One reason I’m so excited about my launch is pretty simple:  Frankly, I’ve never seen anybody offer what I will be offering.

Sure, there are countless article marketing ebooks out there.  But I’ve yet to see anyone create a full-fledged member’s resource area with complete courses and highly targeted video trainings.

(Trust me, I’ve read virtually every ebook out there and even they can’t come close to offering as much massive value as I have been preparing for you.)

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or a small business owner, someone just getting started or someone with tons of experience on the web, I know you’re going to get a lot out of what I have to offer.

But back to the point.

I was going through some of my member’s only resources today when I ran across a few images on a presentation that I think you should see now.  People are always asking me about the potential of article marketing and what they can expect it to do for them.

Folks, check this out…

This is why I am incredibly excited about my upcoming product launch — The Article Marketing for SEO Membership Website. How can I describe it? Let’s just say I’ve finally managed to condense my years of experience, lessons learned the hard way, and success formulas for making it on the web into one sexy little information warehouse.

What’s This All About, Jason?

My goal is simple:

The members-only exclusive website teaches everyone how to get more results online — how to get more traffic, how to increase conversions, how to rank higher in Google, and how to make more money from your websites!  All of it can be done with Article Marketing, and I’m going to show you exactly how…

Plus, I really want to attract a wide range of individuals into the members area so we can continue to develop and enhance everyone’s understanding of Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Internet Business day-after-day.

This is not just a membership, folks — this is a full blown Mastermind Academy!

Why Now? What’s Up Your Sleeve?

The only thing up my sleeve is TONS of information, videos, courses, lessons, live trainings, and an overwhelming amount of high quality content! I’ve worked with thousands of clients over the past 6 years on everything from article writing and article marketing to SEO, copywriting, and full-blown Internet Business setup.

It’s been a long-time goal for me to create an information resource website just like Article Marketing for SEO because it’s simply the best way to share my knowledge with as many people as possible at one time in one place.

You see… Before I became a successful Internet Business Entrepreneur, I was a college instructor at a private junior college in Central California. Fresh out of university, I worked my butt off as a young professor (some of my students were twice my age!) trying to share my knowledge of writing and the English language.

I always loved teaching but the income was never very promising and the work was not always rewarding. That’s when I turned my hand to professional copywriting and web marketing consulting, which I ran as a side gig between classroom instruction and grading papers. Before I knew it, my consulting services were taking off and I was developing an international web marketing service business.

Meanwhile, I started taking everything I was learning about Internet Marketing and ranking higher in search engines and building my own passive income Affiliate Marketing and Adsense websites. Eventually, this helped position me as an Article Marketing expert, leading me to develop one of the leading article writing service firms on the web.  It took awhile to leave teaching completely — even when my business was flourishing, I continued on at the college teaching just one course per week. The energy, feedback, and enthusiasm from my students was more than enough to pull me back to the classroom each week.

The lessons I learned in the classroom are still with me today. Teaching professionally forces you to learn patience, understanding, and requires a tolerance for multiple points of view and a variety of learning styles.

Eventually, I did leave the classroom completely so I could continue to grow in other ways — mostly by traveling to Berlin, Germany so I could explore Tim Ferriss’ theories on the Four Hour Work Week and learn how to get better at managing my time. My 7 months living abroad also taught me a lot about priorities, friendships, and enjoying life. I even met an amazing girl there, who ultimately moved back to California with me where I now live in Malibu.

But I always knew I’d get back to the classroom one day. I just knew that teaching in a traditional classroom was not for me. I wanted to teach but I wanted to do it in an area where I could help create real, measurable change in people’s lives and where I could work with people who had a real passion for learning. That’s when I started devoting JasonClegg.com writings to entrepreneurship, passive income, niche marketing, and everything related to changing your life by creating your own source of income on the web.

The Article Marketing for SEO membership website is my first major information product since I wrote my first ebook right out of college — How to Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon.com (but that’s another story altogether)…

I’m sure this membership website will be the first of many more info products to come. I have so much to share and contribute to our community, I can’t wait to give back. But trust me, everything I do will have a sparkle and shine that will put all similar info products to shame! No offense to anyone else, I just have really high standards.

The Early Bird Launch and Affiliate List

I’m still hard at work behind-the-scenes of ArticleMarketingSeo.com but I’ll be launching it very soon and opening the doors for new members. In the meantime, if you’re interested in becoming a member and/or an affiliate, be sure to join my Early Bird Notification List so I can keep you posted on the launch info.

Early Birds are going to get a deep discount off the regular membership rate. Affiliates are going to be eligible for some cool prize giveaways too! Either way…

Click here to sign up!

Whether you’re a small business owner with a growing website or you’re an affiliate marketer looking to get more results from your online marketing efforts, the strategies for content marketing are essentially the same.

I have talked about these strategies in more detail in other posts, but today I want to look at the whole package together to give you a better idea of how you can get these auto-pilot web marketing machines working for your business or affiliate system.

1. Blogging
We’ll start with the most obvious of the five – blogging. We all know how powerful blogs have become in the last few years or so. These easy mini-websites do a great job of communicating with your niche market directly in an informal and often personal manner. This is the most important place to begin your content marketing system.

ACTION STEP: Setup your own self-hosted blog with a provider like Bluehost or learn how to build traffic with free blogs at WordPress.com or other providers.

2. Article Marketing
Article marketing is one of my favorites, but it’s a bit useless unless you have a website or a blog where you can drive traffic from directories. This content marketing method works because online users trust article directories for providing quality content. Plus, if you do it right, you can really leverage article marketing for seo.

ACTION STEP: Write articles and submit them to the top article directories. Or, better yet, hire an article marketing service to do it for you.

3. PPC Campaigns
Pay Per Click works because many users don’t find what they’re searching for on the first page of Google or Yahoo search results. That’s when they go clicking on those ads in the sidebar. If you can write compelling ad copy and a great landing page, you’ll see tremendous results. But beware: Google is making it more difficult to get cheaper clicks.

ACTION STEP: Create a landing page with a high-quality sales letter and setup a PPC campaign with Google Adwords. Test, tweak, test, and repeat.

4. Social Media Promotions
Social media marketing is definitely on the rise. It’s easily the most cutting-edge form of online marketing but – despite what some ‘experts’ might tell you – it’s really just another form of what we’ve already seen again and again… more content marketing! The only difference is now users are getting pickier about what they choose to see and what they don’t. This just means you have to leverage the right tools to get to your target market. And of course, you’ll need great content to do it.

ACTION STEP: If you don’t have a twitter account yet, you best get crackin’. Setup at www.Twitter.com and start tweeting about topics related to your niche. Then watch the followers start signing-up to read your tweets.

5. Email Marketing
Last but certainly not least, email marketing is the cornerstone of any content marketing system. Once you’ve pulled in an audience with your blog, reached out to them via article marketing, increased your traffic with PPC, and leveraged online communities with social media, it’s time to build that list and start reaching out to your customers with direct-email marketing.

ACTION STEP: Sign up with a service like Aweber to build an online email list. At first, your list will be hard to convert with few signups. But you can be sure the results will improve as the momentum builds and signups increase. Remember: direct marketing is a numbers game.

With the end of 2009 upon us, now is a good time to start thinking about your 2010 marketing plan. I would encourage anyone, regardless of your level of expertise, to begin making plans to put each of these five systems in place or to improve the communication between them for the coming year!

All right, enough of the preface. Let’s get down to business.

Why Your Article Marketing Probably Doesn’t Work

Most people think about article writing and article distribution like this… “It’s easy. I’ll just write up about 300 words or so and submit it to a directory or two and watch the links and traffic roll in. Right?”

Wrong.

First, the major problem with this strategy is a great lack of consistency. If you really want article marketing to work – and I mean REALLY work – you have to work it. You have to be consistent and proactive. You have to make it a regular part of your marketing system. Otherwise, it will wither and die.

The vast majority of people looking to develop an article marketing strategy for their small business, blog, or other venture simply give up way too early and way too easily to ever see any real difference in their website performance.

I know this is the case because I’ve done it myself on a number of occasions. Fortunately for me, I did this very early in my web marketing career. Let me crack that case open and show you what happened and how I learned the power of content marketing.

My Article Marketing Case Study

Several years ago I created a website that today has turned into a very consistent Google Adsense money maker. Sorry folks, I’m not giving away the juiciest details here!

I developed the website around a highly specific niche, put up about 10 pages of content, and waited for the money to roll in. Of course, nothing happened. Around this time I was beginning to see how article directories might play a role in getting high-quality traffic to a website. Being very new to that scene, I started tinkering around with a few directories including EzineArticles.com, which I still celebrate today as the top directory around. Hands down.

And then what happened? Nothing.

Well, nothing at first. But slowly – and I’m talking about months of time here – the traffic started increasing and the Adsense revenue started building. I wasn’t going to get rich off this website, but that was never my intention. My intention was to learn about the psychology behind marketing content with content designed to push a web surfer into some form of a conversion.

I learned two important lessons:

Lesson #1 – Article Marketing Builds Residual But Long-Term Rewards
Since I didn’t market this particular website with any other strategy, I was able to measure the real effects of the article marketing over time. These effects included direct traffic from high-ranking directory listings on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing as well as slow building SEO benefits in the way of organic rankings for the actual pages on the website. Today, I have several three-word search phrases that pull up one of my submitted articles in the #1 slot and my website in the #2 slot.

Lesson #2 – Content Marketing Delivers High-Quality Leads Ready to Take Action
Unlike other forms of marketing like PPC or even social media tactics, article marketing does a much better job of delivering leads who really want to be on your website. Whether you’re promoting an affiliate product, pushing for Adsense clicks, or selling your own products and services, these folks trust your website by the time they arrive.

The Anatomy of an Article Marketing Campaign That Doesn’t Suck

So how do you avoid doing a crappy job with article marketing? For that answer, let’s look at the make-up of an article marketing campaign that works. Here are the elements that you should be absolutely certain are included in your process:

• Well-Written, Highly-Targeted Content

We all know content is king. But directory content is very different from blog posts and website pages. Directory articles should be general. You want to tease your readers, but you definitely don’t want to give it all away. Plus, your article needs to be optimized for the keyword phrase you’re targeting without sacrificing readability and spark.

• Powerful Resource Boxes

We all know how important the resource box is, and we all hear about it all of the time. But, frankly, most resource boxes I read out there are plain awful. Don’t forget how jaded web surfers are. Sometimes you have to tell them what to do to get them to take action. Don’t be afraid to use strong command language: “Click here now!” “Visit our website immediately!” “We have something really crazy to show you.” Or whatever works for your niche. GET THEM TO CLICK! That’s your top goal.

• Consistency and Trust

This is where most people really drop the ball. By consistency I mean doing it, doing it, and doing it some more. You simply have to give article marketing campaigns time to really impact your overall traffic and conversions performance. Commit to at least 3 months of regular submissions. Do 5 per week for 3 months and call me in the morning. You’ll see what I mean.

Trust is the final point and a very important one. Once a web surfer finds your content on an article directory and then decides to click through to your website, that individual has already made several moves — from search engine to article directory and finally to your website. The point is this: you better have something ready for them when they get there. If your resource box promises “more insider tips” or “a free download,” you better deliver on that promise or all trust is lost.

The strategies in this post are pretty straightforward. There are no secret potions or crazy gimmicks – it’s just straightforward business-to-consumer communications. Follow this simple formula, and I am confident your article marketing results won’t suck.

Building Trust and Credibility Articles

We already recognize the power of Google and other major search engines in building trust with users. Again, this is exactly why we use the search engines we use. Your goal as an article marketer is to build trust and credibility using this simple search ranking strategy.

The process is simple:

If you learn to master the article writing and article submission process, you can leverage these directories like www.EzineArticles.com to achieve high rankings for your content. Once readers discover your content, read it, and click-through to your website you have already achieved a high level of trust and credibility. This is a process I refer to as “pre-qualifying” your traffic.

Here’s an overview of how a searcher will behave on your website – let’s pretend it’s me doing the searching.

1. I search for a specific phrase on Google, Yahoo, MSN (Bing), or any search engine.
2. I discover your article – ranking high because of its relevance.
3. I read (or even skim) the content and find it relevant and “persuasive.”
4. I click through to your website and become a potential client, buyer, etc.

At this point of arrival – step four – I am already fairly convinced of your credibility or the reputation of your company. This depends, of course, on how well your article marketing strategy is designed. If you write great content (or hire article writers) and make use of basic conversion strategies, this process should be very effective.

Why Content Marketing Works

When we’re talking about article marketing, we’re really talking about “content marketing” in general. Content marketing can include anything from articles, blogs, press releases, email newsletters, autoresponders, and even – perhaps especially – the very content on your website.

Content marketing works for one very simple reason: the primary reason anyone uses the web is to get information. Even if an individual is looking to make a transaction – book a hotel, buy a book, etc – it all returns to content at some point.

• If I am ready to book a hotel in London, I need lots of content to motivate me to make the purchase I am going to make. Hotel reviews, London travel info, etc.

• If I am ready to buy a book, I need content to persuade or reinforce my purchase. Book reviews, seller ratings, author blogs, etc.

This is exactly why article marketing is so effective. If you create strong, informative, interesting content based around the subject areas relevant to what you’re really selling or promoting, you can enhance a searcher’s interest and pull him or her into the final purchase.

At first glance, this may sound manipulative or underhanded. Truly, it’s basic selling psychology at work in a new age. Old selling strategies (“push marketing”) simply do not work online. If you have professional integrity, a quality product or service, etc etc, the content marketing effort is designed merely to establish genuine trust and credibility with your buyer. We’re not selling snake oil here, folks!

How to Get Started with Article Marketing

Although the nuts-and-bolts are out of the scope of this discussion, I don’t want to leave you without some basic tips for getting started.

1. Create a free account with a reputable directory like www.EzineArticles.com
2. Write 5-10 articles to get started (or hire an article writing service).
3. Submit your articles to the directory and wait for them to hit the search engines.

Again, these are very basic “getting started” steps intended for the novice article marketer. There is much more to the advanced process, but you must start somewhere.

For now, get started with article marketing before your competitors do. It’s the new way to beat the search engines!

Instead, I want to talk about a very specific strategy for optimization. This is a strategy I have used over and over again with tremendous success. And it’s easy to do! This is a major bonus in the optimization world where most people are totally overwhelmed.

Website Optimization – Expensive Firms

Chances are pretty good that if you’re reading this article you’re NOT an SEO expert. You may have even considered hiring a large firm to “SEO your website.” These firms – even the small time consultants – charge ridiculously high fees for… well, I’m still trying to figure that part out.

Here’s the good news: You don’t need them!

Most of that large fee goes to pay the sales team that worked extremely hard to find you and recruit you. The remaining majority of your fee goes into the pockets of the firm owners and, finally, a very very small portion goes to the outsourced labor hired to perform all of the so-called SEO operations and tasks that will help you rank high.

Trust me, I have first-hand experience working with one of these national firms.

(CAVEAT: There are in fact many very good SEO companies out there. And by very good, I mean extremely good. Unfortunately, these folks are also extremely expensive. You get what you pay for in the SEO world.)

Quick Background

Search Engine Optimization has evolved dramatically in the past 5 years. It used to be quite easy to tweak your website, throw up some content, and maybe get a few backlinks from similar blogs and websites – and then, presto, you would pop quite high in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

These days, the direct website strategy is not going to work for you.

Of course, you need to do at least some of these things to get your website pulling rank… eventually. But because the competition has grown exponentially and because major search engines like Google have created more sophisticated algorithms, it’s just not like it used to be.

How Article Marketing is Faster and Better Than Traditional SEO

Here’s the part where I show you the way out of this conundrum. First, let’s change your thinking.

Instead of thinking about optimizing *your* website, think about leveraging another website. Which website? I’m glad you asked.

There are many different options for leveraging other websites, so we should start with a list of some attributes these websites should have:

1. Age
2. Size
3. Reputation

I know what you’re thinking – duh! Yes, I know this is quite obvious but it’s important to see this clearly to understand exactly why I think article marketing works.

Why I Love EzineArticles.com

Consider my absolute favorite article directory www.EzineArticles.com Why do I like these guys?

1. Age
They have been around a *very* long time. According to domain research tools, the domain was created on 19 Nov 1999. Not bad eh?

2. Size
As of this moment, the directory has nearly 10 million pages indexed in Google. Size indeed.

3. Reputation
People trust this article directory. More importantly, Google trusts this article directory.

This is exactly what the Internet is all about. It’s exactly what made Google what it is today – trust.

People don’t use search engines because they like the pretty colors and the fancy features. Take a look at www.Google.com – a close look. It’s one of the simplest websites on the web.

People use search engines because they trust them. You do the same. I do the same. Your customers do the same.

So if you trust Google, then you trust the top results it delivers you every time you process a new search query. Google consistently ranks EzineArticles.com pages high because the article directory has an excellent reputation. They screen all content very carefully. They put new writers through a stage-by-stage review process. In short, they are saving Google a lot of time by clearing new content for the web.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at exactly how you can put the article directory to work for you.