Article direct marketing is one of the most simple and most effective marketing strategies that you could hope to employ in your effort to increase your foothold on the Internet marketplace. If handled correctly, this form of direct marketing will not even cost you a thing. Imagine that – an effective ‘advertising’ tool that you can begin using immediately for free! It hardly seems possible but it is in fact a reality.

Your article marketing strategy can be as easy to set up as simply starting an opt in e-mail list and allowing your web site viewers to subscribe to a newsletter type program with content that will be of interest to your target audience and potential customers. It need not be any more involved or any more complicated than that.

The key when setting up your article direct marketing strategy is to ensure that all content that is sent out is reused on the recipient’s websites and linked back to your own web site. That involves making sure that all content you send is original, current and note worthy. If your articles are informative but boring it is unlikely that anyone will want to include it on their own site so keep your content fresh, entertaining and appealing to your target audience.

One final note: don’t use each and every e-mail as an opportunity to sell a product or a service. Instead, allow your e-mail marketing content to sell your target audience on you and your products and services will sell themselves.

Fabian Tan is a well-known Internet Marketing expert and the author of the popular 45-page Report:

Getting started with affiliate marketing requires only a little bit of background and oversight. There are a number of different types of affiliate marketing programs, each of which varies slightly in method. Each of the methods offers a somewhat different pay structure. Making the right selection depends on the nature of the affiliate content, the kind of traffic expected, and the overhead time and money investment required from the affiliate.

It’s important for a new affiliate marketer to conduct a little research before joining a new program. Learning the basic definitions of terms most often encountered is important in order to ensure effective and thorough question-and-answer sessions. Knowing ahead of time some of the typical guidelines and restrictions potentially will save a lot of energy in the long run. Some of the following questions may help to guide a new affiliate marketer in the right direction:

What’s the affiliate structure? Affiliate programs can range from a direct commission of sales or services to simply the funneling of traffic through paid advertisements.
What’s the payout? An potential affiliate should learn the commission percentages on referred product or service sales. Commissions of fractions of a percent may also be offered just for clicks. Some affiliate programs offer a tiny payout merely for impressions, regardless of whether a click, page hit, or sale results. Profits of this size are merely a trickle but can accumulate into real residual income over time.
What is the tier structure? Many affiliate programs refer to their structure in terms of tiers. In a one-tier system, affiliates earn money through sales that are generated directly by the affiliate. A two-tier system essentially allows affiliates to connect to secondary affiliates. From each of the sales of the secondary affiliate, the primary affiliate also earns a bit of profit. These primary affiliates also earn straight profit from their direct sales, just like in the one-tier system.
What is the expected efficacy? In other words, how many hits or clicks are expected in order to generate one sale? A good affiliate program should have overseen metrics which can generate these numbers with precision. Working with this figure ahead of time will ensure that the affiliate marketer can take the necessary steps to attract the right kind of traffic to his or her website.
What kind of metrics does the affiliate program offer to its affiliate marketers? Affiliates should be able to access detailed, comprehensive reports in order to confirm the hits to sale ratio, to observe trends in efficacy over time, and to further tailor his or her website traffic. This is an important and often-overlooked benefit of affiliate marketing.
Potential affiliate marketers should also take into account membership fees. Programs which require a large overhead investment should be avoided unless their credibility is absolutely established. The best affiliate programs seem to be cost-free.

It’s really true.

As a general rule, one is just as good as another. With that said, there is a world of difference in the level of success that each investor has had pushing their specific program. But it has much less to do with their abilities than it does the muscle that goes into marketing themselves and their thousand dollar program. Because they’re marketing masters, they excel at getting hapless investors who don’t know any better to grab what’s in their wallet and slap it down on a table in the back room of a seminar so they can waltz out the door convinced that they’re well on their way to reaching their real estate investing dreams.

What the gurus don’t tell you is that’s also the secret key you need to unlock the potential profits of their real estate investing course. So you can either keep spending money on the latest update to their program or you can put your precious dollars to work for you in developing a marketing strategy that will allow you to unleash the power of the “secret” investing techniques that you’ve dropped a ton of your money on.

Don’t mistake what I’m saying: It’s imperative that you understand how to utilize a variety of creative real estate techniques. But nothing is more critical to your success than being able to successfully market yourself. It really is a package deal. But having an effective marketing strategy is vital. Otherwise you’re as useless as a concert pianist at a flea market.

There are two directions you can go when developing your marketing strategy. The first is to chase down individual prospects in the hopes that you’ll be able to sell them on you – and your way of doing business. This method is time-intensive and the cost per prospect is unbelievably high – and has not only a small likelihood of returning your investment to you, but has a low rate of return. The other is to concentrate your efforts on those who are already warm to the idea of doing business with you.

Obviously, you need to concentrate the majority of your marketing muscle on the second option. One marketing method you can implement is the use of bandit signs. The cost is very low and you have a great deal of control over type of calls you get. You can advertise for only flexible sellers or you can market to property owners in specific situations. For instance, your sign might specify that you’re interested in working only with sellers who are facing an imminent foreclosure who are also willing to accept payment for their equity over a period of time.

Every caller you get won’t necessarily be a golden prospect, but by placing limited information on your bandit signs about the types of sellers and properties you’re interested in buying, you can improve the quality of your prospects by guaranteeing that 95% of the people who respond will know ahead of time what you want. Unfortunately, the other 5% will be the truly confused – people who want to know if you do refi loans or sell girl scout cookies.

Another warm prospect marketing strategy you can implement is one used by guru real estate investors: direct mail. While this strategy can be a minefield that can cost you a lot of money, it also does most of the heavy lifting for you by weeding out people who have no interest in doing business with you. The two most important aspects of a successful direct mail campaign are targeting to the right people (motivated sellers) and writing a good letter that succinctly describes the kinds of properties you’re interested in and the kinds of seller situations you need. If you ensure that your letter is well-written and it’s laced with descriptive phrases and lots of benefit-driven features for the seller, you stand a great chance of success with your campaign.

Regardless of what marketing strategy you develop, the most important thing you can do is recognize that marketing is critical to your success. I understand the arguments that you have to be able to give the seller an offer they can live with and that you have to understand creative investing techniques. I don’t deny that. But if you don’t have prospects that have ears to hear your offer it really doesn’t matter how creative or well-written it is because you’ll be trying to sell an invisible man with a hypothetical offer.

So concentrate most of your efforts in figuring out how to get warm prospects. Once you have prospects, you can crack open your thousand dollar real estate investing manual and figure out what to do next. Only then will you be able to really begin seeing your investing dreams come true.

Get started today – by developing an effective marketing strategy. So what’s your game plan?

Sean Flanagan went from dead broke, living off Ramen Noodles and selling used pallets from the roadside for $20 a day, to a self made real estate multimillionaire in under 2 years time. He now shares his secrets with thousands of students across the country.

I will believe that conventional wisdom can be sexy. Even with new, emerging and “sexy” marketing technologies and techniques, we must remember fundamentals such as: know your customer, positioning, WiiFM (“what’s in it for me” benefit-oriented copy), KISS (“keep it simple stupid”),plan the work-work the plan, etc. These seem simple, yet they seem to be absent more often that they should be. Conventional marketing processes are necessary to make the new, sexier marketing activities perform also.
I will make friends with IT. These days and into the future, without information technology, marketing is dead in the water. Bake cookies for the IT team if you have to! In an increasingly competitive market and certainly with the economic downturn, the fates of marketing and IT are tied together now more than ever.
I will test, test, test. Set aside 10% of your budget to test new opportunities. This will alleviate the numerous two-hour long meetings speculating about which marketing ideas will work. Also, using the “Opportunity vs. Effort/$” internal method of prioritization helps get things started. Remember this, “It is only expensive if it doesn’t work.” So, determine the cost-benefit relationship of media by testing.
I will have a dashboard. How many active customers do you have? What are your top 10 selling products? Who are your top customers? What is your gross margin? What is your current customer satisfaction rate? When everyone on the team can recite key performance metrics at a moment notice, you have a fine-tuned marketing machine! A marketing metrics dashboard that pops up on your computer everyday is a goal we believe all marketers should achieve. If you already have one, we say, “Bravo!” Other important concepts that should be top of mind so they can guide all decisions include: your organization’s mission, core values; and positioning statement.
I will avoid “needy greedies.” Tortoise or the Hare. Or a different version by Jim Collins, the Fox or the Hedgehog (Good to Great). Even in desperate times, the steady, focused approach is the successful one. Brandishing discounts, sales, and other “bribes” to get customers may help in the short run. However, knee-jerk reactions may lead to near-term decisions that may hurt you in the long run.
I will use a synergistic approach to marketing. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” By ensuring that you use Synergy in planning marketing campaigns, your overall return on investment (ROI) can be higher. Each one-shot activity yields limited results. By having all related activities well-coordinated and well-timed, each email, web banner, TV advertisement, magazine advertisement, and direct mail piece will not have to work as hard when they are accompanied by the other activities.
I will swallow my pride. When you’ve tried to optimize everything else-media, creative, offers…maybe it is the your product your service that needs to be reconsidered? improved? shelved? Also, instilling a culture of “which” idea instead of “whose” idea also helps. This mantra has served us well, “It is not about being right, it is about being successful.”
I will finally keep this year’s resolutions. Like our New Year’s resolutions we make in our personal lives, the challenge is to keep these marketing resolutions beyond March 2009. By adopting some or all of the above resolutions, you may benefit from staying strong in down cycles.