Affiliate Marketers - Why Do You Do This?

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