Exact Impact of Article Marketing on Your Sales

Does article marketing work? And if it does what kind of impact should you expect? What kind of sales will you end up making?

These are the most common questions I receive from anxious new clients.

As the world continues to slowly but surely enter into serious recession, people have naturally become much more attached to the contents of their wallets. And so folks unfamiliar with the usefulness of article marketing want to be sure that it actually works. And it is not enough to just say it works. I believe it is more useful to go beyond that and demonstrate exactly how it works.

Let us keep this very simple. Forget all those complex and confusing pieces of advice flying at you from all directions on the net. Let's just get back to the basics. The truth in business is that if you do not have your numbers correct, you'll go nowhere.

Whatever it is that you are selling online, there is a simple truism. You will need to get your offer in front of enough people to be able to make a single sale. Once you know your conversion rate (that is how many people you need to put the message in front of to make a single sale) it is simple enough to calculate how many people need to see your message for you to achieve the kind of sales and profits you want to make with that particular online product or service. For instance if out of every 10 people who visit your landing page, one ends up making a purchase, then it means your conversion rate is 10%. And so to be able to make 10 sales you need 100 prospects.

That's how simple it should be. A business venture starts with the setting of goals. What do you want to achieve? How much money do you want to generate? What kind of profit do you want? When you answer these questions, all the rest of your article marketing business plans will fall into place.

In a world continually flooded by advertisements which most people have learnt to ignore or look down on cynically, articles are bound to give you much better results than advertisements. Especially if the articles you are using to sell, have valuable information for your target market.

So let's go back to our calculations. If you do a single useful article with plenty of useful content and tips for your target market and post it to a few high traffic article directories with a link pointing back to your sales landing page you will get quality traffic on your sales page. The more targeted your traffic is, the higher the conversion rate. This is one very good reason why general articles are useless in article marketing. What you must do is target a very small niche of your market in each article you generate in your article marketing campaign.

Let's say you did 25 quality articles and posted them at 3 top article directories (like I usually do), you will find that after a very short while a search in Google using your article title will show you that your most useful articles will have gone viral being re-posted a few more times all over the web. Sadly not every article will have a link pointing back to your site, but the good news is that most will.

25 articles will result in about 250 articles out there with links pointing back to your landing page. My disclaimer is that it really depends very much with which industry we are talking about and how competitive the situation is sometimes this figure will be slightly lower and on other occasions higher. In most cases each of these articles will get at least one person reading them and out of the 250 individuals about 50 will click through to your site each week and from there it is up to you and the selling ability of your website (i.e. how good your landing page is and how attractive your offer is) to determine how many of the 50 you will be able to convert into actual paying customers.

Amazingly you can actually increase the conversion rate dramatically by capturing the email addresses of this entire valuable traffic landing on your site. This is usually done by offering a valuable free report which people will have to sign up for. Using an auto responder you can send regular relevant messages to these prospects. There is no way you will go wrong with this strategy and I guarantee that you will be able to eventually convert a huge percentage of these people into your customers. You just need to be patient and realize that folks will buy only when they are ready to buy.

That is exactly how you get to maximize on the effect of article marketing.

By Christopher Kyalo