Article Marketing 101

Why submit articles to Submission Sites? After all it's these sites that make advertising income on the back of your efforts... right?

Well, that's true. But the better article directories also provide a service. Not only are they giving you a system in which you can place and publish your articles, they also provide a place where others can gain access to your articles and publish them on their own ezine, blog or site.

Most importantly, however, Article Submission Sites, such as Celtnet Articles are important hubs on the web. They tend to have lots of visitors and lots of page rank. In return for your article submission you typically get to write a short 'about the author' entry at the bottom of your article.

Articles also allow you to promote yourself, your business, your product and your organization. It's also an extremely good way of building brand awareness and of establishing yourself as an expert in a certain area.

Your article should be original content, written by you and it should not just be a sales pitch. Indeed, a good article should be about something. It's all about pre-selling, about using your expertise in a certain domain or area to write something useful.

But if that's what articles are about, then what's in it for me? I hear you ask... Well, it's all about delayed gratification. It's all about the About the Author resource box which you get to write. In the resource box you get to include your 'pitch' and usually you get to include three URLs to any page of your choice.

The main reason that good articles only give you poor clicks is that you're not maximizing our use of the Author's Box. You've spent all your effort researching and writing your article and when you come to the 'Author's Box' it's incredibly tempting to write a little about you and just to stuff your link in a 'click here to find out more'. Now what's the point of that. The whole reason of writing an article is so that you get your readers to view your Author's Box and to act on it, to click the links that are there.

If you have written an excellent article but have a ridiculously weak author's box then you've blown your only marketing opportunity. Just take the example above. You've written your article on ' Ten Benefits of Autoresponders' and it's well written, informative and maybe even witty. But in you're 'Author's Box' all you've written is: 'For more information on Autoresponders and their uses, click here'. Now, that really, really sucks.

The whole point is to get people to click on the link you're providing. I admit that I'm not the best person at writing these, as I'm not a natural marketer. But I do know that you need to use:

The Power of Curiosity
The Power of Humour

to hook your readers into clicking the link you're providing.

Write good articles then provide good links that make your readers want to click through to your site. If you really want to make your articles sell then read this article on: Writing Articles that Sell.

For more information on using traffic to gain in-bound links and to popularize your site or web page please read:

Building links to Hubpages

Site Promotion through Article Submission

Amongst the many hundreds of article submission sites I would recommend the Celtnet Articles site. They're small but growing fast. They have a better than 24 hour turn around and the articles are promoted via social bookmarking and via RSS feeds that are published every evening.

The site's proceeds also go to supporting charity, so you can help yourself and help a worthwhile cause at one and the same time.

ClickBank Ads - How free ClickBank Ads can Make you Money

Did you know that there's a site on the web that allows you to construct and display ads based on the popular (and lucrative) ClickBank product range for FREE!

Yes, they're allowing anyone who wants to to construct ads in several formats based on ClickBank products. For anyone who doesn't know, ClickBank is a large marketplace of electronic products, each available for immediate download and each offering a commission of between 40% and 70% for anyone who makes a sale (typically that's £20 to $100 for each sale made!).

All you need to do to promote ClickBank products is to get a ClickBank ID (known in ClickBank parlance as a 'nickname', choose some products and start promoting). What the guys over at Celtnet have done is to make the process so easy that anyone can do it.

They've loaded each and every ClickBank product into a database which can be searched via the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace interface (you can even create your own affiliate id from the results page!

But that's not the really cool feature for the lazy marketer. They've created several ad types and formats where you can just create the ad you want, copy a single line of code and paste it into your website!

The various ad types are:

ClickBank Contextual AdSense-like Ads (yes, just like Google's ads)
ClickBank Image-based Ads (Like Google ads, but with images)
RSS feed Ads (an RSS feed of ClickBank ads)
ClickBank search code

For each of the first three ad types you can define the area of ClickBank you want your ads generated for or you can use your own search text. This way you can fit the ads precisely to the content of your website. Easy! Copy the code you get, paste into your website and you're ready to go.

The RSS feeds need to be converted to JavaScript, put into a feed aggregator or displayed via PHP to get them onto your website (See this article on How to integrate ClickBank RSS feeds into Squidoo lenses.) But, because this is an RSS feed and therefore classed as 'news' you can include these Ads on your site along with Google ads (or any other ad type) without breaking Google's terms of service conditions. Which is excellent, you've just added a new revenue stream to your site. To learn the history and how you can use them see: Free ClickBank ads for All.

The ClickBank search system just gives you a way of letting your site's visitors search the entire ClickBank marketplace on the Celtnet server for products.

In all these products and feeds you enter your own ClickBank nickname so any money coming from sales goes into your ClickBank account. Well, the majority does and this is why I'm singing the praises of the system here.

8% of all ads displayed get Celtnet's ClickBank id and not yours. These are assigned completely randomly. But the other 92% of sales are yours and yours alone. (Most competing products take betwen 15% and 20% of all sales, so this is a bargain for you and all proceeds go to charity). If you would like to know more about the cause being supporten then go to the One Million People Campain page.

You should also know that the ads are created dynamically so each time an user refreshes a page of yours they will see a new set of ads. Also the ClickBank feed is updated every week so the ads always remain current with the products in the ClickBank marketplace.

So, what have you got to lose by trying these ads out... Apart from a great deal of money, that is...

African Recipes eBook Makes a Difference

It's nice to see that some people still do care and that the Internet really isn't the cold and sterile place it's sometimes made out to be.

Anyone reading this Blog for a while will know that it actively supports the One Million People campaign to help educate the children of Liberian refugees forced to flee their homeland by civil war and who are now displaced to Senegal, West Africa.

A number of Sites now seem to have picked-up the story, or at least one aspect of the story, as you can see:

Hubpages: African Recipe Book Aids Refugees

Squidoo: Review of The Recipes of Africa

Celtnet:Recipes of Africa eBook


In some ways it's a shame that it's the Recipes of Africa eBook that's been causing a splash... But it's also a good thing. The eBook is truly an amazing culinary feat and it really does go towards supporting a great cause. I just hope that it's the cause and not the eBook that gets the attention. But, if the money comes in, who cares?!

So, what's the fuss all about. Well, the African Recipes Collection is all the work of one man. He's collected together recipes from each and every country in Africa and as well as making many of these available through the African Recipes website he's also gathered the recipes, information about their conutries of origin and information about the five regions of Africa into a single eBook.

The book weighs-in at over 500 pages and provides recipes for over 800 dishes. Most amazingly there are representative dishes in there not only for each region in Africa but also for each and every country! Name an African country and you will find several recipes originating from there for you to make and try at home.

You get traditional recipes, restaurant-inspired recipes, family recipes, colonial-inspired recipes, modern African fusion recipes as well as feast recipes. All the recipes you need for cooking any and all types of African food.

Just as everything else in Africa, it's food and cooking has for far too long been ignored by the world outside. This eBook goes quite a long way to redressing that balance. Now you can find out a about the typical recipes and means of cooking from anywhere in Africa. You can learn new techniques and new recipes and you can bring these techniques and recipes into your own home.

There is nothing else like this eBook out there today. I truly urge you to get yourself a copy now. Learn something new about food whilst helping those less fortunate than yourselves. The Recipes of Africa collection is the one must-have eBook of 2008!