I'm just getting started with affiliate marketing and trying to drive traffic to my website. I thought that I should submit the articles on my website to every directory I could find with linkbacks but someone with more experience than me is telling me that i should only submit to ezinearticles and if i want to submit to others i should make sure the article is rewritten for each directory. I knew that the article should be rewritten for directory submitting but i did not know it should be rewritten for every directory and the advice to only submit to one directory does not seem right to me. What are you guys doing? Thanks
A good squidoo lens will drive more traffic than other article directories. I got my first sale after a week when I used squidoo in affiliate marketing.
I think you got some solid advice. If you do not rewrite, or significantly change, submitted articles they may be indexed as duplicate content. The larger article directories will also suspend your account if you do not submit original work since they are trying to reduce duplicate content as well. Anyway, you don't want to be competing with yourself across many directories.
Posting articles is a waste of time. I did this 8 years ago and can tell you it won't work now, as it barely worked years ago. Why? Nobody reads articles that are posted on unknown websites. The vast majority of articles are written by webmasters who just want free links, and have no interest in the quality of what they have written. Besides, everyone knows this is the case, and will avoid badly written material, never mind put it on their website. Or would you guys put a load of tosh on your site - I say you wouldn't risk the damage such junk would do. So, nope, I never read articles, would never extract them, publish or want my links associated with such articles or the websites that publish them. It just seems a very desperate way to get links, almost like many don't know what they are doing, you know....
I don't know what articles you were writing 8 years ago, but writing quality articles will get you targeted traffic. It is great SEO. No need to submit to more than one quality directory to rank #1 in Google for a long-tailed-keyword.
walruus - No, they won't get you targeted traffic, because placing articles on a general website who's only purpose is to attract general traffic, can only ever send general anything. General traffic is made up of too many different segments for it all to be targeted. The percentage of your target market will be so small, that any benefit derived from this marketing approach isn't worth the time involved posting the article, never mind writing these so-called quality masterpieces. I stopped bothering writing anything of value years ago, when I learnt that people just use articles for a link-dropping and spamming tool. In short - they weren't visiting these sites to read what I'd written - only to get a backlink. These sites are low quality, and full of spam. They are like the old link farm type sites of the early web. I doubt you would get any link PR juice from them, as most will stop the PR getting through. As for targeting, less than 5% will click and likely, less than 1% will click to your site and probably never buy. Too little targeted traffic you see. I know better cost-effective ways to get the results you need. Be nice, and I'll share them with you.
What sites are you referring to when you say low quality sites? If you submit a good-written article to ezine or make a squidoo lens, using a long-tailed-keyword, this will offcourse get you targeted traffic from google. It has worked for me, and i've gotten affiliate sales from squidoo lenses. The OP was asking of which directories to post in for affiliate marketing, not for getting better PR.
No it doesn't. If people blindly stick links on any old site, the targeting will not be there. And thinking that changing a bit of article text for each submission will have little effect because it's in front of the wrong readership! General traffic is just that - general. Only a tiny amount of that traffc will be targeted and even less will convert into a sales. Besides, affiliate marketing is crap and no matter how well you choose banners or advertisers, it simply won't work for many sites. We ran affiliate banners on one of our sites and the only result was thousands of pageviews for advertisers, and no clicks or leads for us. And we were a highly successful niche operator too, generating millions of pageviews for our advertisers (our clients). Sometimes things just don't work - period.
First 10-20 submissions a day, after you have your PR 4-5 or even 6, you can go up to 100 submissions a day..if there are directories where you don't already add your site
For affiliate marketing, I would not recommend having banners, as text links are proven to have a much higher CTR. It's quite simple. Would you rather click on a big banner ad, or read an article that helps you make a decition about wheter or not the product is worth your money, and click the little text link to the product website? I would click the link
Actually, we thought of that. And even with affiliate text links - the results were still zero clicks or leads. Like I said, affiliate anything is a bad bad idea. Sending 1000's of pageviews and good branding to companies that are only paying 10 cents per click - no thanks. It's just too bad a deal, they get massive branding on loads of sites, while the affiliates get a crap payoff hehehe. Many fall for it too.
You might agree, but one method isn't enough, when you need 50 others. A couple of thousand links won't help either or do you think you're the only one with a few links? Even if you get 1'000 links over a period of 12 months, 20'000 other websites will get the same, meaning you're back to where you started from. Okay, the figure may not be accurate, but you get the picture. Some sites have tens of thousands of links, and it doesn't mean anything! It takes years to become established - years.
That's where the domain age comes. Just submit your link to quality sites. Who would you consider, a site that has 100 thousand backlinks on a PR0 or a site that has 10 backlinks on a PR7 sites?