Article Marketing (w/o a Website) vs. Having your own site

7 replies
Hi! I started trying to make money online about two years ago (doing it on and off, sometimes doing nothing for months at a time). My first "teacher" (not a guru) was all about article marketing w/o the use of a site (his articles linked directly to the vendor's site).

I want to try and make money online again, not matter how much work is needed, but nowadays I see many people talking about the uselessness of article marketing w/o a website. Currently, all I have is articles for specific keywords that link directly to a vendor's site.

Should I go ahead and make my own website, or should I keep trying to rank my articles? (The competition for the keyword is pretty low). Thanks!
#article #marketing #site #w or o #website
  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by scooby23 View Post

    I see many people talking about the uselessness of article marketing w/o a website.
    Yes indeed. There are reasons for that. (Let us know if ever you find anyone making a living that way.)

    Originally Posted by scooby23 View Post

    Should I go ahead and make my own website
    Yes. Otherwise you have no real asset and no real business, just a temporary "rinse and repeat" attempt at one.

    Originally Posted by scooby23 View Post

    or should I keep trying to rank my articles?
    Only if you want to try to use SEO to build up other people's businesses for them, rather than yours, for you.

    It's phenomenally difficult to make more than the occasional semi-random sale by direct-linking (from an article to a sales page), partly because with no website of your own, you can't build a list, you can't try to sell other things to the same people, and you can't even try repeatedly to sell an initial product/service to readers of your articles. So you're chasing perhaps 5% of the potential income available to you, at the expense of the other 95%.

    Does this post help you? http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5210243 (it happens to refer specifically to ClickBank products just because that was the context of the thread in which it was made, but you can more or less substitute the words "affiliate sales" for "ClickBank sales" without losing any of its underlying points).
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6435578].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author Condiel
    I have been doing a lot of article marketing for a long time since my site do not have a blog page. I admit that my articles have provided some traffic but they aren't that helpful in increasing the rank of my site in search engines. Now that the algorithm is again updated, creating a website where you can post your content is extremely beneficial especially in marketing. This will be good to the rankings of your keywords, much more since you said that your keywords do not have that much competition. Providing consistent quality content in your website will enable Google to favor your site more than competing websites that do not have fresh content.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6435817].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author pamon
    when people ask for examples and your work, kind of hard to point them to a website if not there. grab one on blogger/wordpress. easy to do
    Signature

    Freelance Writer & Blogger For Hire. US based. Awesome Rates. Check out http://about.me/davidamodt for samples & more.

    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6435862].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
      Banned
      Originally Posted by pamon View Post

      when people ask for examples and your work
      Examples of what? The OP is asking about article marketing himself, Pamon, not about selling articles to other article marketers.
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6435932].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author webbizgold
      I would strongly suggest article marketing with links to your own website. You benefit in many ways here:

      1. Your articles themselves might get ranked for good keywords.
      2. The backlinks pointing to your website is good SEO to boost your site's rankings. Otherwise with direct linking, you are performing SEO for the merchant instead.
      3. You can do countless things with your own website as compared to just direct linking to merchants. Yes, it's more work, but well worth it. You can build your list, write reviews that pre-sell for even better conversion rates than direct linking, and build blogs that grow on their own with user content, and so on.

      Cheers,
      Chris
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6435940].message }}
      • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
        I'm guessing that the first teacher being referred to advocated "Bum Marketing"...

        That was one of those methods that worked because it flew under the radar, in stealth mode, because very few people were doing it. Once it blew up into a phenomenon, the sheer volume caused it to collapse under a deluge of digital manure.

        Many of the sites where one could post an article with some expectation of results no longer even allow direct affiliate linking. Those that do have mostly lost their power.

        There are a lot of people still using articles to make affiliate sales. They just aren't doing it with direct linking.
        {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6435998].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author timb98133
    I would defiantly have a website. Ideally I would have the resource box of your article lead to a squeeze page where you can capture email address. List building is where it’s at!

    Article marketing however is a great way to drive free traffic to your offers. It’s one I use quite a lot!
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6436093].message }}

Trending Topics