Would you like to teach me affiliate marketing through article marketing?

Here are a few relevant and helpful threads, to start your collection ...

This very good but very long thread explains in detail why it's so important to publish articles on your own site first, before submitting them anywhere else (and a lot of the indicental chat in it touches on other "basic article marketing questions").

This one explains a lot of stuff about "spinning" and why most professional article marketers think it's a waste of time, and based on fallacies and mistaken beliefs about "duplicate content".

This one explains why it's seriously bad news to create backlinks to article directories.

This one explains a bit more about article directories and writing for syndication.

This one is about "unique content" and a bit about link-juice, I think.

This one is about writing for syndication.

And in this excellent little article an expert writer/marketer explains "duplicate content" to perfection (and there's more on that blog which will be helpful to you, too).

Well, atleast suggest some good quality article directories, where affiliate links are allowed. As far as I know EZA does not allow affiliate links.

I'm trying hard to keep this civil...

You want to promote Clickbank products as an affiliate by dumping articles with affiliate links on article directories. Am I getting this clearly?

If so, about the only way that will work for you is to get in your time machine and go back about five or six years. Back before thousands of other people ruined the possibility by dumping tens of thousands of junk "articles" that were badly written ~200 word ads.

If you want to make actual money from marketing with articles, you'll have to learn how to do it in today's world.

Like John, above, I want to keep it civil, but thinking that is why you have the problem, and are either unable or unwilling to learn how to do what you say you want to do. You're saying you want a quick-draw shoot-out against massed opponents but you don't want to put any bullets in your own gun "because you think it's worthless". I don't mean it uncivilly, but "Good luck without it!"

It wouldn't have worked for you even three years ago (I tried something similar-but-better, myself, and - no rudeness intended, it's only an observation - I can probably write better than you and was also probably better informed going into it). It might possibly have worked - to some extent - five or six years ago: I wasn't online then and can't comment first-hand.

You say that you want to promote affiliate products from ClickBank or similar affiliate networks. Well, however you look at it, selling ClickBank (or similar) products steadily boils down to three main things ...

(i) You have to select the products wisely: obviously enough, without getting this part right, it doesn't much matter what else you do;

(ii) You have to pre-sell effectively to well-targeted traffic (you can't do this, the way you want to do it);

(iii) You have to build a list and form relationships with the people on it, so that they'll buy on the strength of your recommendation. Without doing this, your conversion-rate will typically be somewhere between "very low indeed" and "non-existent". You can't do this without your own sites (even if they're only squeeze-pages).

These things aren't optional: you really do need to do all three of them. There's a huge turnover of affiliate marketers trying other ways and not being successful. The above overview - simplistic, superficial and obvious though it is - is representative of those who make any steady money worth talking about from it.

I'm just being realistic, here - just in case you want to try something without stacking the deck irrecoverably against yourself.

Really?? Oh dear, maybe I was sidetracked counting the money article marking makes me, when the IM world decided article marketing is an ineffective business model. What a shame.

I utilize articles in multiple ways in my business: in my blogs, submitted to Ezine Articles and directly to a list of highly targeted webmasters for republication, in information distribution, occasionally as press releases, and most recently, re-purposed in videos.

Way back, I used to write articles for others, but I've more or less closed down that shop, although very occasionally I do write for 3 remaining clients at $200+ a pop.

My articles (written to inform only), contribute to traffic to a whole variety of websites, from a membership website which I began pre-internet back in the late 1990's, to a blog selling my own product, to straight affiliate blogs, to my own, personal blog.

But... as you tell me I'm following such a bad, ineffective business model, I suppose I'd better hang up my keyboard and just go back to watching the Rugby World Cup. Go 'Boks!

I don't really disagree with you at all - I'm just slightly surprised to see a self-admitted schmoozer expressing it so forthrightly.

Indeed ... I never had (nor wanted) enough clients to be able to write 4/5 articles per day at $200 each, but I certainly couldn't do that (and wouldn't want to).

My perspective is that an article writer who can earn that amount can - in the long run - do much better through affiliate marketing, effectively by being his/her own only client.

They don't look that black to me ...I'm "just saying" ...