If you've read Part II of my content series at SiteProNews you'll know that the next step in my series is aimed at acquainting you with Article Marketing and Article Syndication.

Lower down on this page you'll find a true story which will hopefully demonstrate the power of Article Syndication. There's a lot more to the subject than you might think. For example, most people confuse 'article directory marketing' with article syndication. The two are very different and one of them is practically worthless to you.

If you want to grab an advance copy of the next in this series, just use the email form at the top of the page and I'll get a copy out to you as soon as it's done, in a day or two.

The following article is extracted from one of my Internet Marketing books and relates to the story behind how I got into Internet Marketing some 13 years ago.
Enjoy!

The $14,000 Article That Launched My Career

I've never been a particularly good salesman, or at least that's what I thought. I'd dabbled with sales and marketing during my career as an Engineer in the Paper Industry, but never felt comfortable going face to face with a prospect. I later came to realize that the Internet was invented with me in mind. I could now make money selling, without ever having to come out from behind my desk. Even selling sand to Arabs was easy, from my fictitious bazaar in the Mid East.

Let me start off by asking you a question – had the title of this book been “How I Made Over $1Million from One Syndicated Article”, would you have still bought it?

I suspect the answer would be 'no'. That title would have been way too preposterous and unbelievable and you'd have dismissed me as a crank.

But the reality is that one article launched my entire Internet business. That business has gone on to make millions of dollars over its 13 year lifespan and I attribute everything to the one single article.

So now you're wondering what this 'super' article was all about, how brilliantly written it must have been, how ridiculously cutting edge the content must have been, right? Well, it was neither brilliantly written nor cutting edge, in fact it was quite an average sort of an article.

The actual article is almost irrelevant to this strategy. The 'brilliant' part of the strategy was how I monetized the article, and to be honest, that wasn't particularly brilliant either.

Let me tell you exactly what happened. But remember, the thing for you to take away from this is the concept and not the specifics of what I was doing. You're probably in a different type of business than I was, but the concept is still applicable. Later on I'll be showing you exactly how to apply my techniques to your business, to ANY business, so hang with me for a while.

In the Summer of 1999 I was a few months into my new business venture and things were looking quite bad, from a financial perspective. I'd made a decision six months earlier to leave the Industry in which I'd spent the last 17 years of my life. My well-paying Executive job, car, pension, medical plans were all gone and following a very expensive relocation, my savings were completely gone too.

I'd been working extremely hard honing my new skills in the Design and SEO industry and focusing on trying to attract new clients to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Though I was relatively new to the game I could see what I thought was an opportunity.

Most of my inquiries were coming from people who had a website but were receiving little or no web traffic. They weren't generally receptive to my telling them that they needed to spend more on the design of their website to bring it up to scratch. The general consensus was “show me the traffic then we'll think about spending more on design”. People were disillusioned. The Internet was quite new, it was being touted as the next great thing for commerce, but people couldn't figure out how to get a piece of the pie. And to some extent, neither could I. (Wind the clock forward 13+ years and it's still the same story for most people. They can get a WordPress of Joomla website put together but getting traffic is still the big issue).

I decided what was needed was a low-cost service to basically analyze a person's website, show them where it stood presently in search rankings and give them a clear and concise path forward, with emphasis on gaining more traffic. I identified a specific need, then geared my whole plan towards satisfying that need.

I decided that in offering something to satisfy the need of the customer, I would keep it simple and give them two options from which to choose. I'd read a lot on the web about SEO and realized how it could be extremely confusing and daunting for people, the last thing I wanted to do was to add to that confusion.

What people needed was a clear and unambiguous path forward. A path that would lead them to more traffic, more customers.

My only reference was to show people my own website listings' for “Search Engine Ranking”, which were generally impressive - in the top third of the page on the majority of the important search engines of the time.

So I had a way to stamp some credibility on my message and convince people that a plan coming from me would be a sound investment.

So I set about writing an article on “Search Engine Ranking”. It was still a relatively new concept, people didn't understand that there were things which could be done to a website to influence its rankings. The article was written in laypersons terms and it basically gave away information for free, but not too much information. So I gained people's trust to some extent - “here's a guy who clearly knows his stuff and he's passing the information along to me without asking for anything in return. I like this guy!”.

But the key was what to do with the reader when they came to my website. I had a loose plan for getting the article distributed and read, but how to monetize it?

To support the Article I worked on the format of the plan so that the mechanics would steer people down a specific path and take action.

I built a section of my website which was basically a library of information for people. Notes on building Meta tags, researching keywords, how and where to submit your website to search engines, etc etc. I decided that by surrounding people with information which was quite exhaustive, people would be too exhausted to do it themselves!

So I gave them a couple of clear service options.

For a mere $99 I would visit their website and create a report on their present status with respect to on-page SEO. I offered to write this detailed report in such a way that they could either do the work themselves, or provide my report to their web designer and have them do it.

Nowhere did I say to them that I was the one who should do the follow-up work.

I felt that was quite important to the strategy at that point. It's like taking your car to Ford's for a 'free inspection' knowing that they're going to come up with a list of jobs that need doing at $140 per hour. I didn't want people to think that I'd be leaving anything out of the report because my intent was always to be the only one who could implement the 'fixes'. I was offering and providing a very comprehensive report which wasn't just bait to get more money out of them. (“It seems legit” was one comment I got on the order form!).

I added a second service which included a few additional bells and whistles and priced that at $199.00

With two clear service options I was able to create a simple on-line order form so people could take immediate action and place an order without the need for additional information or personal interaction, assuming that's what they wanted. For those who weren't ready to purchase, I created a simple news service and invited them to register their email address in return for a series of useful articles.

With the mechanics in place I submitted my article to a website called “WebProNews”. They boasted of a mailing list with 250,000+ business owners and were looking for cutting edge trade articles to share with their readers.

A couple weeks went by and I hadn't heard from them. I'd resigned myself to working on a list of alternate websites that might accept my article.

I postponed the research effort as my wife and I had to leave for a family reunion in Colorado Springs. It really could not have come at a worse time. We were financially drained, with practically no income from the business. The trip to Colorado was going to drain our bank account pretty much down to nothing.

To the chagrin of my wife, I hauled the computer system out to Colorado and setup base in the hotel room. It's a fact that the less work you have to do, the harder it is that you have to work. I didn't have any clients at that point, which made me want to work 20 hours a day to try to acquire some.

After 4 days we were getting ready to leave for home when something incredible happened. My email suddenly became flooded with inquiries and questions about my service. Not only that, I started to receive many, many online orders! Buried away within the many inquiry emails was an email from the administrator at WebProNews saying “thanks for the article, we really enjoyed it, and we've included it in our latest member newsletter along with a link back to your website”.

In 24 hours I received just over $10,000 in new orders, direct from the order form on my website. These were bought and paid for, the money was on its way to our bank account! Over the next 24 hrs an additional $4000+ came through my account. Over the next two or three weeks even more money came through, as I answered people's questions and gave them the information they needed to place their order.

I was surprised to find that over 70% of the orders were for the $199 service option. That one article launched my business and gave me clients, many of whom I still service to this day.

Oftentimes it's just a matter of thinking a little outside of the box. It didn't cost me a penny to write the article and come up with a plan to support it, I just had to conceive the idea then implement it.

Of course, Article Syndication as it has come to be known, is now the cornerstone of my various successful business ventures. I have a network of money sites and mostly my sales come as a direct result of article marketing and specifically, syndication.

In many ways the system I created on my own steam is now the standard way of generating leads in 2012. But it's surprising how many people get it wrong. They miss a step or just approach it in the wrong way and the whole system fails at the weakest point.

To learn how to make $14,000 from a single article and how to create an effective sales funnel to place your efforts on auto-pilot, drop your email into my list above.

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