Article Marketing Tricks #5: The Synergy Strategy

The Synergy Strategy is the 5th secret to making article marketing pay off for you. Another good name for this technique is I Scratch Your Back, You Scratch Mine, but that's not quite as cool-sounding as Synergy.

This strategy requires that you have a list of people you can mail to, but you don't have to have a huge list -- you can do this even with a list of 100. All things being equal, of course, a bigger list is always better.

The other thing that's required is to find another internet marketer who's working in the same niche you are, but isn't a direct competitor.

For example, if you have a dog training product, look for someone who has a dog health product. If you have a diet product, look for someone who has an exercise product.

You need to find someone who's not a direct competitor because you're going to approach that person with an offer.

Just like you, they want to provide useful content to their list, so the offer is this -- for a few days in a row, each of you will promote an article written by the other to your own list. So on Day 1 you're going to send one of Bob's article to your list and Bob is going to send one of your articles to his list.

Each of you will preface it by saying something along the lines of, "Here's a guest article written by someone who really knows about ________. You're really going to like the tips here."

Basically, you build them up a little bit and give the user a reason to read the article.

By doing this you're getting exposed to a larger audience and you have two choices of what to do with that traffic...

• You can either pitch them one of your products, or...


• Try to entice them to sign up to your email list

In either case, you and the other internet marketer can decide whether to use each other's affiliate links in the articles, or just use the extra traffic as the benefit you receive. In most cases you'll probably go ahead and use affiliate links. That's typically an easier sell when you're pitching this idea to another internet marketer.

I mentioned earlier that you can use this method even with a smaller list. In that case you're going to look for someone who's at about the same "level of business" as you, or find someone with a larger list who's willing to email just a subset of their list.

Alternatively, if you can't find someone with a smaller list, offer to mail X number of their articles for each one of yours -- that's one way to leverage a larger list until you can build a large list of your own.

Whatever you do, don't exaggerate the size of your list -- this is a business relationship you're starting and it could lead to bigger things down the road. But if you tell someone you have a couple thousand people on your list when you have 173, they're going to know something's wrong when they don't get the results they should.

Using this strategy to create synergy between you and another marketer is a great way to make article marketing pay off and can lead to even more profitable partnerships in the future.