The main pages are there for the sole purpose of making the sale.

OK, so how do article pages differ from the main pages?

Article pages provide useful information to your visitors. They help get the trust of your visitors by providing quality information on the topic they are interested in.

Though the articles usually target less competitive phrases, we theme the page so that it can capture traffic for a range of phrases. Once the visitor is on your site, it is up to you how you make money from them.

On the article pages, you are not directly trying to sell them anything, but you can try to "persuade" them to click on a link to a main page where they will be sold something..

Let’s look at an example.

If your article is titled "Best dolls for 3 year olds", you could talk about the safety issues. If there are any hidden dangers, tell your visitor. This is a way to build trust so that THEY TRUST YOU. If they trust you, they are more likely to buy one of the toys you recommend on your site.

If you have read about a doll that has button eyes that come off too easily, warn your visitors that the doll could pose safety issues for those under a certain age. Make a recommendation for maybe a Barbie doll instead. It is perfectly acceptable to link to the Barbie Doll page from within the article itself. I would certainly also include a section at the end of the article with links to recommended main pages.

This is a way of funnelling your visitors from the articles, to the main pages that sell the products. Once the visitor clicks the link to the Barbie doll page, they are pre-sold on the Barbie doll itself, and trusting your judgement because of the quality article they just read, buy through your link.

Done properly, funnelling like this can greatly increase your chances of making an affiliate sale, even though your main page targeting the phrase “Barbie Doll” may not rank well itself.

All articles should be closely related to products you sell on your website. If they are not, then it will be very difficult to get your visitor to buy anything from your site. This is the difference between targeted traffic, and non-targeted traffic. The former can results in sales, the later wont.

One possible work-around for this, is to include Adsense ads on the less targeted article pages.

Google Adsense is all the rage at the moment, because you can make money without actually selling anything. All you need is for a visitor to click on one of the Adsense ads, and you are paid a per-click value into your Google Adsense account.

Because it is so easy to make money with Adsense, many webmasters use spamming tools to create 1000s of pages with little or no unique content, whose sole purpose is to make Adsense revenue.

These webmasters often create 3 or 4 sites a day, each with 1000+ pages (yes this is very possible with some of the spam generator on the market).

For these spammers it is a numbers game. If you have 100,000 of these spammy pages on the internet, then you can make some income just with Adsense.

The search engines have been flooded with millions or these low quality pages, and of course they are considered spam and treated appropriately. At best, sites built using these tools are banned, at worst, the webmasters run the risk of having their Adsense account closed.

We will look more at this later on, but a word of warning here.

Adsense provides a way for the visitor to leave your site without buying anything. If you have a high quality site, I recommend you limit Adsense to those pages that really cannot pre-sell a product. It takes a little bit of trial and error, but which would you prefer:

a) Sending 100 visitors a day to a merchant where you make $15 commission per sale,

or

b) getting 100 clicks on an Adsense ad where you only make 5 cents per click.

If you pre-sell your visitors properly, the former option will be far more profitable, but you do need to track your results. With the Adsense scenario, you make $5 for your 100 click. But how much can you potentially make by sending your visitors to the merchant?

Sales per 100 visitors you send to your merchant

Your income

0.5 (i.e. 1 sale every 200 clicks)

$7.50

1

$15

2

$30

3

$45

In affiliate marketing terms, we have worked out the “EPC” (Earnings per 100 Clicks) for the merchant (and for Adsense).

This is a great measure to use when evaluating merchants, and whether or not to use Adsense.

The truth is that Adsense ads on your site will dramatically reduce the number of product sales you make (even down to zero sales). Try building your site with Adsense ads, and then remove them. Test both options for a month, and see which generates more income.

8.2. Summary

Articles are a fabulous tool for making money. You can use them to:

Funnel visitors to main pages which sell products.

Capture the email address for your newsletter, autoresponder course etc.

Make Adsense income.

Sell your eBook or software.

Direct your visitors your free report, which uses some form of income generating technique inside, so that you can make income from that visitor long after they leave your site.

Hopefully I have given you a small insight into how main pages and article pages differ. They have very distinct roles on your website, but used properly, they compliment each other, and make your site more profitable.

In the next Chapter, we’ll look in more detail at the art of pre-selling. I’ll give you the exact steps I go through when writing pre-selling content myself.

Equipped with that knowledge, you will then be ready to create the main pages of your website.