Starting to get dejected
I know a lot of you are recommending article marketing as a way of attracting traffic to your website. I went ahead and created a Squidoo lens which has been active for about four weeks. I tagged it heavily with my niche keywords and have yet to receive any visitors to it. I have pinged it with pingomatic and added it to various bookmarking websites.
One of my concerns, has been trying to avoid what I consider to be spammy looking articles and lenses.
At this point I'm not sure that I want to write anymore articles until I can get a better idea of what works, and what stays within the boundaries of proper netiquette. Part of me (the greedy part) thinks "rules be damned, I want to get paid!".
I've recently tried the google hot trends autoblog and post to Twitter, and my website just looks like a cheap spam site. Does this actually work?
I know some people are saying they have thousands of hits, I have yet to see it for myself I have got some hits but nowhere in the thousands.
I also have concerns, that my website will be de-indexed by Google for scraping content that isn't mine.
I also played around with pay per click, I had a $100 free credit from Yahoo and ran ads for a few affiliate programs. I think I spent about $60 and made about $26. At that point I turned off the Yahoo search marketing until I could better understand how to best capitalize on it.
There were a few programs I was going to push, one of was a marketing plan from a member of another forum, I was very impressed with her layout of her website, combined with the free information that she was willing to give on her website, however her landing page has a nice little opt in pop up I don't think is fair considering I'm doing all the work driving traffic to her website.
I'm also slightly put off by the amount of people who say they make so much money doing affiliate marketing, whereas it seems their main business is actually selling their "formula for success". I know some of you do have some marketing plans that are probably aboveboard, the main problem i'm finding is separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak. For a lot of pitches I see for making money on the Internet, i'm constantly reminded of the Don Lapre ads that used to run on television. "You can make THOUSANDS of dollars placing tiny classified ads!!"
I'm sorry if this is a fairly negative post it in affiliate marketing forum, I'm very enthusiastic about affiliate marketing, for all intents and purposes you guys are my peer group and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
I am not giving up just yet, I just want to make sure that my business model is not dependent upon an article directories anti-spam policies. I would hate to spend copious amounts of time writing articles only to have them axed as new anti-spam policies kick in.
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