Gadooney.com

(Umm, wait, what? March is already gone? But February is just supposed to be starting up, not April. Good lord.)

Needless to say, March has been pretty busy, and the posting regularity here has suffered. I’m a bit of two minds about that. One of my minds obviously feels bad, and a bit guilty for not making more of an effort to post daily here. My other (larger) mind is just too busy to worry about such things, especially with so much going on. I picked up a ton of freelance SEO/content creation work this month, which is keeping me very busy. I’m still plugging away at my own sites as well, with further eats into time. Now I suddenly have two houses to get fixed up and on the market, on top of all that, so things have been a little hectic.

As far as how I spent the bulk of the month, I actually managed not to start up any more new sites. I didn’t create a ton of content on the existing sites, spending more of my time trying to build up external links, now that the sites are starting to get indexed in various search engines. I also invested a decent chunk of money and time into simply working smarter, buying tools such as Bookmarking Demon and the SEOBook.

I also started dabbling in promoting ebooks via Clickbank, and had pretty surprising success so far. I wanted to add some CPA products to what I was promoting, just to wean myself away a bit from dependence on Adsense and similar PPC programs. The ebook field is pretty shilly and I feel a bit dirty perpetuating it, but, in the end, if someone wants to buy a shilly guide to help them power level on World of Warcraft, well, more power to them, and I don’t mind getting a piece of that action as an affiliate.

I’ve been a little disappointed with my Adsense results so far, to be honest. It’s been a few years since I played heavily in that field and, like anything on the Internet tubes, things change pretty quickly. In the past the bar was much lower, as far as the ease of getting ranked pretty well for decent paying terms with a minimum of effort. Basically you could slap up a site, optimize the pages, and get enough traffic for it to be worthwhile, without ever really focusing on building out a deep site, submitting it to directories, getting external links, etc.

While that’s still somewhat the case, there’s simply more competition these days, and I’m finding that I can’t simply rely as much on quantity as in the past. So I’m slowing down a bit and spending more time fleshing out the sites, instead of just banging out content pell-mell. Part of it, too, is the realization that I have a lot to learn, having been away from the hardcore SEO scene for a bit, so I’m slowing down a bit in general, and trying to keep my eyes and brain wide open to new ideas and techniques.

Revenue-wise, it’s looking like I’m once again going to come in around the $1,000/net profit mark, after backing out hosting costs and money spent on Adwords campaigns. Which, again, is very welcome, but it’s still skewed towards my poker blog, with is responsible for about 2/3rds of that profit. It’s a bit of a glass half full/half empty scenario, as it’s not the worst thing in the world that I can start up a bunch of sites in January and have them producing $200-$300/month in net profit for me, but that’s not exactly quit your day job money, either, especially considering the amount of time I’ve invested.

It’s pretty easy to chalk up any self-helpy lingo about “embracing failure” to out and out loser talk, but it’s pretty hard to succeed in affiliate marketing (or life, for that matter) without falling on your ass from time to time.

If you subscribe to the notion that experimenting with different types of affiliate content, models, and sites is a good thing, it’s inevitable that some don’t pan out. You wouldn’t know that from perusing most of the affiliate guru sites out there, where people effortlessly crank out sites that make $192,026 within the first sixty days, but the reality is that for every successful profitable site you spawn into the world, most affiliate folks in the trenches have five or six stinking corpses of sites, which actually cost them money.

I’ve been dabbling in the semi-sordid waters of eBook promotion (cough, outright shilling, cough), and had pretty surprising success so far. I wasn’t entirely convinced that people would really fork out cash for eBooks, especially some of the more outlandish, over the top titles out there, promising all sorts of things, but lo and behold, people do seem to actually buy them.

What with my tinkering with Adwords of late, I thought I’d take the eBook promotion to the next logical step, and buy targeted, related keywords. Based on the conversion rate so far from the natural organic search traffic I was getting, it looked like I could make a little extra money from buying clicks through Adwords.

$100 worth of Adwords traffic later and I had exactly 0 eBook sales to show for it. Umm, yeah, nice work. Go, me.

There are lots of moving parts to the above equation, so there’s really no conclusion to be drawn as far as the ultimate potential for sending Adwords clicks though landing pages for eBooks that you’ve created, but for the time being I’m sticking to what’s worked, which is simply going after search traffic the old-fashioned way, with no purchasing of keywords.

Simply put, you don’t know until you try. And the fact that you’ll have four or five failures for every success isn’t a reason not to try. If anything, it’s the best reason to try, as you’ll likely never get very far in the affiliate world if you stay in your comfort zone, exactly copying other approaches that you’ve read or heard about.

While I have babbled muchly about incorporating Google Adsense ads into your affiliate sites, I haven’t really discussed the other side of the equation at all, which is Google Adwords. In general, affiliate marketers tend to use Adsense to monetize their sites, while retailers and other service providers tend to use Adwords to market their products. In some cases, though, affiliates make quite a lot of coin by using the Adwords system, so today we’re going to look at a quick example of that.

Let me start out with a silly sort of warning, as the example I’m going to use is from one of my sites, and it’s something I threew together last night for an example, and is not well-optimized at all. So do as I say, not as I do, mmkay?

The Adwords system lets you create campaigns where you create ads and target certain keywords and keyword phrases. You set a certain amount that you will pay, per click, for your ads, and based on that amount the ads are shown in various positions on pages that are running Google Adsense ads. If you bid higher than anyone else, your ads show up in the top position; bid lower than anyone else, and your ads are on the bottom (or not displayed at all, if too many other ads are ahead of yours).

So right off the bat we’re talking about a bit of a different beast, as far as using Adwords for our nefarious affiliate marketing purposes. Up until this point, everything I’ve discussed is largely free (other than your web hosting and domain registration). Not so with Adwords. This costs you money, for each and every click, so keep that in mind. Tread lightly here, especially when getting your feet wet.

I’ve been experimenting lately with some CPA pages (cost per acquisition) on various sites, just to try some new things. CPA campaigns are a bit different from Adsense, as they’re basically a set fee that you’re paid when a user completes an action (such as submitting a web form for a car quote) or buys an e-book or subscribes to an online membership site. While CPA deals can pay out very well, they’re a bit riskier for affiliates, as it’s all or nothing; either you refer someone who follows through and makes you cash, or you get zero. With Adsense, you can pretty much bank on some revenue, if you run enough ads in front of people, but CPA campaigns have a lot of peaks and valleys and a lot more variance in general.

Back to my example (I know, finally). I’ve been playing around with some campaigns on Azoogle that pay out when users submit their email address, along with name, address, telephone number, and sex. To be honest, most of these are really annoying for the surfer. as they promise a free KRZR phone, but you have to wade through a kajillion survey pages with offers, only to finally find out that you need to complete six subscriptions with people like Columbia House and Stamps.com just to get the damn phone. On the affiliate side, though, you get paid when the surfer reaches the second or third page, which is usually after they’ve submitted personal details, so for some deals it doesn’t matter if they ever buy anything.

I poked around for a deal involving a product that should get decent search traffic, that also wasn’t too godawfully annoying and didn’t ask for credit card info early in the process, as that’s typically a deal killer. If you dangle a nice enough carrot in front of people, you can get email/address/personal details enough for it to be profitable, but it’s insanely hard to get more than that.

I ended up finding an offer to promote a sweepstakes entry for a free 2007 Mustang Shelby, that paid out upon submission of email/personal details only, and pays $2.55 per lead. That’s not great but decent enough, so I decided to give it a whirl. I had an old domain lying around where I created the following page:

Get a 2007 Mustang Shelby for Free

Now, like I forewarned, that page and site are NOT well-optimized. Successfully using Adwords to make money as an affiliate is tricky, as you’re suddenly very much in the world of marketing. I went with a fairly honest pitch on that page, and did little to pretty it up, and it’s very possible that it’d be more successful if it were more shilly, just upselling the free car, doing anything to get people to click through the links. Do not mimic my approach, as it’s pretty clumsy and un-tested, and I just wanted to get something up and run traffic through it and see what happens.

After I created that page, I went to Adwords and started building my campaigns. First you have to create your ad, that shows up in Adsense ads, and again, this takes much practice, refining, and skill, as far as writing ads that attract clicks. This isn’t something I do much of, and honestly, I ain’t that good at it. So keep that in mind. The biggest single factor with using Adwords is to tweak, refine, and analyze your campaigns, until you find what works. Here’s the ad I created for my keywords:

Free 2007 Mustang Shelby
Too good to be true? Find out for
yourself, if you can handle it!
www.bonusbug.com/freemustangshelby

Once your ad is created, then you need to input your keywords. A book could be written on this subject, so I’m just going to show you how to find a big honking list to start with. Refining your keywords and how they’re displayed is important, so again, success here takes some practice and work. For my initial keyword list, I used the Google Keyword tool and simply input “Mustang Shelby”.  I exported that list to CSV, then copy and pasted it into Adwords.

The next step is to set your daily budget limit and your maximum bid foryour keyword terms. I set my daily budget limit to $20 and maximum bid of 0.26. The estimator tool will give you a rough idea of what you should expect to pay each day, but keep in mind it’s a rough estimate. Again, these settings take refining moving forward.

Okay. I did all of the above and let it run. The campaign has been up for about 24 hours and so far I’ve spent $9.56 at Adwords, as far as what I’ve paid overall for the clicks on my ads. At Azoogle, I’ve made $10.20. So, after a day, I’ve made a whopping $0.64. Not going to retire anytime soon, and given the time I spent on setting it up, I’m still in the hole. Due to the nature of the CPA deal, I could easily have made $0, too, so I’d need a better profit margin than the quick, 24 hour results to justify continuing to run the ads, more than likely.
But that’s not quite the entire picture, as I also made $2.60 from clicks on Adsense ads on the Bonusbug website yesterday, and all of the traffic came from the Adwords campaign. To be completely honest, I hadn’t considered that, as far as the people inclined to click on an ad for a shot at winning a car for free also being inclined to respond to other content on a website devoted to free offers, coupon deals, incentives, etc. So that’s something to keep in mind, as far as the possiblity that a break-even Adwords campaign (where your expenses offset your profits) could actually be worthwhile for you, if the traffic it sends to your website sticks around enough to respond to other things there.

So, in a very cursory nutshell, that’s one way to use Adwords as an affiliate to potentially build traffic and profits. Again, playing with Adwords is very tricky and potentially expensive, so poke around on Google and od more research before you try it out. I’m just trying to explain the basic framework here, and this should in no way be seen as a guide to how to do it right.  Just some fodder to get you started and an example of another way that affiliate marketers ply their trade online.

While I’ve had the whole week off from the day job, the vast majority of my time has gone into trying to get two houses up to speed and ready to sell, so I haven’t had much time for affiliate marketing work. What time I have put into the sites has been more in the vein of monotonous drudgery, as far as updating WordPress on all the sites, getting some new plugins set up, making sure all the .htaccess files are good to go, setting up each site in my admin console at Google Webmaster Tools, yada yada yada.

Now that the sites are getting some search traffic, the real work really starts, as far as scheming up ways to build links, working harder to squeeze as much money as possible out of what traffic the sites are getting, and other fun stuff.

Back to the monkey manual labor. Whee…

Despite Aaron Wall’s SEO Book getting positive reviews and plugs from just about anybody who is anybody in the world of affiliate marketing and SEO, I’d held off on buying a copy for myself, until earlier this week. Why would I wait so long to give it a whirl, when it’s more than patently clear that it’s a valuable resource? Well, honestly, I’m pretty much a cheap-ass, and $79 is a lot to spend on an e-book, especially when there’s a goodly chance that I already am familiar with a lot of the material.

Having worked my way through most of the 300+ pages of SEO Book, I have to say I’m pretty happy with the purchase. Most of it wasn’t that new to me, having picked up bits and pieces of what’s covered in it over the years, but it’s really well-organized and well-written, and packs a lot of meat into it. If you’re just getting started, it’s a pretty amazing resource and will literally shave years of wasted time off your learning curve.

Probably most importantly, SEO Book is heavy on the solid fundmentals, as far as guiding you through the entire process, as far as how search engines work, how to write good content, how to structure your site, and so on. It’s also very white-hat, relying on solid basic principles to improve the rankings of your sites and pages, instead of dealing with much more dodgy practices that might work today, but won’t a week from now. Yeah, the title is SEO Book, but another alternative, much longer title could be something like “Learn How to Create Solid, Fundamental Content and Websites that Will Rank Well in Search Engines for Years to Come”, as that’s more what the book focuses on, as opposed to the minutiae of things like optimizing your alt-img tags.

You also get some other useful freebies with the book, such as a listing and ranking of various paid and free directories to submit your sites to, and access to other keyword research tools and other good stuff. You also get free access to any updated future editions, which is actually pretty useful for something like this, as Aaron updates it frequently to reflect the rapidly changing world of SEO.

On the down side, it’s in pdf format and it’s 300+ pages, so unless you can print it out at work on the company dime, you’re probably faced with reading it on your computer or printing out sections at a time, which can be a bit of a chore.

All in all, though, SEO Book is definitely worth checking out. $79 ain’t cheap, especially for us tight-asses of the world, but it’s money well spent, and will pay for itself if you’re serious about the affiliate marketing thing and take the advice to heart.

(Remember, if you’re playing along at home and would like a review of your site, just shoot me an email or comment and it shall be so.)

Best Air Miles Deals is an interesting idea for an affiliate site, and a bit different than most sites I’ve talked about here. Most of the sites I’ve been cranking out are pretty squarely targeted at search engine traffic, and aren’t necessarily designed to build an audience and keep them around. There are some exceptions (such as this site and a few others), but by and large I find potentially profitable niches, build small sites with content driven by keywords for those niches, then move on, with no real effort to make the site sticky.

Best Air Miles Deals, though, is completely different. Jeff has set up the site so that, from day 1, you have to keep returning to his site, if you’re interested in finding the best way to maximize the air miles you accumulate. He’s doing a lot of the research and legwork for potential readers, so they’re locked in to checking back to his site, each and every day, if they want to tap into his knowledge. It’s not only potentially sticky and interactive, but it also leaves interested readers no choice but to return.

It’s also got some nice tie-ins to existing affiliate programs, especially with credit card affiliate programs. Those are some of the most lucrative out there, paying a very high cost-per acquisition (CPA) rate for everyone you refer who signs up for a credit card, and it’s a very natural fit to market those, given the nature of the site. Any niche with high CPA deals also tends to pay pretty well for clicks to Adsense ads, too, so that’s working in your favor as well.

As a whole, the site layout is solid enough. The category structure works well for you and I think opening up posts to comments is smart, especially as the site gets traffic and people start leaving comments, as that could be a draw in and of itself, especially if savvy people leave comments about other great air miles deals, etc. (I might tweak the theme a bit to remove the background colored box for the comments section, as all of those horizontal boxes are a little intimidating, but that’s more in the personal taste realm, and it’s fine as is).

As far as suggestions and possible improvements, don’t be afraid to be an expert (even if you don’t consider yourself one). The current “About” section is honest and accurate, but it isn’t the most compelling of tales. If I’m a random reader who lands on the site, I’m not exactly overwhelmed by the fact that you’ve only been accumulating air miles for 6 months and are halfway to earning a free flight (or already have earned one, the text is a bit unclear).

Should you lie instead, and claim to have earned millions of air miles from the tips and tactics you recommend on the site? Well, I’m not going to tell you to lie, necessarily, but I’m also not not going to tell you to lie, either. Remember, there’s no law that says that the persona writing the content for the site has to be you. Affiliate sites exist to make you money, nothing more, nothing less.

In a case like this, I’d ask myself the following questions, if I were debating whether to adopt a more “experienced” persona for the site. Am I completely misleading users and talking about something I’m far from an expert about? In this case, no. You obviously are good at playing the air miles game, and users still get great tips on maxing out their own air miles. Are you taking advantage of readers somehow by pretending to be more expert? Again, no, you’re just spinning the text in a slightly different way. So, personally speaking, I’d probably adopt a more experienced, wheeling-and-dealing persona for the site, but that’s just me.

The biggest obstacle for a site like this is going to be all of the legwork you have to do, as far as finding good deals and constantly posting content to the site. It’s not the sort of site that you can let sit for weeks at a time, slowly building content for, etc. Because most of the deals are time-sensitive, you have to keep feeding new deals into the hopper, or risk losing any readers that you accumulate over time. So your load is doubled, as far as maintaining the site, since you not only have to constantly find good deals, but also post about them on the site.

Marketing the site and growing traffic will be a bit different, too. You’ll have to take a slightly more active role in growing traffic, as far as taking part in existing forum sites devoted to coupons/deals such as FatWallet.com, and siphon people off to your site via strategic use of signtaure URLs, direct links to your content, etc. While search engine traffic is always good, you really want to attract active users who play the air miles game themselves, and who will comment with the own deals they find, as that’s when the site will really take off.

In that vein, this would be a good site to consider adding an email collection box in the sidebar, as far as a breaking-deal sort of alert that people could sign up for and get emailed about, when you find a really nice deal somewhere. It’s kind of a pain to manage such things but it can be invaluable for sites like this, as it gives you a way to ping people and remind them that hey, there’s that cool website out there about air mile deals that I used to check out but had forgotten about. It’s also a very natural fit, as far as an email service, and would probably get more people signing up as opposed to a generic email collection box on a site about wombats, which would have no real reason to ever need to email people.

All in all, you’re off to a great start. It’s going to be a lot of work to do it up right and maintain it, but the site definitely has legs and is an interesting idea. Interactive community sites like that are harder to get rolling, for all the obvious reasons, but once they acquire momentum they tend to pick up steam quickly, as users end up shouldering much of the workload themselves.

Yesterday we covered using ezine articles to start building links to your sites once you’re getting some traction getting indexed in search engines, so today we’re going to look at another good way to start building incoming links to your sites, which involves using social bookmarking sites to full effect.

To recap slightly, when I launch new sites I tend to look at the launch as basically a two-stage process. The first part is, for lack of a better term, the throw-content-on-the-wall-and-see-what sticks phase, where I’ll start up a bunch of sites, post lots of content to them, and not worry about much else. I try not to limit myself or overanalyze things. Since it typically takes months for new sites to get listed in search engines, I don’t worry too much about anything other than getting content up. You still need to pick good niches and subjects for sites, which stand a good chance to be profitable for you, and you still need to optimize the structure and layout of your sites, but I don’t usually chase links and traffic in the first stage.

Once I start to get some love from the search engines, then I start to get serious about the second stage, which is building up the links that point to your site. Some people argue that links are important to get your content fully indexed in the first place, which is true, but personally I’ve found it much easier to build incoming links once I have a goodly amount of content up. It also helps me weed out some clunker sites, as far as ideas I try that turn out to be difficult in practice, so by waiting until they either get some search engine traffic on their own, unaided, I avoid wasting time building incoming links to sites that turn out to not be the best idea in practice, as far as getting traffic and making money.

We’ve touched on social bookmarking sites before when discussing traffic sources, but we haven’t really talked about using them to build quality inbound links to your sites. The idea is really simple and doesn’t need much explaining. When a page of yours gets bookmarked at Digg or del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking site, an incoming link to your affiliate site is created. So completely aside from the chance that it might send traffic to your site, each page of yours that is bookmarked on social bookmarking sites create an incoming link to your site.

Not all incoming links are created equal, as some social bookmarking sites are configured to not pass PageRank to your site (this basically means that not all links to your pages on social bookmarking sites help your page get a boost in search engine results), but pretty much any link to your site is a good thing.

So how do we get links to our pages on social bookmarking sites? Well, one obvious way is to write lots of great content that people are inclined to bookmark. For most affiliate sites, though, that’s a bit hard. It’s also kind of a chicken/egg conundrum, as you need lots of traffic for someone to be inclined to bookmark your page somewhere (since a relatively small number of surfers are active social bookmarkers), and most sites don’t have that kind of traffic at the beginning. It’s also difficult as affiliate content can be rather shilly at times, and not exactly the meatiest of content that someone will bookmark. While you can incorporate easy buttons and links on your pages that make it super easy for users to bookmark the page to various sites, no matter how easy you make it you still need traffic.
Instead of just sitting there, hoping and praying that people bookmark your content, you can pursue a more active role, albeit a slightly sneaky one. Register an account at social bookmarking sites and bookmark your pages yourself. Yeah, I know, it kind of undercuts the higher-minded ideals that such sites are based on, but, umm, it works. I’m not saying that everyone should run out and do this or any other slightly sleazy technique I might cover here, I’m just giving you some options.

So you’d basically create accounts at all of the social bookmarking sites, log-in as a user, and bookmark your affiliate pages/sites that you’d like to generate links to. Pretty simple and effective, but it’s also rather time consuming, as you need to create accounts at each site, manage your log-in/passwords at each site, and track which pages you’ve submitted where, etc.

You can extend the above idea one step further, and use automation to generate even more backlinks from social bookmarking sites.  This is verging into black-hat territory, as far as outright manipulation of various systems to artifically boost your pages in search engine results, so be forewarned. One tool to automate the social bookmarking posting process is Bookmarking Demon, which not only automatically creates accounts for you at many different social bookmarking sites, but has the ability to store your login/password information, so that you simply enter the URL and keywords for the page you want to submit, hit go, and the software automatically posts your page to many different sites.

Bookmarking Demon is far from cheap, but I’ve been using it for a awhile and it’s been well worth the expense. For a free alternative to simultaneously post pages to multiple social bookmarking sites (although it has many fewer features and functionality), you can try also OnlyWire.

Again, I fully understand that this technique will not be everyone’s cup o’ tea. Like I said, just throwing things out there, and the choice is up to you as far as how aggressively you want to pursue promoting your sites, generating links and traffics, and any other number of affiliate schemings that go on to try to make money online.

Once your sites have been kicking around for a few months, with good juicy content finally getting indexed in search engines and producing some traffic for you, it’s time to start shifting gears a bit. You still need to continue to crank out content, as that’s the lifeblood of any affiliate site, but you also need to start focusing on getting backlinks to all that great content you’re producing.

I’ve already discussed a few ways to manufacture backlinks to your site (including forum posts and outbound links), but I’ve been saving others that are a little more time consuming initially, but pay off dividends in the long run. Remember, backlinks are basically links from other external sites that point back to your pages.

So, looping back to the title, today we’re going to look at using ezine articles as a way of generating strategic backlinks to your affiliate sites. This is pretty standard fare in the affiliate world and nothing new or groundbreaking, but lots of folks starting out might not know about it, or how it works.

The idea is pretty simple. Write a general article related to the theme of your site and post it at a site like Ezinearticles.com. The sky is pretty much the limit as far as the length and format, and you can browse around on their site to get a general idea of what most articles look like.

You want the article to be informative and reasonably well-written, but don’t try to write an epic masterpiece. Pick something you know and spend 10-15 minutes writing a clear, concise article on it. It’s best to pick a fairly narrow topic, which can be covered quickly and painlessly.

Here’s an example of an article I posted for my Patio to Pool site: How to Build a Concrete Patio.

Decent enough, but no great shakes. So why’d I bother with writing it, creating an account at Ezinearticles.com and submitting it there? Scroll all the way down and you’ll notice there’s a bio section at the bottom, that allows you to include links to your own websites, with anchor text of your choosing.

That’s the real value here, especially when combined with the way that ezine article sites in general work. The model for those sites is that authors and website owners post articles, which can then be freely used by anyone with a website who needs free content to fill it up. So while you basically give up the content that you post there for free, in exchange you potentially get backlinks from any site that takes your article and publishes it on their site, as they have to post the entire text, including the bio section with your anchor text and link to your affiliate site.

That’s the idea, in a nutshell. You’re not really doing it for the potential traffic that might result from people clicking through the bio link, but for the link itself, as Google and other search engines factor in all the links that point to you, as well as the anchor text of the link itself. Since you control all of that (as you get to write the bio and link and anchor text yourself), ezine articles can be a great way of building quality, optimized links that point to your affiliate site.

There are a few things to keep in mind, though. If you’re using pre-existing articles or content from your site as the text of the article you submit, be aware of the fact that it may hurt the ability of that page on your site to rank well in search engine results. Other sites that publish your article might have a higher PageRank, so search engines will boost your content on their site above that same content on your site. So don’t give get lazy and give away the crown jewels, as far as just copying and pasting stuff you’ve already written into article form and submitting it.

You also should consider varying the anchor text you include in your bio, and not always use the same anchor text. You also don’t have to link to your home page, either (as I did in the above example article), as you could link to an inner page, too. So if I wrote an article on “How to Build a Japanese Water Garden”, I could instead use a bio text/link of something like “Check out my patio and pool site for info on Japanese water gardens and more!”

Another thing to keep in mind is that this technique takes time to bear fruit, as you need to get lots of articles out there, and they have to actually be picked up by other website owners looking for content to populate their sites with. Depending on your niche, that may take quite awhile, so this isn’t a slam dunk, immediate way to boost your backlinks, PageRank, and search engine traffic.

As far as places to submit your articles to, in addition to Ezinearticles.com there are tons and tons of similar article submission sites. You can find lists by running Google searches on “ezine articles” as well as hitting some of the below links, which I’ve used at various times in the past (I haven’t combed through the full list below in awhile so some of these may no longer be active):

www.findbusinessarticles.com
www.addme.com
www.allthewebsites.org
www.amazines.com
www.articlealley.com
www.articlebin.com
www.articlecentral.com
http://www.articlecity.com/
www.article-directory.net
www.article-emporium.com
www.articlefinders.com
www.articlesfactory.com
www.articlessource.com
www.articlesumbissions.com
www.articlewarehouse.com
www.articleworld.net
www.authorconnection.com
www.awebhostingprovider.com
www.businesstoolchest.com
http://www.buzzle.com/
www.commonconnections.com
www.connectionteam.com
www.constant-content.com
www.easyarticles.com
www.ezinearticles.com
www.family-content.com
www.fresh-articles.com
www.freezinesite.com
http://www.goarticles.com/
www.ideamarketers.com
www.isnare.com
www.marketingpitbull.com
www.searchwarp.com
www.uniterra.com
www.womens-netnews.com

It takes awhile to initially register for each site as an author (I’d recommend storing all that stuff in an Excel file as far as author ID and password for each site, to speed up logging in and posting to each site in the future), but it’s time well-spent, as you want to get your articles out to as many sites as possible.

Sorry for the lights going a bit dark in these parts of late, but real life has been kicking me in the butt of late, and I’ve had more important stuff to wrestle with than all of my silly web schemery detailed here.

On the bright side, things have settled down and the time off was good for me, as far as recharging the batteries a bit. I’ve got some new content in the works here, as well as a few site reviews and other stuff to roll out over the next few days.

Dabble in the affiliate marketing world for very long and you’ll realize that the ability to juggle is definitely very, very valuable. For all of those of us with a day job (not to mention a spouse, family, or life in general), there’s only so much time in the day and only so many things one person can do.

If you take a generalist approach and have many affiliate sites up and running, prioritizing and working efficiently gets even harder, as you’re always facing a mountain of work, always neglecting whatever site you’re not currently working on. No matter how motivated you may be, sometimes the mountain overwhelms you, and the end result is that you do absolutely nothing, saying any number of variations of a phrase like “Ugh, too much, not today.”

I’ve been doing this stuff for years and years and that last one still bites me in the ass. I can preach all day about the value of writing something, anything, each and every day, but I still come up empty occasionally, usually at the worst time, as far as having many, many things that need doing.

One thing that helps me get out of that rut is kind of bass-ackwards, but it works. Lists tend to paralyze me, and while a routine is good (when your workload is manageable and everything is clicking along), sometimes that routine itself becomes an excuse not to get work done.

If you tend to get work done early in the morning but, due to feeling overwhelmed by the mountain of stuff to do, put off doing work that morning, odds are you aren’t going to carve out time later in the day. Ditto if you work later in the evening, as delaying doing anything has a tendency to result in later saying “Hey, look, now it’s bedtime, I’ll work on that affiliate crap tomorrow.”

So how do I get out of that nasty feedback loop when I find myself stuck in it? As backwards as it sounds, I try not to obsess on what needs to be done and surprise myself by suddenly sitting down and cranking out some content, just doing the first thing that comes to my mind.

My wife thinks I’m crazy, but I’ll be in the middle of yardwork and stop, come in, and write for 15 minutes or so. Or putting away laundry, when I suddenly disappear and bang on the keyboard for awhile. Or watching television.

It’s not that I’m some mad scientist and suddenly inspired, but more that I’m tricking myself into just doing work, without the whole internal monologue that normally accompanies it, as far as telling myself I need to get work done, making up elaborate reasons why I don’t want or need to, promising myself I’ll do twice as much tomorrow to catch up, yada yada yada.

Once you have a number of affiliate sites up, the nice thing is that it’s pretty easy to bang out content here and there, as you’re typically talking about fairly short, concise pages. I keep a list of potentially profitable keywords for all my sites geared towards search engine traffic so it’s simply a matter of sitting down, pulling up a list, and writing a couple of pages.

While it’s kind of dumb, tricking myself into working usually gets me over whatever hump of malaise I’m stuck on, and back into my normal routine of slowly and steadily generating content on a variety of sites.