It really feels bad when you wake up one day to find that your income has been unplugged by someone playing GOD over you. And do you know what’s even worse? when someone makes up a rumor that affiliate marketing is dead because HIS sites are gone.
It’s really bad because it makes new affiliates give up although this statement about the death of affiliate marketing could not be further from the truth.
I am an affiliate and I am making my living out of affiliate marketing and promoting other people’s sites and products. And this whole “death of affilaite marketing” thing is nothing but a rumor. At least not due to the latest Google updates.
First of all I don’t rely on Google’s search engine traffic in my business. I am a “paid traffic” guy. And that’s for a reason: I am running a business. To run a business you need to know your ROI on everything you do before you decide to do it. With paid traffic I can do that. With Google’s organic traffic I can NOT do that due to those updates of his.
Still, I get organic traffic from Google search results to all of my websites. And due to the large number of sites that I have I can tell whether this is a trend or not. So let’s get into it.
Some of my sites have been hit badly by the new updates. By badly I mean losing more than half of the traffic they were getting from big ol’G. Other sites moved up and are getting more traffic.
The rest of the story is more important …
Most of the sites that were hit badly started to climb up again and caught up with the first page once more. Still this is not the whole story yet.
What’s ironic in this movement is that my income from those sites is almost the same as before the updates. And that’s because Google’s traffic represents less than 5% of the total traffic I am getting to my sites.
That’s right. Less than 5% of my traffic is from organic search engine results. The rest comes mainly from paid traffic. But this is not all.
If you are on my list or have been following my pdfs you’d know that I have a method for free traffic that has nothing to do with Google and it’s my favorite free traffic method. It worked for me 5 years ago, last year, before Google updates, after Google updates, and is still working until now.
And this method is article marketing, but not as you know it.
Most of the courses that teach article marketing, like “my online income system“, focus on two concepts that I don’t like:
1. Getting back links from the articles directories and if you’re lucky you’ll get some from publisher’s sites as well, and
2. Ranking the article in search engines so that they send you traffic!
And that’s for a reason, Google gives authority to big sites with large numbers of pages and you have a better chance ranking your article in search engine results if you publish them on those big sites than on your small site.
My method is built on a totally different concept:
1. Your articles are not going to be spammy articles. On the contrary, you’ll be writing really good articles and will publish them on your site first. There was a rule of 500 words, forget that. Don’t limit yourself to the number of words and write for the readers. Impress them.
2. Rewrite your articles (dont’ spin them, really rewrite them) and publish them on article directories. A really good article will be picked by other sites, and here comes your back link. The most important thing here is to ignore that “anchor link” thing because this is what identifies a spammy link. Just place a plain url for your website.
3. Also the good article (the one on your site and that one on the article directory) will pick up traffic quickly if you go viral on Facebook because you’ll be proud to share it and your friends will also share it. And here comes some traffic to your site from the social giant.
4. Contact the owners of the websites that published your article and offer them more articles written just for them. Mention the panda and they’ll thank you for your offer. Now you can include the anchored links in your articles.
This method has been mentioned elsewhere on this site and on my other site fomt.biz, porbably a bit different now than when I first published it but it’s almost all the same. The main difference is that plain url in the article bio box.
So here you have it. Affiliate marketing is not dead due to Google slaps or anything. But it could die due to something else.
As you might know, I am a CPA guy. Of course I don’t promote trash scammy offers. The same affiliate networks that have the trash also have some good stuff. Since the end of 2011 and utnil now the affiliate networks that I have been working with have been disappearing one after the other. Some file bankruptcy and some are still operating but stopped paying affilaites! Only a couple are still working with me and the mother company of one of them is filing bankruptcy, so it’s all declining. The only networks that have not been touched are Clickbank, Amazon, and Commission Junction among a few others. This is not a good picture for the future of affiliate marketing, although there is an advantage in it (the disappearance of trash offers).
Anyways, sites like Clickbank and Commission Junction look like they’re here to stay around for quite a while, so don’t let those “death of affiliate marketing” voices discourage you. Go ahead and do it.