Question for Article Marketers using Clickbank

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Well, to be fair, that is one "model" of article marketing. It works very much less well now than 5 - 7 years ago, I gather (when not so many people were doing it), and it's tremendously hard work "rinsing and repeating" all the time, and the proportion of people for whom it works at all is pretty low (which is, of course, why the turnover of participants in article marketing is so very high), but undeniably there still are some people who make it work for them, up to a point. Not a .....very advanced point, perhaps, but still a point.

To put it very mildly and tactfully indeed, it's a sort of "second-best approach", stacking the statistical deck very firmly against yourself for the long term.....

When people start off threads here saying "Article marketing doesn't work any more" (which they do, from time to time, although of course far more people just "drop out silently") you can be virtually certain that they've (i) been "writing for clicks", (ii) been sending traffic to article directories instead of getting traffic from article directories, and (iii) been submitting short articles which nobody will want to syndicate; and it's also highly likely that they've (iv) used a spinner and/or a mass-automated-submitter, and (v) failed to appreciate what an article directory actually is; and it's also distinctly possible (though here I digress) that they've (vi) been promoting products which a successful affiliate wouldn't have been trying to sell anyway.

I started off doing all these things wrong, myself!

After many months, I realised this wasn't working.

I was confident/arrogant enough about my own writing/copywriting skills not to wonder if the problem was with the writing in my articles and on my little sites, but to assume that it was because I was following prevalent advice which was itself deeply flawed and unreliable. It just suddenly struck me that in a business activity in which the success-rate is so low, and turnover of people so very high, there was a pretty good chance that the "generally available advice" was itself all going to turn out to be pretty misguided. And I also started seeing some things given as advice which I was pretty sure were mistaken, like the whole "duplicate content" story, which clearly didn't add up. (Fortunately I was right about this).



Never point back from an article directory copy to another copy of the same thing on your own site. It needs to be on your site primarily for search engines and perhaps other visitors to read, not for your visitors from article directories. There's no harm at all having it there, but no need to link to it.

I typically use my two links for my landing page and one other internal page, in each article, so that my landing page gets 50% of all the article links, and the other pages each get some. (But I have my list-building opt in box on every page, so the reader's always seeing that, wherever they "land").

When you start off, your site won't be much more than a landing page, of course, but thats fine, too. You can use both links to go there.

But don't link back to another copy of the same article.

(There are even a few people who, with some of the most contorted, contrived "reasoning" you could ever imagine, try to argue that the fact that you don't want people seeing another copy of the same article when they get to your site is a reason for not having it there at all, not posting them first on your own site, and so on!! :rolleyes: ).



Other articles can link to that one, so you're showing people there are a few. Or to a review-page (if that isn't on the landing page), or whatever ... it depends how your site's designed. But it's not a disaster at all, especially in the early stages, just to link to the landing page. This is comparatively "fine print stuff" compared with the "overall thrust of the argument".