar engaging ads in every issue of Nat-Geo and has older ones online for viewing at http://www.canon.com/environment/report/wildlife.html if you want to see actual examples of what I’m describing)

Purple Block: a single paragraph of encyclopedia-style description of the Cuban Iguana, giving the necessary specifics on the species and letting readers know what the piece is about

Orange Block: a large, stunning picture of a Cuban Iguana

Two Blue Blocks: a couple paragraphs of conversational-style text covering the traits and life of Cuban Iguanas, followed by a short paragraph on how Canon “sees” the importance of making the world a better place, partly by raising awareness of endangered species (with the implication being it’s easier to raise awareness when you can put a face on the problem, even an Iguana’s face). And concluding with a URL to http://www.canon.com/environment

Red Block: The Canon logo

Okay, now this is a print media piece, so there are a few differences from online content that I’ll go over, but for the most part what Canon has done is create a great article that highlights their product line while engaging the reader on a level and topic that’s important to them.

The “tricky” part, or what I call the “craft” in this is that Canon doesn’t ever mention their products. The word camera never appears in the piece at all.

Instead, what they did is create a piece of informative and entertaining content that highlights what their products do in a way that will connect with the target readers of the magazine the content appears in.

To translate that into a process that could be used online for article writers/marketers, you would first zero in on your target reader by using a title and keywords that will grab their attention.

Next, create a piece of content that doesn’t openly sell anything, but rather highlights the features or benefits of what you want to promote while informing and/or entertaining readers.

Finally, provide a call-to-action link in your resource box that doesn’t say “now I’m going to sell you something”, but rather says “go deeper into this topic here”. If you look at the link Canon uses in their piece, it isn’t “Canon.com/ORDER_HERE” but instead it is “Canon.com/environment” because even the link can make a connection to the target reader of Nat-Geo by including the keyword environment in it.

This is a perfectly formatted piece of “engagement marketing”. I like that term better than article marketing, or information marketing or entertainment marketing, because it can be any or all of those things.

This type of content creation works and can be applied to anything, product or service doesn’t matter, whatever you want to promote there’s a way to do it with engagement marketing and article writing.

For instance, if I wanted to promote a software program that lets users create musical beats, I wouldn’t talk about the software at all, I would write a piece about the fun of creating music and probably include a video (with audio) of someone young sitting at the computer and creating their own beats in just a few seconds (to highlight the ‘ease of use’ of the software as well as the musical capabilities) and hopefully looking very happy with their sounds playing back to them.

Since my real focus of the content is on how easy it is to have fun creating your own beats, my call-to-action would be to a special page on my site which was also intended to highlight that “it’s easy” to make music and have fun with my software, maybe including more videos or even user uploaded clips.

The point is, with engagement marketing you don’t have to “sell” the product or service at all. In fact, you want to avoid anything that could be perceived as selling.

Just highlight a feature or benefit your product/service provides, in a way that connects with your target reader on their own level. This builds interest after you’ve grabbed their attention, and once their interest tips over into desire through engagement they will take action to purchase (provided your site has a clear navigation system).

Give it a shot, try writing some engagement based content, include media if appropriate, and see how it works out for you. If you follow the examples above closely (but make them fit what you’re promoting) I bet you’ll be surprised with the results.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article writing, engagement

The sad truth of it is that a lot of people have a very short-sighted view of article publishing, and don’t realize that it can be utilized for much more than just a cheap backlink for their sites. By seeing article publishing as just a means to cheap backlinks, they justify submitting garbage articles, often written (or spun) by software, and that aren’t readable by humans at all.

I’m not writing this to pick on anyone’s strategies or methods, but as an editor for Content Caboodle who, like all of the editors here, is willing and eager to help authors get more value from their efforts, I feel it’s part of my job to inform people who submit those type of articles that they are wasting all of their article publishing time, which can never be a good thing for any person or business.

The bottom line is even if it only took someone 10 seconds to have a software program spit out some keyword rich paragraphs, if those paragraphs don’t make for a readable article when you submit it here for review, then they’ve wasted that 10 seconds, plus the time it took to copy and paste the article into our submission form.

A Better View of Article Publishing

Sure, backlinks from author’s resource boxes are a primary consideration when publishing articles, but reaching new groups of human eyeballs with your content and perspectives should be equally important to you.

And it isn’t just the traffic from the article directories like Content Caboodle that you have a chance to impress with your articles, but also the traffic from thousands of eZines and Newsletters out there that often use “well written” articles from sites like ours as filler content.

To demonstrate how writing the best articles that you possibly can could benefit you, I have a real-world example to offer.

I’m personally into exotic pets. I love animals, and I’ve always enjoyed having very unique pets in my home. and I belong to several eZines and discussion groups that focus on exotic animals/pets.

Over the past 2 years I’ve seen numerous articles taken straight from Content Caboodle and with the proper attribution links attached, used in several of those eZines/Newsletters and linked to from multiple discussion groups. In fact, the articles of one author here at Content Caboodle, TamanduaGirl have appeared over and over again.

And what’s really interesting is that TamanduaGirl only has 5 articles published on our site, but they are each very well written, highly informative and incredibly entertaining. And because of that, eZine and Newsletter publishers gobble them up because they know their subscribers will love the content.

With only a handful of articles (and we all wish TamanduaGirl would publish more soon), this author has reached tens-of-thousands of real human readers directly on our site, and I’d be willing to bet twice as many or more from the various eZines and Newsletters that have reused those articles.

Not too bad for publishing just a handful of articles, huh?

While at the same time, we also have authors on Content Caboodle who have submitted dozens and dozens of articles, but have reached just a couple hundred readers with them on our site, and in all likelihood haven’t ever had their articles reused by eZine/Newsletter publishers.

The difference is strictly in the quality of the articles

You don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer to get great results with your articles online, you just have to put in a minimal effort to make them informative and entertaining. The web is full of “noisy content”, fluff pieces and even software spun garbage. That means that there is a ton of competition for mediocrity out there, but it’s also an opportunity for you, because it also means that with just a little bit of effort anybody can make their work stand out from the crowd.

Read your own articles before submitting them and ask yourself, “being interested in this topic would I be glad to have found and read this article, or would I feel cheated by it?”

If you truly believe you would be happy to have found and read it, then your article is ready for publishing.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article publishing

I have to start by saying if you have an article declined please don’t take it personally. It is not a reflection on you nor any sort of personal judgement about your ideas and opinions.

In almost every instance that a submission is declined it is because the content somehow violated one of our few “Submission Guidelines” in some way and has nothing to do with the theme or idea of the articles.

A few good tips for making sure your articles aren’t declined are:

• Use your best grammar. We know not all of our authors (or readers) claim English as their first language and we do our best to not exclude anyone who submits their best efforts to us. If the idea of your article is understandable we’re not going to decline it because of any minor grammar mistakes, but we do ask that you submit your best efforts in return.
• Don’t write in all caps.
• Don’t use over-sized fonts for your whole article. It’s acceptable to highlight key points in an article with bold or larger text, but don’t do it with the whole article.
• Don’t try to stuff keywords or extra links into your articles and resource box.
• Don’t use automated article writing/rewriting and submission software. Most of the time we can tell right away when something was written/rewritten by software, these programs leave fairly clear ‘footprints’ in the articles or submissions that we can spot, and in the past we’ve been fairly easy going about automated submissions if the article was good quality, however moving forward the decision has been made to decline everything created or submitted by automated software, so don’t use anything that attempts to circumvent our system.

Now, to end this posting on a more positive note, here are a few Do’s that will help ensure your articles get approved and will help to increase the number of people who read them:

• Use images in your articles. We provide an easy to use submission editor that lets you include images with the click of a button and we encourage you to use it often. Over the past 2 years one thing has become very clear to us about articles published here, the articles that get the most views are the ones that are well written, thorough on the topics they cover, and include images. People like pictures and our stats show it.
• Beef-up your author’s profile. You can add an About Me bio blurb, a signature, your website or blog URLs, your Twitter contact info, pictures and more to your profile page, and the authors who use these features get a lot more interest than the authors who don’t. Plus, to get highlighted on our main page Author Showcase you must have a picture on your profile.
• Be interesting in your writings.
• Be entertaining in your writings.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article writing

There’s currently a class-action case that illustrates this, started by user Anthony Michaels against the web site Classmates.com because their email marketing copy told him that former school friends and classmates were trying to reach him, and that he had to upgrade to a premium membership for $15 to make contact.

As a free member of Classmates.com myself I know these emails are impersonal and seemingly triggered by anyone–whether they know you or not–searching for your name (which hundreds around the world may share) or visiting your free profile page on the site.

The assumption being that if someone visited your profile or searched for your name then they must be looking for you.

But that wasn’t the case for Michaels. Nobody was looking for him specifically, and so in essence Classmates.com could be said to have mislead him with their sales copy and end up paying out a lot more than they earned to those who have signed on to the class-action suit.

The lesson here is simple and hopefully obvious, and it applies to every piece of copy or content you create, don’t lie or imply anything that may potentially mislead somebldy who consumes your content.

Consumer fraud laws are broad and aggressive, and while some might laugh at Michaels for launching what they consider a frivolous suit after being duped by a word-play technicality, the fact is the government does tend to act first to protect individual consumers in such cases.

Keep this in mind when writing your articles. Don’t make unfounded claims about products or services, and never imply any benefit that doesn’t truly exist.

The best rule of thumb is to always under promise and over deliver. It keeps you safe of legal actions and makes your customers or end users more enthusiastic with you in the long run.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, classmates.com, lie

Let’s say you are promoting a web site that offers some skin care product, you research the topic, select what you believe are great keywords, and write a fantastic article describing the proper usage of the skin care products.

But, did your article begin with discussing the reasons why someone would want or need to use these skin care products? Because most of your readers are going to be people who have some skin condition they’re trying to overcome and if you don’t connect with them right away you lose their attention.

If you article began with “how great So-And_So’s skin care products are” you’ve missed your chance to connect with the average reader. However, if you began your article discussing the condition(s) your reader may likely be afflicted with you’ll make that connection and then have a reader more willing to accept your advice and recommendation in the resource link.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, connecting with readers, writing

When it comes to links in articles we believe our policy is very liberal for authors. We allow up to 3 links within the body of an article, and an additional 2 links in the author’s resource box.

We also allow direct affiliate links to be used in the author’s resource box. Our position is that if you, as an author, wish to promote a product or service by developing quality article content that is informative for readers there is no reasonable cause for our policies to penalize you by forcing you to use additional domains or redirecting links in your resource box.

However, the Ying to that Yang is that the article itself must be informative to readers and not purely intended to sell them on any product or service. Articles that appear to be nothing more than a sales letter are declined during review.

Any links included in your article text should be for informational reference and/or add value to the article for readers. Our editors are checking them to verify this during the article review process once you submit an article for publishing.

We understand the desire of article marketers to include sales links in their article text, but we have to meet and serve the interests of readers and publishers as well as authors; and our guidelines have been established to be as fair to all as we can be.

Technorati Tags: affiliate links, Article Marketing, guidelines