Affiliate marketingThis post is part of a multi-post series designed to help new affiliates learn affiliate marketing quickly and get an internet business off the ground as quickly as possible.

In this post I’ll provide a high level overview of core writing skills for beginning internet marketers. Here are three essential elements every new marketer needs to grasp with his writing.

Write for Readers, Not Search Engines

The first and most important thing to understand about professional blogging and the world of affiliate marketing is that you should always write for your reader first, without getting caught up in the opinionated world of SEO marketers.

While it is important to pay some attention to basic SEO principles, too many new bloggers get caught up in trying to optimize their pages for search engine algorithms, rather than provide high quality, helpful content for their readers.

This is an extremely flawed approach. Your readers are the core of your site: as a blogger, you need to address them.

Help Your Readers First, Sell Second

Not only do you have to put your reader’s interests above those of the search bots, you also need to put your reader ahead of yourself.

This means that you should NOT be trying to sell to your visitors on every page, nor even should you be engaging too many “hard sells” across your product reviews.

Your job as a blogger is to help your reader. This builds trust, so that when the user is ready to make a purchase, your opinion is valued above other random sites he may come across. You NEVER want to sell a reader a product he doesn’t really need. Click here to read more on finding the right user-product fit.

Include a Call to Action

Finally, the last element of content creation you need to grasp is that you, as a marketer, should always include a call to action in your posts.

As I mentioned above, this does NOT mean you’re always selling. Instead, you’ll always providing the user with a clear option of a next step that’s right for him. “If you’re looking for X, do Y. Otherwise consider doing Z.” Here are a few examples of possible calls to action you can include within your post:

  • Reading a follow-up article
  • Reading a more detailed article on a related topic
  • Signing up for a newsletter
  • Leaving a comment
  • Asking a question
  • Starting a free trial

Notice that not one of these is directly selling the user a product. Product sales should be reserved for your product-specific pages, not everyday posts.

Next Steps

Now that you understand a little about how to develop your writing skills as a beginning internet marketer, there are a few next steps you might consider: