Article Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, and Autoresponders

Many people making money online do so by article marketing an affiliate program by using a few informative articles, and a well designed autoresponder program.

Article marketing is simply writing articles to market a product or service. This is not only an excellent way to build business, but is very inexpensive as well. In fact, when you couple a few well written articles with a good autoresponder, it can be as powerful as the best marketing push from a large company at a fraction of the cost. In some cases, it can even be entirely free.

The articles you use with your autoresponder should be very clear, short, direct, and informative, providing the reader with information that is relevant to a specific topic. The topic should, in some way, be related to the product or service you are trying to sell. The articles will provide a direct link (hot link) to a webpage for more information.

The webpage they will visit, of course, should be one which is professionally designed to sell a product or service that relates to the topic of the article. While many people use such marketing techniques to sell their own products, having a good looking, professionally designed, and SEO optimized website is very expensive. For this reason, many just getting started in Internet marketing opt for an affiliate marketing program where they sell someone else's products through a unique link provided them by the seller. They then receive commissions on purchases made by people they have sent to their unique affiliate link.

For a little more on affiliate marketing, read "How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?".

To get them before the web browsing public, these articles can be submitted to article banks, article directory websites, ezine publishers, or even posted on your own website or blog.

By combining article marketing and affiliate marketing you can build respect and recognition for yourself as an expert on the subject you write about, and this simple tactic can be one of the most effective ways to market a service or product on the Internet.

However, it can become even more effective, many, many times more effective, when it is combined with the proper use of a good series of such messages delivered by an autoresponder.

Once you have signed up with a good autoresponder service, you set up your marketing program by adding a series of your articles to your autoresponder.

It is important that each article series has its own autoresponder address, so you will need an autoresponder service that allows you to do this. Next, make a master list of your articles, with the autoresponder address for each article listed beside the title.

With the right service, you can even add descriptions of the articles on your master list.

Now, the more places you can advertise your article addresses, the better, but, advertising these links one at a time can take a great deal of time.

This is the beauty of the autoresponder: It allows you to advertise using only one autoresponder address. Setting up an autoresponder series doesn't take long at all. In fact, most of the time will be spent on writing the articles, and you can get around this by getting series of articles from various sources.

Simply put the word out in your newsletter and on your website and you're on your way. You can even allow other ezine publishers to use this is a free informational resource for their subscribers! This not only gives them a little gift for their customers, but gives you free advertising as well.

Remember, the beauty of using article marketing and autoresponders for affiliate marketing is that, once set up and linked to from various sources, your informational articles, with your unique link embedded in them, will go out to subscriber after subscriber, literally growing your business while you sleep.