I am a mother of three, with two dogs, a husband with a demanding work schedule and I have a home-based online business. Let me just say it. I don’t get dressed! Not unless you count sweats and a headband. So I have been reluctant to get heavily into video marketing which is all the rage — until now.

Instead of getting all crazy about when and how I was going to ever produce enough videos to make an impact in my business, due mainly to time constraints and honestly – motivation (I like my college sweatshirt!). I decided to get creative and find a way to combine both videos and articles to get the best of both worlds.

It’s so simple — you can do it after you finish reading this article.

1. Write your article.
2. Create a powerpoint presentation of your article. If you are a mac user you can use keynote as well.
3. Add pictures if you want to get creative, or you could simply just type chunks of the article on each slide.
4. Convert your powerpoint file to a flash or quicktime movie file.
5. Upload your video to YouTube and any other video sites you can find.
6. Watch the traffic roll in!

You can learn about my other strategies for creating video articles in the most comprehensive article marketing weekly training program available — Articology.

Are you interested in promoting other people’s products? Do you have a few mentors whose products you loved and want to promote? Or would you rather start an affiliate marketing based online business – instead of a product driven one? Or do you have an information site that will only make money via advertising and affiliate income?

Well then there are three things you need to know about using affiliate marketing in your articles.

1. Writing product reviews is one of the best ways to combine article marketing and affiliate marketing. The reason why — is that if people decide to read your review it’s because they wanted information on that particular product and will probably buy or not buy straight from your affiliate link — based on your review of course:-)

2. If you write articles and submit them to article directories, make sure you check the writer’s guidelines. A lot of directories do not allow affiliate links in their articles or even in the bio or resource boxes. Some directories will allow an affiliate link if it links to a custom url such as http://articlemarketingsuccesskit.com – but not if it links to http://lisaangelettie.com/kit or some other domain name with a backslash extended url.

Some marketers like to have a few core products and services that they always promote such as web hosting, shopping carts, etc. and will create a custom url to effectively promote them in their articles. But I would only really do this if I know that the affiliate is a proven earner (in articles or blog posts on my site), and is even worth the effort.

3. If you own an information-based site like my flagship site http://GirlShrink.com, then you can really get busy and monetize all the content on your site. Advertising is a really good earning model such as Google’s Adsense, but I can make the same amount on one affiliate sale that my site makes during one entire day with adsense. So make sure that you cover all your bases when it comes to the articles on your own website. Promoting Clickbank products has always been a great earner for me on all my sites.

Ready to take your article marketing to the next level? You will when you enroll into Articology™ – The Article Marketing Training Program.

When I was first starting out on the web, I wrote a really weak newsletter for my subscribers. I mean I have a professional background as a writer — I had written for The New York Times for goodness sakes! But I had to face the fact that my newsletter wasn’t doing much for my business and I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.

It wasn’t until I found one of my mentor’s — Alexandria Brown and read her Boost Your Business With Your Own Ezine — that I realized what was missing.

One of the many things that I learned from her was that I could actually sell and generate sales straight from my ezine, and one of the keys to that was writing an info-packed article in every issue of my ezine.

When you write articles for your newsletters and ezines, there are a few important things that your articles should be doing…

1. Give the reader useful information. Your own newsletter is not the place for your more “fluffy” articles. As if you wrote those:-) No, your ezine is the place for some of your best work because you are building a relationship with your subscribers. They need to be able to trust what you say and like what you say.

2. Support a principle that you teach in one of your products or services. For example, if you offer relationship coaching sessions for couples — it would be great if you wrote an article on The Top 5 Reasons Why Your Marriage Needs Coaching. This is an informative topic that you could share a lot of tips in that also supports your business and the relationship that you want to have with prospects.

3. Promote a product or service of yours or an affiliate product or service within the body of the article. Remember that this article doesn’t have to pass the scrutiny of an article directory. You can promote all that you want inside your own article — but just remember to choose your promotions sparingly and cautiously. You do not want to overload your subscribers – just get them interested enough to click back to your site or your sales page.

Ready to take your article marketing to the next level? You will when you enroll into Articology™ – The Article Marketing Training Program.

A while back I wrote a bonus lesson for my premium article marketing training course – Articology™, detailing the many benefits of one of my favorite article directories. It was one of the easiest bonus lessons I had ever written, because the content just poured out of my head! Why? Because article directories are a tremendous source of traffic for almost any business – in any niche.

With all the search engine optimization tricks and tactics out there, there is one principle that has never changed and that is that Google and other search engines LOVE content. And the more you write – the better.

That’s why so many article directories out there have great PR rankings and traffic statistics. It’s a no brainer for marketers like us to submit our content to directories, and as you become a more advanced marketer — it may even be a good idea for you to build your own article directory. It’s actually very easy to get off the ground — I have taught clients how to do it who had very little experience.

Just remember this when choosing an article directory:
1. Pick a directory that is active. That means you get emails from them. They review and approve your articles in a reasonable amount of time.

2. Pick a directory with good stats. One with a decent PR ranking (not a 2 or 3) and one that has a steady flow of traffic (check Alexa rankings).

3. Pick a directory that you would consider syndicating content from. If the articles are all junkie and you wouldn’t use them – then you don’t want your own articles sitting over there either.

Ready to take your article marketing to the next level? You will when you enroll into Articology™ – The Article Marketing Training Program.

Let’s be honest. There are a ton of social media and marketing sites that you could join and be a part of — right? I mean there are so many that it is enough to make you log off your laptop and just say — forget about it! But not so fast!

If I could convince you to join and participate in only one social media site that works really well for article marketing, would you do it? If you answered yes, then open a new window in your browser right now and join Twitter.

Twitter is a social media site that allows people to send quick updates about what they are doing, where they are, anything. Posts are allowed to have links in them (shortened into tiny urls to save space), and all the posts have to be short and quick.

What’s great about this is that you can write an article and then send all your Twitter followers (friends) a quick note about it with a link to read it.

Twitter makes receiving information highly digestible. When someone sends me say a quick note about a new holistic dog food with a link — it’s no biggie to just click on the link and then see if I want to read the rest of the article.

Twitter sends real traffic to your site, interested in your content, and ready to join your list if they like what they see. I have seen a steady increase in traffic to my blog and also in subscriber rates since I started posting my articles to Twitter.

Another tip — Using one of the many Twitter tools out there to enhance your experience, you can have your blog’s RSS feed automatically post your new articles to Twitter. OR if you write and submit articles to a directory such as EzineArticles.com, they have their own special tool which will automatically submit your articles to Twitter once they are approved. Cool huh?

Ready to take your article marketing to the next level? You will when you enroll into Articology™ – The Article Marketing Training Program.

You are probably very passionate about your business and what you do, aren’t you? In fact, it could be that the only problem is – is that everyone else doesn’t seem to know how much you love what you do. Or how about the fact that no one even knows that you are really GOOD at what you do.

With problems like this, you may think that you need a publicist to get the word out; but publicists cost a fortune — and what entrepreneur really has the budget to hire one?

Well guess what? Not only can you get the word out about what you do and how well you do it — but you can also position yourself as the “go to” person in your niche or what I like to call the “celebrity expert” using article marketing.

Articles have the power to help you carve out a strong presence in your field and become the resident expert. The principle behind this is really simple.

When you write articles and have them published on a variety of high-traffic, high-exposure websites — you have become a published author. Published authors or writers are automatically given more credibility in any marketplace, because there is an assumption that they must be highly knowledgeable on the topic that they are writing about.

The more knowledge — the more credibility. The more credibility — the stronger your position is in your market. The stronger your position in your niche — the more people trust you — the more money you will make.

It’s that simple.

Just remember that the key to working this principle to your favor is to:

1. Write high-quality content packed with information that your market wants to read.
2. Write often so that you are visible to your marketplace.
3. Be highly selective about where your publish your articles. Don’t just publish them to any ole’ dead in the water article directory.

Ready to take your article marketing to the next level? You will when you enroll into Articology™ – The Article Marketing Training Program.

It is tougher than ever to add people to our subscriber lists these days, but it is still extremely important that we build a good list in order for our businesses to prosper.

So the key to building a good subscriber list is to offer potential subscribers something of good quality and something that is free.

Whether you offer your subscribers a free report, infoproduct, cd, or video — any or all of these items can be created using articles.

Write a few articles and combine them for a free report. Record an article and burn it on a cd, or offer the audio as a free download for opting in. Speak your article into your webcam or your flip video camera and offer it as a free training video.

Another idea that always works is to write a series of “evergreen” articles and create an autoresponder ecourse with them. Give it a great title and have people opt-in for your course. This is a great way to repurpose articles that you have already written.

Do you write an ezine or newsletter? Well a great way to build your subscriber list and to build a relationship with those subscribers is to offer them a powerful new article in every issue. I subscribe to a lot of marketing lists, but the ones that I stay subscribed to are the ones that offer a fresh new article in every issue.

Ready to learn more advanced article marketing strategies like this? You will when you join Articology™ – The Article Marketing Training Program.