Johnson.

Today is Monday and the last week of my holidays before I start university again on the 27th. I guess I’m just a little bit disappointed at the way that I conducted myself over these holidays.

I had planned to do so much. There was so much growing I wanted to do and instead, I wasted my days sleeping in and “planning” marketing stuff to do. It started off with me wanting to do videos for my affiliate marketing blogs. Then I got bogged down in so many little, insignificant things, things like definitions of affiliate marketing and crap like that.

As I sit here writing this, I’m not sure if I’m able to achieve my goal of a new laptop by the end of this month. I want to get the Toshiba M700 Tablet PC, but it seems like I’m not ready for such a reward. I’ve hardly earnt it, having not really conducted myself during these holidays.

As I sit here writing this, I’m aware that I’m making myself depressed. Saying that I’ve achieved nothing during these holidays is stupid, because there are things that I’m glad that I’ve learnt. Just heaps of things about being happy, I guess. Knowing more about what I want in life. Knowing more about why I want to be an affiliate marketer.

All I want to do is make a sale a day of a Clickbank product. That’s all I need to suffice and be happy at university. And I’ll be damned if I don’t make it happen in these last 7 days of my holidays.

I was up earlier this morning, doing some pondering about Affiliate Marketing as usual. Before I hit the hay around 1:00 am, I had one of my mini-epiphanies about Affiliate Marketing. I realised the true reason that Affiliate Marketers need quality content on their blogs and what the content’s meant to do.

The epiphany came about when I was wondering why, on one of my other exercise-related blogs, a particular post about 3 exercises women could do to burn upper arm fat got so many views compared to my other posts. Taking a holistic point of view, that post actually gave USEFUL information that my niche audience could use right there and then, whereas my other posts were just me crapping on.

When everyone says you have to have quality content on your blogs, have you actually ever stopped to think what this means and why it’s so important? Again, let’s break it down logically…

Q1. What is content?

A1. Content is information.

Q2. What is quality content?

A2. Quality content is  good information.

Q3. What is classified as good information?

A3. Good information is information that is useful.

Q4. What sort of information is useful?

A4. Information that allows you to immediately address your problems is useful.

Q5. What sort of information allows you to immediately address your problems?

A5. Um I dunno, how about a post that’s called, “3 exercises to get rid of arm fat”?

Q6. Why would that post allow people to immediately address their problems?

A6. Exercise is an immediate solution (usually) and the results they get from the information allow the quality of the information to speak for itself.

Kapiche?

All the gurus always tell you to understand your niche audience and their problems and stuff. What better way to do so than to prove it by giving them an immediate solution to their problems?

And that, is the key. Content is used to give you expert status. If you give people content that helps solve their problems, they will see you as an expert, they will see you as someone generous who puts them before their hip pocket and they are more likely to trust you.

This is an interesting question if you think about it. When was the last time you bought something? Every decent Internet Marketer knows that people purchase with emotion and and justify with logic. But that doesn’t explain why people buy things. Without getting too entrenched into the economics side of it, let’s try and break it down logically.

Q1. Why do people buy things?

A1. People buy things because they want to own them.

Q2. Why do people want to own things?

A2. Because owning them means it’s closer to hand and easily accessible.

Q3. What sort of things do people want to be closer at hand and to have easy access to?

A3. Things that they would use frequently.

Q4. What things do people use frequently?

A4. Things that address their most major problems. (Something that I have close to me all the time is my phone. My phone addresses the following problems: checking the time, checking the date, calculator, calls from friends and looking busy when I’m on public transport so weirdos don’t bug me. Something else that I have close at hand is my wallet, for obvious reasons.)

Q5. Is the thing that you’re promoting something that people want to have closer at hand?

A5. …

Q6. How can you make the thing you’re promoting something that people want to have closer at hand?

A6. By proving that it addresses their major problems.

Kapiche?

Just a mini epiphany I stumbled across today when going about my AM. No one likes a salesperson. No, that isn’t the epiphany. It’s more about what you need to be to sell stuff online. The Internet can be a scary place. People aren’t who they appear to be and you can be fooled pretty easily if you give into your emotions when purchasing stuff online.

Having said that, how do people make a living online at all? The trust barrier is HUGE. I mean, to trust someone in person is hard enough, now remove everything that allows us to deem people trustworthy and well, you’ve got a task on your hands to get people to be on your side.

There was an article a while back from CopyBlogger and it talked about mandatory disclosure of affiliate links. I think the person who realises that this is the right and only way to go about your Affiliate Marketing business will be the most profitable Affiliate Marketer. Not only is simply writing, “oh by the way, I’m an Affiliate Marketer and if you click on this link over here and purchase, I’ll make a commission” extremely liberating, it also tears down one barrier and makes you human. You’re a person who wants money and is going to review a product that is going to do it for them.

That’s the simple truth about it: you can’t like someone if you don’t trust them. Fullstop. Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. 99% of beginning Affiliate Marketers never disclose their picture, let alone their name. Establish yourself early so that people can match a name to a face and a personality to a name. Be human. Be yourself.

Trust = Likeability.

I reckon anyone wwho knows how to ake the cynic shell out his hard-earned dollars can market to anyone. Marketing is all about trust. Well, the cynic is one of those guys who doesn’t give out trust like it’s free. You have to earn it. He’ll make you work for it. That’s why when you write copy or whatever, you’ve got to write it for the inner cynic in you. A good way to practise is by reading some cpy yourself and finding where you find yourself being cynical. Here are 7 phrases cynic’s use:

1. “yeah right!” you’ve made a crazy claim that you can’t back up or can’t prove.

2. “you don’t even know who I am!” you try to generalise the reader into a category.

3. “so what?” you’ve said something which you think has sounded impressive but isn’t.

4. “what’s your point?” you’ve said something that seemingly has no purpose.

5. “why should I?” or “what’s in it for me?” you’ve told them to do something, like “click here now!” but they see no reason to.

6. “prove it!” you’ve said something, they’re interested but they want proof.

7. “why should I listen to you?” this one should be first, but it’s the credibility issue. why should they listen to you?

So if you want to write better copy or just market better in general, see if there are any holes by always asking yourself these questions/statements.

It’s about 12:10 a.m. Monday morning over here down under. I finished doing about 6 hours of study today. Exams are coming up this week. God, I can’t wait to finish Physics and Chemistry. It only hit me last night that my Computation exam is next week as well. Scary stuff.

I’m no good with code. I just don’t get the logic behind it. Oh the language I’m learning is C, by the way for those of you who are software engineers/computer scientists.

But speaking of code, I ended up playing with meta tags for the first time ever. I was sort of apprehensive; let me fill you in on my coding experience.

I was first exposed to programming back in Year 9 when I did a subject called Programming & Hardware. I was working in HTML, a relatively simple code used to code the Internet, basically. I sucked at it. I then used Microworlds to design a very simple game. I sucked at that  too. I’m pretty sure I ended up copying my mates in the  test.

Fast forward to now. I’m doing a major in Engineering Systems and struggling with C. So you can understand why I’m so apprehensive with code. I looked it up in Google, “how to change meta tags in wordpress”, or something along those lines.

It actually wasn’t that hard. I changed it for three of the blogs that I’m currently active on at the moment. I’m assuming it wasn’t that hard; I’ve yet to see the results and see whether my meta description comes up nicely on Google or not.

I was pleasantly surprised that one of the main fitness niches I was focusing on which I ran on a Wordpress hosted blog, was updated today, just a few hours after I’d added a new post to it. Well, maybe not a few hours, but within 24 hours. I mean, it had shifted down a few spots for the keyword I had it ranking for, but that didn’t bother me.

That could have been due to the fact that I went to Google Webmaster Tools and added the site map, also verifying it today. I installed a Wordpress plugin that made a sitemap that was compatible with Google so that was fine, but getting on good terms with Google and having the spiders crawl my blog was the important thing.

I’ll chuck up a post soon on ways you can get your Wordpress hosted blog up and getting crawled very quickly. With tools that are freely available to anyone, of course.

Article marketing is a popular way to get visitors to your site for one main reason: it’s easy to do. It’s not hard to sit down and type up a 500 word article.  However, a lot of people exploit this fact and abuse article marketing. They call article marketing a numbers game; there is more focus on quantity vs quantity. Could it be made more effective?

Noob article marketers write a heap of articles to just help them understand the niche better. Value they bring to the table might be little, but it’s helping them improve. I myself have done this on occasion, heck, I still do it. I wish I did it from the very beginning since I started affiliate marketing because then I’d be helping other people understand it along the way.

Ideally, the articles you write (or get written for you) should be so good that you don’t have to rely on people finding them, they should be spread around by people who’s emotional centres you hit. The reason why people see it as a numbers game is because, more often than not, they tend to write “generically”, listing facts, “top 3 reasons” blah blah blah, instead of writing things that people want to know.

That’s the ultimate problem with article marketing. I’d say it’s a safe bet that 99% of the content that people bring to the table is pretty redundant and will disappear not only from the search engines but from people’s minds pretty quickly.

Having said all this, I think the problem is actually the way that article marketing first came about. If everyone could write out an article that would get 100 publishers, then no one would need to outsource article marketing. People only outsource it because it’s boring and they want someone else to do their dirty work. But if they really enjoyed the topic and that was communicated across in the articles they wrote, then their results would be reflected by how viral the actual article is.

Now that I think about it, if there weren’t so many crappy articles out there, there probably wouldn’t be so many article directories. Maybe EzineArticles.com wouldn’t even exist (gasp!). Think about it. People submit hundreds of articles to these directories every day. People join Ezinearticles like every minute. Not everyone keeps writing articles. Some people just join up then forget about it. A lot of people write crappy articles and submit them. EzineArticles.com exploits this by putting ads in each article.

I guess one aspect that makes Article Marketing truly a numbers game is the fact that if you write a heap of articles, like over 100, you might be lucky with a few because they’ll end up on the first page of Google and stay there. I’ve got a couple articles like that.

My deal with that however is that it feels hit and miss. Like, you need to spend all that effort writing 100 articles only to have 2 or 3 really good ones. It’s not really marketing at all. It’s luck, grit and patience. You know what I’m saying?

No one’s expecting you to write superb articles each and every single time. That’s crazy. Instead, aim to always hit a certain threshold on the response graph. It will slowly but surely create credibility with your prospects and, at the same time, you’ll naturally get better at writing in general.

As long as you write articles because you are genuinely interested in the topic (or interested in something that relates to it), then that interest will be communicated across to readers. There aren’t enough article writers who write articles that get published like crazy.

In conclusion, I think that Article Marketing, in its current state, is a numbers game, though ideally, it should focus more the quality of the content and try providing excellent value with a marketing focus.

So I get up at 11:30 am this morning. I was playing Badminton last night and was considerably tired since the night, well morning  before, I was chatting with a mate until 6:30 am.

So yeah, I get up and check my emails and one of the lists I’m subscribed to is CopyBlogger. Now, if you’re a blogger who wants to drastically improve pretty much everything, then CopyBlogger is the way to go. I mean, there’s providing value and then there’s PROVIDING VALUE.

You know when sometimes you read an article and you’re like, “ah yeah, that’s interesting…” and then you forget about it right after you “x” out of the tab? Well the information that you’ll find at CopyBlogger is stuff that you’ll remember, simply because stuff they say just makes sense.

I’d like to quote the one and only Einstein:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

CopyBlogger simply encapsulates this tenet and then some. For a bit of recursiveness, the email that I received today was talking about a guy called Rajesh Setty, a dude who lives in Silicon Valley and is an entrepreneur. I was compelled to write this post because of one particular picture that CopyBlogger used as the basis of today’s email…

"9 Ways People Respond To Your Content Online"

A picture tells a thousand words. Yeah, yeah that’s a saying that everyone knows. It’s often overused but I have no choice but to use it in this sense.

I mean look at it. It’s so simple and compelling at the same time that I just had to take action upon it. I guess  I felt… somewhat inspired? I’ve been thinking a lot lately about article marketing vs video marketing, social bookmarking and just affiliate marketing in general.

This simple diagram is like a grounding; I feel like it keeps me safe by helping me categorise what sort of information I’m putting out there into the World Wide Web and, ultimately, how much value I’m adding to the virtual stratosphere.

I guess I took action because of the emotion of security, just from that little mental dump.

My gut’s been telling me recently that there’s something wrong with article marketing, or to put it more correctly, article marketing is being used in the wrong way. Everyone agrees that article marketing is a numbers game. Even I agree. But if you’re focusing on numbers alone, ie. you’re focusing on quantity and not quality, then you’d probably be scoring a 2-3 on the response scale above? Maybe a 4, max?

This leads me on to think about those who outsource article writing (including me). What difference does it make getting someone to write articles than writing them myself, attitude-wise? I only outsource them in the first place because, simply put, I can’t be bothered writing articles on that topic, BECAUSE it doesn’t interest me.

Paying someone to do it for me, whether I pay them $5 or $20 an article… I mean, they have an added incentive which is payment, but if the topic doesn’t interest them, then how good is the quality of the article going to be?

You know what I’m saying?

It’s called article marketing, but as long as you treat it as a numbers game and try to dredge up visitors, you’re not marketing at all. You’re making statistics.

Phew… think I’m going to make some lunch now.

To me, written content has always been there more for the general value that it brings to the reader, rather than filling it up with keywords so that, fingers crossed, it might just fluke a page 1 ranking in Google.

I’m pretty sure it’s just been of recent, but not EzineArticles doesn’t let you submit an article with a vague title. They want keywords that make the article more search-friendly, at least for the internal search engine within EzineArticles.

I’m a firm believer in providing value before going for the peripheral and more often than not, ephemeral page rankings that might come with an article with good keyword density. As far as I’m concerned, keyword density is dead. I mean, even if your keywords were strategically placed so perfectly that they are on the first page for that keyword, the chances that it’ll stay there, due to lack of competition are almost nil, especially if it’s a good keyword.

I’m no where near a professional article writer. I wrote articles and shot them to one of my other blogs but I was playing the numbers game back then. I choose to outsource my article writing.

I’m sort of just going around in circles now (see, told you I wasn’t a good article writer =p) but the point I want to make before I wrap up this post is you should write for people to read first and not search engines to scan. The longer you write, the better you’ll get at it and the more successful your articles will be in the search engines as well as with people.

Yeah, I was  going to write this post yesterday, but I got tired, so I forgot about writing it.

I’ve got a pretty big ego. Hell, my ego requires that I say that just so that it’s satisfied. Checking up the stats for this blog yesterday I think it was. Someone actually looked up my name. Johnson Kee. Now, it could’ve just been me on like a university computer or something… but man. It sent my imagination into overdrive.

I look up my Internet Marketing heroes, you know, Frank Kern, Edmund Loh, Aurelius Tjin and to an extent, Travis Sago. I look at how many hits their names get in Google’s External Keyword Tool. And I sigh. I dream. I wonder. What would it be like having someone you don’t even know look up your name from the side of the world?

Of course, your name has to be looked up for all the right reasons. I’d like to think that I’m at the crest of a new wave of Affiliate Marketers to grace the World Wide Web. One who effortlessly combines social media marketing, Web 2.0 and video marketing. Someone who has the gusto and vibrance to change the world.

Yeah, that’s who I want to be.