William Charlwood

You can approach the process of article marketing from two different angles. You can write articles that interest you or you can write articles for profit.

The two approaches are a metaphor for how people tend to go about creating their own internet marketing businesses. Most people think of ideas for products and then develop them just as article writers tend to think of ideas for articles and then write them.

More commercially oriented people tend to look for markets before embarking on product development. Similarly minded article writers look for valuable topics to write about before putting pen to paper. The real pros prioritise the writing of their articles to focus on those that will generate the most revenue.

So how do articles generate revenue?

As an example, I wrote an article in this blog a few months back about some software that helps you build a list. I wrote it because I strongly suspected that people would be interested in the product and that they would therefore be searching for it online. I included in that article my affiliate link to the product’s sales page.

A couple of days back someone searched for the product, found my blog article, read it and clicked my affiliate link and bought the product. Thank you!

That’s one way you can make money online with articles.

I could have written about something intellectually more intriguing but I knew that the product was interesting, that people would search for info about it and that they would buy it. I also knew that it had an affiliate program.

So I focused that day on writing an article about it.

And the beauty of much of the internet from an article marketing perspective is that once you publish an article like that it just sits there like a spider in a web, waiting for the occasional search that comes its way. And when it does, you can make money from it.

One other thing to think about is what you call your article. For example, if you are intending to write an article to generate affiliate commissions, it can pay to include the word “Review” in your title because people looking to buy a product will often search for reviews before getting our their credit cards.

In some cases you can do even better by using the word “discount” or “buy” in your article’s title because such searches are often done by people who have already made the decision to purchase. The next step they want to take is to pay for it and that is exactly when you want them to read your article and find your affiliate link.

I bought XSitePro version 1 ages ago and found it to be an excellent website designer, publisher and content management program. I bought XSitePro2 about 2 months ago the day it was released and have been using it ever since because it is so easy and simple.

But I am very conscious that you don’t just want to read a sales pitch about a new product so instead I thought I’d set out the key features of the product so that you can decide if it can help you in your own AdSense business.

1. It comes with a vast range of high quality templates that you  can edit. This means that if you want to start a new site fast you can without hunting around for graphics. The templates are grouped into sales pages, article pages, graphical, stylish” and “blank” or plain.
2. You add content to your site simply by typing or by pasting it in. The interface is WYSIWYG so what you see on screen is what your site will look like.
3. It AUTOMATICALLY builds 3 site maps for you: One is alphabetical, the second is in page order, the third is actually a Google Sitemap which is a nasty XML page that Google uses to make sure that all your pages appear in its index (This gives you a much better chance of having your pages show up in searches.)  XsitePro helps you submit this page to Google as well.
4. It lets you add AdSense to any page with just 3 clicks. The code is then installed for you.
5. If you want to add AUDIO or VIDEO to your pages it is very easy - you just follow the in-built wizard which takes audio or video files and uploads them to your web server automatically and generates control buttons such as Play, and Fast Forward that appear on your site.  You can also specify whether these videos or audios should start playing when the page loads or when the viewer clicks the play button.I tested this feature last night and in literally 2 minutes had both a video and an audio on a web page complete with controls. Stunningly easy.
6. It includes an automatic Search Engine Optimisation system that products page by page reports that tell you exactly   what you need to do to optimise your pages to get them ranked well.
7. It includes READABILITY scorers that tell you whether you have written copy that is too difficult for people to understand if they are in a hurry.
8. It includes wizards to help you build smart looking subscription forms.
9. It includes scripts that let you generate real time date and time displays, future dates and so on.
10. It includes scripts that make it easy for your visitors to print a page or add it to their bookmarks
11. It includes scripts to PASSWORD PROTECT pages.
12. It includes an interactive and helpful(!) HELP manual
13. It generates a MOBILE version of your website automatically. If you think how common it is becoming for people to view web pages on their mobiles now you’ll see how significant this is.
14. It lets you include global scripts on all pages. These are scripts such as the Google Analytics script that you want to include everywhere. By adding a global script to your site XSitePro2 will automatically place it in every page  on your site.
15. It includes an AFFILIATE WIZARD. This lets you set up and store information about affiliate programs you are a member of so that to add an affiliate link to a phrase or image on a new page is a single click.
16. Do you want some GRAPHICS like arrows,guarantee logos, credit card logos etc, or do you want some designer text boxes? They are all included and take a click or two to add to your site.
17. Ever wanted to add an RSS feed to your site so that you get continually updated content but didn’t know how to do it? with XSitePro2 it takes about 10 seconds. Click the page, select RSS Feed Wizard and follow the instructions. Dead easy.

Seriously, there are loads of excellent features that I am sure you will find useful in XSitePro2.

In some ways one of the biggest is the one-click publishing feature that makes keeping your website up to date so easy.

Add in the fact that it also has facilities to help you keep track of your hosting companies, your affiliate accounts and so on and you’ll see why I think it is such a powerful tool.

XSitePro 2 WEBINARS and $100 discount
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To give you more info, there are actually a couple of webinars coming up that will demonstrate and explain more about the design and function of XSitePro2.  There’s also a special $100 discount available during the launch phase. XSitePro webinars

Affiliate marketing is a way of marketing in which the business selling products uses a number of unconnected people to help sell its products usually in return for a commission.

There are therefore 2 different entities involved in affiliate marketing.

1. The business selling the product or service.
2. The marketer who promotes the business’s product or service on a commission basis.

Before the internet, affiliate marketing had a fairly bad name not least when it was associated with multi-level marketing. However, many businesses were in effect affiliate marketers when they acted as agents for other businesses. For example, I worked once for a company in the UK which had agents in many other countries round the world that promoted our products into their local markets. The company I worked for didn’t pay these agents any money. Instead it “sold” them products at a large discount whenever they got a made a local sale and the agent then passed the goods onto the end user at the full market price. This effectively means that they earned a commission from the sale and this business model is extremely widespread. They were in fact acting as affiliate marketers: they acted as a commission-only sales channel.

The internet has put affiliate marketing on steroids because tracking technologies allow businesses to set up affiliate links for an army of affiliates and track any sales made by an affiliate automatically. It has even enabled the automatic recruitment of an affiliate sales force.