Can't seem to burst that first conversion bubble

Seems that way sometimes but successes like Eben Pagan in the dating industry, Joe Polish in cleaning,Matt Furey combat conditioning, et.al. really show that IM is just a small slice of the pie.

I understand your frustration. When I first started online I thought the same thing, and the truth of the matter is that traditional article marketing is not getting the same traffic that it used to.

Forums are a great way to get traffic, and it helps if you have some valuable content to share with others. Sharing valuable content with your forum community will get you a lot of respect, and I firmly believe that you will receive ten-fold back what you put into it.

For me personally, I like to use classified ads to drive traffic, as well as document sharing and content syndication.

"Document sharing" Involves submitting articles or short reports that you have written to websites such as Scribd or Docstoc. You will need to put your articles or reports in a .pdf format, and then submit them. As with normal articles submitted to article directories, make sure that you include keyword phrases at the beginning of your titles. It also helps to submit your document URLs to Digg immediately after publishing the documents.

Another great traffic generating method is to find popular blogs in your niche, and get to know the blog owner. Leave insightful, respectful comments on the blog, and then email the blog owner about writing a guest post for his/her blog. This powerful traffic generation method is known as "content syndication" and it allows you to leverage your content to get much more traffic with much less effort!

Have you tried Facebook Ads or social traffic in general? I still make very decent money sending facebook users to cpa offers. Any simple lead generation type offer works great on facebook (with a little bit of testing and tweaking of course) things like gaming,dating are easy to get conversions with.

facebook ads was my next thought, I just have to convince myself that it's not just a waste of money like most of the other stuff has been.

I also did alot, and I mean, A LOT of research into Jamorama and Jam Play and Guitar Tricks through spyfu, who was promoting them, and reviewing them and just about every other angle I could think of. Most of them, the affiliates I mean, were promoting about $50 - $150 / month through ppc. As I said before, i'm waiting for google to approve my site (5th times the charm), before I can promot through there, and I need to get some more capital before I can try again with bing or yahoo or Looksmart again...

So, until then, it's seo (for which Google has just barely started showing me) and forum and safelist postings.

I suggest that you focus on one method and bleed it dry until you have mastered it. Moving from one form of traffic generation to another just simply isn't going to do you any good.

Take article marketing for example. Times have changed, so you are not going to see results from just submitting articles and waiting for sales. Those days are long gone.

Right now in order to see results from article marketing you are going to have to work on the seo mechanics of your articles. This involves picking the right keywords that you can rank for. Having 2% or less keyword density in your articles. And most importantly LSI.

Lsi is greatly underestimated when it comes to article marketing. It allows you to get more roi for your efforts if done right. All you simply need to do is to insert related keywords in your articles that you can rank rank for and if your article has enough backlinks thrown at it you will find it ranking high in google for more than one keyword.

So instead of seeing 40 - 50 hits over 30 days per article. You will start seeing 100 - 400+ hits. And you might even run into a gold mine keyword that shoves hoards of traffic to your article.

The key is picking your keywords and then seeing if you can rank in google in the first 10 places for them.

Grab that keyword list and save it as a text file. That is going to be your money makers for the campaign you are going to be running.

Next is content. You want to be focusing on the pain/problem of the visitor that is going to land onto your article. Empathize with them if necessary. You need to be able to connect with the visitor.

Now, this next part is what separates old article marketing from new article marketing. You want to promote the hell out of your content. Backlinks are crucial to the rankings of your article.

Without backlinks your article will die off in a slow death after a couple days. Keep consistent with your efforts and stick with it.