Ever since the AffSphere launch, I’ve become even more convinced of the importance of article marketing for affiliates. During the time we were building AffSphere, I kept trying to boil down my own article marketing to a real simple system – something that would be low-cost, newbie-friendly, and generate some cash profits pretty quick.

It took a while, almost a year. I experimented with various article marketing strategies – to be honest, some worked a LOT better than others – and I think I’ve just about gotten it down to a science. Naturally we’ll be turning it into a course, and we’re pretty excited about the uniqueness of the material.

Before we release the course, though, we’re actually going to test the whole system out on one of our new hires here at our Affiliate Classroom office. She knows NOTHING about article marketing – Sarah’s got her own blog, but she hasn’t syndicated even one article online, ever. So she’s pretty much starting from complete scratch.

The big experiment will be starting in about a week – Sarah’s already calling herself the “guinea pig” in my mad scientist article marketing “laboratory” LOL!

Seriously, after my dozens of experiments in all kinds of niches, I’m even MORE excited about article marketing than when I first discovered it. Here’s why:

1. Articles generate the highest quality FREE traffic. Don’t get me wrong – ANY free traffic is fine in my book – but with articles you get HIGHLY targeted traffic.

2. With articles, you can reach targeted audiences that might NEVER click a PPC ad. We all know that not every product lends itself to paid search advertising. Sometimes potential customers need to be educated about the product and the problems it solves BEFORE they can even THINK about buying – so your articles can help them learn AND guide them straight to your recommendations.

3. Conversions from articles can rival or even exceed PPC conversions. If you research article niches and products ahead of time – and choose products wisely – you’ll get solid conversions. Plus you get great ROI – after your initial investment of time in writing and submitting the article, all the traffic is free.

4. Articles build credibility – for you, your sites, and the products you recommend.

5. Google LOVES articles! When you search, do you notice how many articles show up on the first page of Google results? And not just from the big article sites – we’re already getting nice Google indexing of AffSphere article pages for some niches. Google loves content, and articles are about as “pure” content as you can get!

To sum up, article marketing is a LOT more powerful than most affiliates realize… when you do it right. That’s what Sarah and I are going to be refining in the coming weeks… so watch for more updates on our “lab experiment!”