Are These Methods Of Affiliate Marketing Really Outdated?

The ones that don't involve depending on article directories for their own traffic and/or their own backlinks.

The ones that so many here have been commenting on in recent months when they describe how they're starting to make money by writing different sorts of articles which get syndicated to relevant sites in the niche, which bring them targeted traffic (without their needing to do the targeting themselves) and quality, relevant backlinks.

The ones that bring traffic directly to your own site instead of taking it to article directories where the majority of it doesn't click through but is lost instead.

The ones that involve building relationships with some of the thousands of ezine publishers who are constantly in search of content to put in front of the targeted subscribers of all their publications and are entirely happy to attach backlinks to that content.

The ones that involve gradually building up one's own website by effectively getting other people to do one's off-page SEO for one, through syndication, while attracting targeted traffic in the niche, by always publishing all one's work on one's own site first, getting the long-term, cumulative benefit of all the initial indexation rather than unwisely or unknowingly giving that benefit away to other people's sites.

The ones that involve building up a genuine, asset-based business which leads to gradually increasing residual income from work already done, rather than depending constantly on a "rinse-and-repeat" model in which the income significantly reduces and stops if/when the constant work stops.

The ones whose guiding principles comprise quality rather than quantity; relevance rather than numbers of backlinks; selectivity rather than software; authority rather than dependence; subtlety rather than spinning; informed analysis rather than ill-informed urban myth.