Spamming

If you're like me, you're sick and tired of receiving hundreds of spam messages in your mailbox every morning, and you would not consider buying anything they had to offer, even if it's something you really wanted.

Needless to say, spammers are not most decent people in world, and it comes as no surprise that many of them are also scam artists posing as eBay or PayPal to steal your credit card information. Everday inexperienced and unsuspecting internet users continue to fall prey to unscrupulous characters from dark corners of cyberspace.

While spamming is not a completely ineffective promotion tactic, I don't recommend it as a way to promote your site at all. Not only is spamming highly intrusive and unethical, but it could also get you into a lot of trouble. Just imagine how many people you'd have to anger to make a sale or to get a visitor to your site. The search engines will ban your site when they find out that you have been spamming. Various laws are now being made to prosecute spammers.

Pop-up/Pop-under Traffic Schemes

Have you seen ads offering "1,000 visitors for $9.95"?

Consider this: many companies are willing to pay up to $10 or more for every visitor Google or Overture sends to their site. Why wouldn't they spend their $10 to get 1,000 visitors from pop-up ad brokers, instead?

Perhaps they're smart enough to realize that 1,000 "visitors" they would get from having their sites displayed in pop-up and pop-under windows on other sites are worth less than one legitimate visitor Google or Overture sends them.

While not necessarily unethical, pop-up advertising is no longer as effective as it used to be. Most web surfers find pop-ups annoying and intrusive, and many now use pop-up blockers to avoid them. Even those who don't have blockers installed on their browsers have grown accustomed to instinctively close pop-ups and pop-unders without taking a glance at them.

A pop-up exchange is a program that allows members to show pop-up windows linking to one another's site. As a member of exchange, your site would display a pop-up linking to another member's site every time someone visits your site. There is usually an exchange ratio involved. A 2:1 exchange ratio means that for every two pop-ups you show on your site, your pop-up would be displayed once on someone else's site.

Still, thousands others wait for their generous checks from all sorts of affiliate programs and laugh all way to bank, every month. I make good money from an affiliate program using articles as main part of my affiliate marketing strategy.

But what is more is that there are plenty of other guys out there doing same, although some of them use more expensive methods than free articles. For example, recently I personally saw a monthly check for $15,000 shown to me by a friend involved in a leading affiliate marketing program.

So what is difference between frustrated and successful?

The difference is that top earners have an affiliate marketing system for generating a constant supply of leads or traffic to web sites they represent. In contrast, ones who do not make any money do not have any system. They often just sit back and wait for things to happen. Sorry folks hype is just not true. You have to put in some effort!

In this first article in a series, we will deal with 3 key factors one needs to address to launch a successful affiliate marketing strategy using articles that can work for virtually any affiliate program.

1) You must know what works and what doesn’t.

The problem with most affiliate programs is that you will not be able to know where your traffic is coming from. Online that is a disaster. It is like flying an aircraft blind. Sooner or later you will crush.

A good solution is to start a blog with an identical topic to your affiliate program. Use a good site meter to carefully monitor traffic you are receiving. You can then easily refer people who visit your blog to your affiliate site. To make your blog even more interesting you can carry Google Adsense pay per click ads. This way you can have some income even as you build up your affiliate program. Use articles that you are posting elsewhere on your blog.

While generating revenue from your blog, do not lose sight of your main objective which is to monitor what articles posted at which web sites are bringing in most traffic. You can then use this information to constantly improve on volume of traffic headed to your affiliate program site.