ezine and affiliate link

For each niche site I have one primary landing-page to which I always (or virtually always) link. And as the sites grow, a few other pages for which I do some off-page SEO mostly in the form of an "additional link" (where 2 are allowed, i.e. pretty often). So the primary landing page will get at least 50% of my backlinks and those other pages a lesser number, in inverse proportion to how many of them there are.

It's a little bit difficult for me to generalise, because some of my sites promote only 1 product (which is almost always a "higher-priced Clickbank one"), while others promote as many as 5 (which will always be at quite a wide mixture of prices).

But in principle the landing page to which I link will contain either a product review or "product information" with a big link to one or more product reviews on other pages.

It's still important, but with the "writing for syndication model" of article marketing, it's quite a bit less important than it is to people trying to use the "rinse and repeat model"/"writing for clicks model". I still like my sites to rank well, but they do anyway, partly by virtue of having already collected the first-indexed versions of every article (and, of course, by having chosen long-tail keywords in the first place, though I suspect I probably do, overall, a little bit less keyword research than "most marketers", too).

Every other word (and word-combination) on that one page is still a keyword, though, strictly speaking. If the page is indexed, you couldn't prevent that (not that you'd want to, obviously).

Ah ... "deliberately" ... yes, indeed.

In principle I'm usually targeting one primary keyword per article. (But necessarily including others, of course, whether you choose to call that "latent semantic indexing" as some people do or "gossipping about related terms" as I do. )

Not really, no. To all intents and purposes I have one landing-page per niche, with only occasional exceptions for niches in which I'm promoting a few products. I'm slightly struggling to answer, here ... sorry ... I have one niche in which I sell both digital and physical products and I do treat that one a little differently. It's a recent-ish but highly successful niche and I might try to repeat that some time soon with another niche as well. And that is, in a way, potentially a 2-landing-page sort of site. Or can become one, anyway.

I have more than one keyword for that page of my site. Only one main one per article linking to the page - not per page.

I don't actually use "product name review" keywords, though I know many others are very successful with them.

I'm not trying to target people who are already thinking of "product x". (I'm not for a moment suggesting that's a bad thing to do - I know it can be a very good thing to do, but it's certainly not exactly my "mainstay"). I'm trying to target potential buyers in "niche y" who haven't yet bought anything/much because they don't like all the hype and crap, other people's salesy sites and products' hypey sales pages. I want to be the person from/through whom those people (who tend to conform to a particular demographic - a huge demographic - of affluent buyers who are not catered to at all by "typical affiliate sites") will buy.

Nooooo ... not at all: I'm afraid it's the answers that are a bit unclear. This is mostly because I have what I think many marketers might consider a somewhat "odd" mixture of entirely unrelated niches, each with its own "special considerations" albeit that my sites, opt-ins and autoresponder sequences are broadly similar across the entire range. Sorry, I may not have been helpful here at all!

I suspect that there's a quite a widespread "imagined scenario" among affiliate article marketers which goes something like this: someone has a problem and looks for a solution to it by typing something into Google, finds your article, reads it, clicks on the link, goes to your site (already very different from what I'm doing, because I make sure it's my site they go to first, rather than to an article directory) and either buys (following a hoplink, let's say) or opts in (in which case you sell to them later). The reality, I think, is very different. 99% of those people have done this before, yesterday or last week or last month. They've already seen that product's sales before and not bought it. That doesn't mean they won't buy it today, or next week, or next month, if I pre-sell it differently from all those other sites they've already seen. To me, the "imagined scenario" is an "idealised" one: it's just not like that in the real world. I don't pretend, or imagine, that when someone buys a Clickbank product through my affiliate link, that they've never seen that product's sales page before "finding me". This is, broadly speaking, unrealistic. That will occasionally be true, certainly, but those occasional people, in my opinion, are the exception, not the rule.

My article directory articles are not aimed primarily at potential "immediate customers". (I do get some of those as well, I admit). I don't want my EZA articles to be found by people typing search-terms into Google. I want those people to find my site, not EZA's site (and EZA's AdSense)! The people I want to find my article at EZA are searching inside EZA, not inside Google. And they're there because they're using article directories for their intended purpose (which has nothing to do with "fast traffic" and "crap backlinks" which are the only ones on offer from directories, and "rinsing and repeating" and "writing for clicks").

The "targeted traffic" finding my articles on sites other than my own site are (a whole different group) people who've already been targeted by those sites' owners and are looking there because they're sites at which those people often look - and attracting those people is where the real money is, in article marketing. Those people aren't looking in article directories, but the people who find (or "have found") them are: they're looking for "content".