Affiliate Marketers - Why Do You Do This?

[XFactor]

After paying my dues with almost 2,000+ pages of content, SEO, & writing I am
moving from Adsense to Affiliate Marketing.

In my research I notice a technique that some of you Affiliate Marketers are doing
and it seems like a short-lived way to make money - kind of like cutting off a finger just
to feed your mouth.

It goes something like this:

1) You pick a product and create 1 blog page about it.
2) You write article after article submitted to ezinearticles.com (or whatever directory).
3) Your resource box directs the viewer to your 1-page blog, which links to the product.

Now perhaps I have spent so much time learning the value of building up lots of
content pages on my sites to obtain long-term traffic SE traffic directly to them, but it
seems to me that the above approach is not really building a stable system.

Your entire efforts depend on 2 things:

A) The existence of the article directory and,
B) The existence of your 1-page blog (which, lets face it is probably not ranking for anything).

Wouldn't it be a smarter and wiser approach to not only continue with article marketing,
but to also put in dozens, if not hundreds of pages, on your blog/site which is something
that you personally own and will create 100 times more revenue from search engine traffic,
not only in the long term but also on the medium term (3 weeks+ down the road).

Your dependency on article directories is surprising, as many of you are not building up
your own website to market your affiliate products.

P.S. I am not knocking this approach, just curious about the whys and the why nots.

- John

[korypearman]

That's basically what I see as well.

The approach I take it make a Squidoo page promoting whatever product. Then I blog about my page and write many articles to all the directories and I bookmark all my articles.

That way I have everything pointing at my Squidoo lens which then points at my affiliate links.

Is that basically what you are going to do?

P.S. When I get some money from this, I will make an actual website and have everything pointing at my website instead of a Squidoo Lens.

Kory

[Click Cutter]

Article directories are providing aditional exposure + external links to your website. You can put the content on your own site. It's just two different methods.

[XFactor]

Originally Posted by korypearman

That's basically what I see as well.

The approach I take it make a Squidoo page promoting whatever product. Then I blog about my page and write many articles to all the directories and I bookmark all my articles.

That way I have everything pointing at my Squidoo lens which then points at my affiliate links.

Is that basically what you are going to do?

P.S. When I get some money from this, I will make an actual website and have everything pointing at my website instead of a Squidoo Lens.

Kory

Perhaps my post gave the wrong impression. I'm not asking if I should do this, what I am
wondering is why do many affiliate marketers not spend any time building up those 1-page
blogs instead of depending on the major article directories.

Yes of course article marketing directing viewers to your affiliate portal is the game, but
I would not let my entire affiliate business rest on the existence of an article directory and
a 1-page blog.

Rather, have that blog or site rank for lots of keywords that get targeted traffic to the
affiliate promotions.

That is the one valuable lesson I have learned with working my ass off with Adsense for
so long, is that a real business should involve building up your own site, putting heavy
SEO and content into your own pages, getting hundreds and thousands of pages ranked.

And more importantly, only using article directories and such as stepping stones to investing
into your own site.

Many ways to skin that cat I guess

- John

[nico52]

Here is an easier way to look at it that might make it sound a little more reasonable. Lets say that you build a big blog with lots of content. That will be your landing page or where you want to drive traffic to.

How many keywords can you find that you want to rank for? 50? 150? Are you going to build a site and build it up for all those different keywords?

That is where the beauty of article marketing comes in if done right. EZA is not going anywhere anytime soon. Or at least I hope not. Using articles you can put in little effort and try to get ranked for all sorts of long tail keywords. They will rank and drive traffic to your sites.

That way there is little invested in each keyword that you are going after. If you find some keywords that are bringing good traffic and you got an article up on the first page of google then you know you are good to attack that keyword and try to dominate the first page of google.

I don't want to have to put in a lot of time and money to try to rank for hundreds of keywords. That would be a pain. Using articles I can do the same thing and get the same results with a lot less work and time.

Does that make any sense?
Adam

[Carol J Smith]

I do that to make a quick dollar. I look at my my affiliate money as short term quick cash, and I have other methods that I look to for long term profits.

Carol

[John Taylor]

Originally Posted by XFactor

That is the one valuable lesson I have learned with working my ass off with Adsense for
so long, is that a real business should involve building up your own site, putting heavy
SEO and content into your own pages, getting hundreds and thousands of pages ranked.

John,

You're right to question that strategy, it works for
some folks in the short term. But it isn't a business
building strategy.

Keep thinking the way that you're thinking and you
will see the value in your existing infrastructure.

John

[XFactor]

Originally Posted by nico52

Here is an easier way to look at it that might make it sound a little more reasonable. Lets say that you build a big blog with lots of content. That will be your landing page or where you want to drive traffic to.

How many keywords can you find that you want to rank for? 50? 150? Are you going to build a site and build it up for all those different keywords?

That is where the beauty of article marketing comes in if done right. EZA is not going anywhere anytime soon. Or at least I hope not. Using articles you can put in little effort and try to get ranked for all sorts of long tail keywords. They will rank and drive traffic to your sites.

That way there is little invested in each keyword that you are going after. If you find some keywords that are bringing good traffic and you got an article up on the first page of google then you know you are good to attack that keyword and try to dominate the first page of google.

I don't want to have to put in a lot of time and money to try to rank for hundreds of keywords. That would be a pain. Using articles I can do the same thing and get the same results with a lot less work and time.

Does that make any sense?
Adam

Yes Adam, that does make sense, and I get it...

I guess from my experience, and my opinion of course is that the "pain" you speak of
when building up rankings is something that should be a smart investment.

It has worked for my Adsense model, and the way it is looking it could probably triple,
or even quadruple, my current earnings when I start to build a large site on my affiliate
review sites.

- John

[korypearman]

Oops, sorry XFactor

Kory

[XFactor]

Originally Posted by John Taylor

John,

You're right to question that strategy, it works for
some folks in the short term. But it isn't a business
building strategy.

Keep thinking the way that you're thinking and you
will see the value in your existing infrastructure.

John

Ok John, thanks for the reply. For a little while I thought I was going crazy
because there are some well-known warriors here who "teach" others about
building an affiliate business, but who's sales, from my research, are literally built
without any foundation at all.

Like I said - I'm not knocking this simple approach, just curious as to why some
of these seemingly very smart and hard-working affiliate marketers continue
to avoid setting up their own brick houses.

- John

[JayXtreme]

John...

Your thought process is the difference between one hit wonders and building a business..

A solid business is built on foundation and quality... I FULLY appreciate why it is cool for some people to use one page blogs and EzineArticles like that.

But for me I would much rather serve the majority of my content on my own property.. don't get me wrong I do use EzineArticles and use it a whole lot.. but I don't EVER give it preference over my own domains and it is always an add on to my business building and not as my main aim.

Peace

Jay

p.s. Great perspective John.. your previous business model will serve you well as an affiliate

[Paul M]

This technique can work quit well if you are promoting recurring affiliate programs,
because your actually building up a monthly commission with minimum effort.

I mean it take hardly any time to build a 1 page blog promoting a monthly commission product and submitting a few articles a days.

I think affiliates go for this because of how little efforts involved, an if you keep with this for a few months you can build up a nice recurring income.

Just my opinion,

paul

[Tom Borowski]

Your thoughts about this strategy are pretty much correct IMHO. You can definitely make money this way and it can work for years. But you're definitely putting all your eggs in someone elses (the article directory's) basket. It's very similar to relying on Adsense as your single source of income. It works, but only as long as Google doesn't kick you or the article directory doesn't close down/ban you/change the rules/whatever.

[JamieBing]

I know we never or should I say rarely have them pointing to a one page anything! Typically speaking we have one or two key blogs we point back to for our affiliate marketing. We still get sales from things we promoted over a year ago.
This is a proven tactic for long term , sustainable growth in sales and over all traffic.

[David Raybould]

Hi John,

Good post and a very interesting thread.

To be honest, I think the reason people stick to the article directories etc may just be because they don't know the potential that having the articles on your own site has. To a lot of people, attracting traffic from search engines seems super difficult and they worry you have to put all kinds of special codes on your sites etc, which is simply not the case.

Hopefully some people can learn from this thread!

David

[XFactor]

Originally Posted by the_writer

Hi John,

Good post and a very interesting thread.

To be honest, I think the reason people stick to the article directories etc may just be because they don't know the potential that having the articles on your own site has. To a lot of people, attracting traffic from search engines seems super difficult and they worry you have to put all kinds of special codes on your sites etc, which is simply not the case.

Hopefully some people can learn from this thread!

David

Well David I just recently decided that it's time to hit the big leagues and start
making some real money.

Now to do this with Affiliate Marketing I realized that the actual building up of targeted traffic to my sites is not so different than what I have been doing for a long time now.

What brought this topic up is reading some very well-known marketer's "affiliate guides"
& WSOs - most all preach the same thing: Build sand castles, not brick houses.

I then realized that something is very wrong with this and wanted to question it.

So thanks for all of the replies.

- John

[Monetize]

I'm not sure if you're referring to the free blogs; it's a big
mistake to build anything there. I wish more people would
get that but sadly many newbies setup this type of blog
and it's a complete waste of their time and effort.

Self-hosted WP sites can be SEOd much faster and easier
than a static website, and they're the best thing for CMS
especially when you're managing multiple sites and niches.

As to your assessment of what other affiliate marketers are
doing, unless somebody spills their guts publicly, there's no
way to know what anyone else's business model is. Setting
up WP sites, monetizing with AdSense, Amazon, eBay and/or
other affiliate offers WORKS. Article marketing WORKS.

People should do whatever works for them.

[discrat]

Yeah I know when I first started Blogging about 8 months ago I created one page on my Blog with all my products. I thought it was good to do this because it was so neat and easy to find all my products on this one page.
I then started to do PPC advertising and aimed it at this one page. After doing PPC for a month or so with very moderate success I continued to just keep this one page. I thought this was the way to go and worked on just somehow getting people to go to that page where everything was so easy to find , no clutter with multiple posts, etc..etc...

One day I decided I better start adding more posts and content and within three days of finally adding new posts to my Blog I started to get SE Traffic.

It really goes to show that content that is relevant and of quality will gain the attention of the bot and SE pretty quickly!!

[JJ Manning]

John

You make a good point. Here are my comments.

1. When someone new starts out with little or no HTML knowledge and little to invest apart from their time it is far easier to set-up a blog or squidoo and start promoting affiliate products via article directories. This method alone can be very rewarding. You can scale this up and create your own real estate once you have banked some cash.

2. Using a blog, hub page, squidoo etc is a great way to test a niche. I often use a blog and submit 10 to 20 articles to test a niche and certain products. Once the test is over and it's proven profitable, I then create a content site. You can then add links to the test blog pointing to your new site. A win, win situation in my eyes.

So basically, I agree with your point that you should invest in creating your own sites and real estate - I have over 20. However, I still use blogs to test a niche and products before going through the expense of creating a new site.

HTH

JJ

[chris_surfrider]

John,

You're seeing something that few people will realize, even though it's so totally obvious.

Mini-sites have their place, though.

What you'll find yourself as you begin looking for profitable markets as an affiliate is that some markets are HOT while others are anything but.

Unlike adsense, the only traffic that's worth your while is stuff that converts.

So you'll want to prove markets first through small tests (mini-sites, PPC, "sand castles" so to speak) before building your brick castle on a solid foundation.

THEN it makes sense to go crazy and build authority sites, newsletters and all the rest.

But not on a whim.

The problem is that most people stay in "sandcastle" stage because it's proven to work.

They fail to realize that they could scale that initial response 100 times or more by actually investing effort into a *real* site.

-Chris

[XFactor]

Originally Posted by chris_surfrider

John,

You're seeing something that few people will realize, even though it's so totally obvious.
Mini-sites have their place, though.

What you'll find yourself as you begin looking for profitable markets as an affiliate is that some markets are HOT while others are anything but.

Unlike adsense, the only traffic that's worth your while is stuff that converts.
So you'll want to prove markets first through small tests (mini-sites, PPC, "sand castles" so to speak) before building your brick castle on a solid foundation.

THEN it makes sense to go crazy and build authority sites, newsletters and all the rest.
But not on a whim.

The problem is that most people stay in "sandcastle" stage because it's proven to work.
They fail to realize that they could scale that initial response 100 times or more by actually investing effort into a *real* site.
-Chris

Thanks for Chiming in Chris. Your guide is one of the few that I have found who suggest
the investment of adding pages and content - kind of a no-brainer.

- John

[Neil S]

So what is the strategy here then? Obviously to get initial traffic we should submit to something like EZA because we can rank strongly initially. If our website is not ranking then posting the article there will take months. So do we initially submit to EZA and then rewrite the article for your website?

And if so how long does it usually take for your own website article to rank for the keywords on average?

[Mike Bogowski]

Hi XFactor,

Like many others in this thread I agree with you completely. I also have a confession to make, Im guilty of doing exactly what you said. I have my reasons though and the main one is....

SPEED! If a new product is launching or I find a hot niche I can whip up a one page website and submit 10 articles within 2 days then wait a week or 2 and see if anything comes in. If it does I'll usually build a set of 10 keywords and create a mini site around it of around 10 pages (1 for each keyword) and focus the TLD on my main keyword.

The main keyword is usually a buy keyword or a review keyword based on the product.

Using the 1 page approach works but is like building a business on quick sand because you aren't going to get longevity. Even if you end up ranking for that one page website it will be so simple for someone to steal that rank from you by creating a site which is only slightly better than yours.

Have you considered changing the model of many of your adsense sites? Just change any adsense blocks to affiliate links. This could potentially boost your income over night if commissions and conversions are high enough.

Anyway, hope this helps

[XFactor]

Originally Posted by Mike Benkovich

Hi XFactor,

Like many others in this thread I agree with you completely. I also have a confession to make, Im guilty of doing exactly what you said. I have my reasons though and the main one is....

SPEED! If a new product is launching or I find a hot niche I can whip up a one page website and submit 10 articles within 2 days then wait a week or 2 and see if anything comes in. If it does I'll usually build a set of 10 keywords and create a mini site around it of around 10 pages (1 for each keyword) and focus the TLD on my main keyword.

The main keyword is usually a buy keyword or a review keyword based on the product.

Using the 1 page approach works but is like building a business on quick sand because you aren't going to get longevity. Even if you end up ranking for that one page website it will be so simple for someone to steal that rank from you by creating a site which is only slightly better than yours.

Have you considered changing the model of many of your adsense sites? Just change any adsense blocks to affiliate links. This could potentially boost your income over night if commissions and conversions are high enough.

Anyway, hope this helps

I just want to say again that I am not criticizing the practice of article marketing. In
fact, I use it almost exclusively for pumping fuel into my sites as well.

And I can certainly see the value in this approach with your example of spiking niches.

- John

[XFactor]

Originally Posted by Mike Benkovich

Hi XFactor,
Have you considered changing the model of many of your adsense sites? Just change any adsense blocks to affiliate links. This could potentially boost your income over night if commissions and conversions are high enough.

Great suggestion, however my Adsense websites were approached in a completely
different manner as far as keywords.

I used keywords from all over the spectrum, many of which do not have direct products
to switch out for affiliate links.

Also, I make a full-time income from Adsense and that is something I want to
mess with. It is affording me the position now to move onto affiliate marketing with full-flown
confidence.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" ....... or something like that.

Besides - it would take a long time to mess with over 2,000 pages of content.

I'm hoping to make 4-5 times as much with affiliate products and with 1/4 the amount of
content - so long as I work smart.

Which of course is the reason for my questions.

- John

[Jeff Hope]

John,

You might want to check this thread, which is related to this topic:

Article Marketing is Over-Rated

Jeff

[Daniel Molano]

It's very simple really, and this is actually the approach I attacked IM with the first time.

When you start out in the IM game you most likely have no idea about html, about web hosting, about SEO or about anything for that matter. Heck, when I started I didn't even know how to get a domain.

This whole process allows you to start off right there and start making money. The articles provide many backlinks and nice free targeted traffic. And as you write away you become a much better writer.

So in other words, you are learning and at the same time making money from a sand castle. Now do you wan't to take it to the next level? We all know a blog post is considered a page, so just start writing articles and putting them INTO your blog (after your article marketing campaign is over).

This way you can get some from both worlds, organic search engine traffic and also targeted traffic from the articles. The beauty about article marketing is also that each article (If properly implemented with the right long tail keywordphrases) will generate traffic for years to come.

This strategy condenses my two favourite methods of traffic generation: SEO and Article Marketing, the latter actually contributes to the SEO with the backlinks.

[Chris Monty]

I used to go out and grab a keyword rich domain, then try to build it up in time for big launches, but that is pretty short term.

Now, I'm using one big, gargantuan blog, getting page rank and Alexa rank, and when I want to 'review' something, I use that big blog and select the right 'tags' and 'categories' for it.

[Justin Jordan]

The plan I'm working on for my affiliate marketing experiment is to do one blog post for every article. The blog post will run one a day for a month or so, then scale back to three times a week. I'm working ahead so that I can just schedule the blog posts and let it run if need be.

Once I've run through my initial run of blog posts I'm going to start mixing in the articles that I'd already submitted with new content. We'll see how it goes.

The blog is hosted on my own domain, so no worries there. Right now it's just affiliate products (actually just one) but I may mix in adsense down the road, depending.