Good Writing is Good Writing is Good Writing

One fun thing about this project so far is that I’ve gotten a lot of emails and comments from people, which is not only cool and and of itself, but it makes me feel a bit more useful in general, as far as addressing particular questions and concerns. I’m going to spend a day or two knocking out a lot of the questions that have cropped up, as most are practical, nuts-and-bolts, and things I sometimes take for granted and forget to slow down and cover in at least some detail.

One common bit of feedback that’s cropped up a lot is something along the lines of “I’m not an affiliate at the moment and have no immediate plans to be, but I’m digging the site, keep up the good work.” My initial knee-jerk response is, hey, thanks, and then I start thinking and worrying that people might simply see “affiliate marketing” and think Amway and immediately close the browser.

This also dovetails, in slant fashion, with some feedback I’ve gotten from experienced affiliates about the wisdom in launching a site where the primary purpose is to educate people as to how to make money via affiliate marketing, since that necessarily involves creating more competition for anyone in the affiliate arena.

The common thread (in my head at least), is that I really don’t feel like I’m trying to teach people to be successful affiliate marketers here so much as I’m trying to teach people how to write good content for the Web. Which. really, can be distilled even further to trying to teach people to write good content, or, even more simply, to write good.

Lots of guides to affiiate marketing are heavy on the technical side of things, as far as breaking down what elements are most heavily incorporated into search engine algorithms and helping you isolate and manpulate them to your advantage. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it works and has value, but it throws you into an endless loop of chasing whatever the current trend is in SEO, as far as what the search engine algorithms currently value, which is always subject to change in a week or two. If you play that game, you end up endlessly tweaking and fiddling with sites, changing link structures, using different elements in your pages, rejiggerng keywor density, and on and on and on.

If you haven’t noticed by now, I tend to stay away from that stuff, to a large extent. While it has value, most of us are working with a finite amount of time, and I pretty strongly feel that you’re time is much better spent by sticking to the much simpler game plan of writing something every day, sticking to topics you know and enjoy, and creating focused, well-written pages.

Not only will sticking to those simple concepts help you make money in the affiliate world, but they’ll also help you get traffic to any Web site that post content to, whether it’s a personal blog, a fan site for your favorite band, or a site for a business you own. Pulling back even further, training yourself to write content that is concise, focused, and consistent can be valuable at your day job as well, especially in a day and age when many people sadly can’t even string together more than one or two coherent sentences.

While the goal of this site isn’t going to change (it’s still going to be focused on helping you cash in on some of that juicy money floating around in the world of affiliate marketing), it’s important to note that the main method I’ll be using is to illustrate the value of good writing, first and foremost, which can be extended far past the narrow world of affiliate marketing and can be valuable in all sorts of ways.

Good Writing is Good Writing is Good Writing and related information can be found in Getting Started