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I talked about this a bit back in the early days of this site, but the last six months or so have been a bit odd for me, as an affiliate marketer. I’d put almost all of my affiliate eggs in the casino and poker basket the last few years, which was unceremoniously tipped over last October with the passage of the UIGEA.

Since then I’ve been casting about, launching new affiliate sites, trying a bit of this, a bit of that, and slowly rebuilding my monthly income. With an emphasis on “slowly”, as it’s been a bit of a grind, especially since I was pretty spoiled in the past with some of the juicy CPA payments from casino and poker sites.

While my wallet may be lighter, the experience has been good, though, and I feel like I’m expanding the bag o’ tricks, even if it’s a niche or idea that I don’t pursue full-bore moving forward. Promoting eBooks falls directly into that category, as far as something I’d never done before, that made me a little money, and is not a bad option to have in your affiliate toolbox.

I read an article on EarnersBlog a few months back about promoting eBooks on Clickbank, which provides an affiliate program to promote a variety of eBooks and earn a commission as an affiliate whenever someone buys the eBook.

The idea is fairly simple, but with a few twists. Sign up at Clickbank, search for eBooks that you’d like to promote, and write up some reviews for the eBooks, praising their virtues. 

The ultimate style and tone is up to you, as far as whether you attempt to be an impartial reviewer, an enthusiastic devotee to the eBook, etc. Over-the-top enthusiasm worked best for me, but your mileage will vary here.

Do some basic keyword research first, after selecting an eBook to promote. If it’s a guide to power leveling on World of Warcraft, poke around with your favorite keyword research tool to find phrases to target that are highly searched on, such as “WoW Horde leveling guide”, “World of Warcraft leveling guide”, etc.

I wrote three different reviews for each product, each targeting and optimized for a different phrase that was highly searched on. Don’t write an epic tome as far as the review, just make sure it’s well-optimized for the subject. I typically wrote three or four paragraphs, from 300-500 words each, with many links to the eBook embedded throughout.

The next step is the slightly unusal one, as far as publishing your reviews. Typically you’d put them on a website of yours and wait days/weeks/months for them to get indexed by search engines, etc. In this case, though, you publish them on a third-party site, with USFreeAds and Squidoo being good options.

The reason you don’t publish them on your own site is that both of the above sites are regularly spidered with new content published on them almost immediately getting indexed and ranked well for even competitive terms, due to the high PageRank and authority that both sites pass on to content. Your eBook reviews should be ranked and getting clicks in search engines within days, often grabbing top three spots in Google right off the bat. It would likely take weeks to months to replicate that same effect if you’d published the content on your own site, unless you’re sitting on a very authoritative PR6 or above site.

Once your reviews are indexed and producing search traffic, it’s basically a numbers game. If you write good, compelling copy and get enough traffic, you’ll inevitably get some conversions. It depends on the eBook and your marketing skills, but some of my best reviews were converting at 1 sale for every 100 clicks, which isn’t bad at all for a slightly schlocky product like an eBook.

Keep in mind, too, that your out-of-pocket expenses are very, very low. You don’t even need a website of your own, as you’re publishing the content on a third party site. Posting on Squidoo is free and USFreeAds charges a nominal monthly fee for a basic account, under $10/month, and you’ll make that back plus some with your first sale.

So what’s the catch, and why am I speaking about my efforts here in the past tense? The biggest drawback for me was that while the reviews initially ranked well and got gobs of traffic, they pretty quickly fall out of those top spots in search engine results. Even with extra effort to build a variety of optimized incoming links to the reviews, I couldn’t make them stick in search engines.

It also was fairly time consuming, as far as writing the reviews themselves, and Clickbank has all sorts of issues, from lack of support to track clicks to more serious issues about not crediting affiliates for all sales. Unfortunately, there’s not a good alternative to them, if you want to promote eBooks, which is the only reason I’m mentioning them here.

In the end I made a bit over $500, so it wasn’t a total loss. I probably invested 20 hours or so in te project, so a $25/hr earn rate isn’t too bad at all. What ultimately turned me off the project was more psychological, as I didn’t necessarily enjoy writing the schlocky, over-the-top reviews for eBooks that I’d never read and were more than often a waste of money for the poor sap that bought them. I also didn’t feel as if I was working towards anything, due to the fact that the content was published on another site that I was building links and traffic for, even when I was making a bit of scratch for my efforts.

Those issues aside, it’s not a bad technique to have in reserve, as far as a way to make some affiliate money with a very quick turnaround. If you’re willing to keep banging out the reviews and constantly put up new ones to replace the old ones that fall out of search results, you can make some decent money, without waiting for months for your content production efforts to really kick in and start making you some money.

While I’m not out of the crazy-bust woods just yet, I can sort of see daylight, peeking through the trees. Many apologies to my 4 faithful readers who keep checking back, looking for new content here.

One nice thing about the somewhat forced hiatus from my online affiliate scheming while I tackled umpteen other projects was the reminder that one nice aspect of affiliate marketing is that you don’t even have to be driving the mothership actively to make money. Yes, indeed, you need to always be hustling new content and getting stuff out there, but things will indeed click along on their own for quite awhile, making you money, once you get lots of irons in the fire. I actually had my best month in quite awhile in April, and barely had time to add much of anything to any of my sites.

Still a bit pressed for time, but plans are to ease back into the posting saddle here. I’ve got all sorts of ideas for posts, and the plan is to get a little more specific and advanced, now that anyone following along at home has got the basic chops down, as far as getting sites up, picking niches, comfortable with banging out content, and all that good stuff.

Much of my affiliate work of late has been centered around trying to make the most of the traffic I’ve got, as opposed to cranking out new content, and I’ve been trying out various programs, kicking the tires of this program, trying that new program, etc. In no particular order, I thought I’d share some of the results here from some of the newer programs I’ve been trying, for the folks interested in such things:

• Text Link Ads continues to treat me very well, and I’d highly recommend them for anyone with a blog who’s looking to make some extra bucks. They pay promptly at the first of the month and have an active base of advertisers looking to buy text links on blogs like yours. They pocket a large chunk of what the advertiser pays, so you’re likely better off selling text links on your site directly if you can from a pure dollars and cents perspective, but they provide access to your site to a much wider range of potential advertisers.
• AuctionAds is a new program that’s very similar to Google Adsense, except it features eBay auctions. What’s nice is that you can target the ads using keywords that fit your site, so it’s more niche-friendly than some programs, and since it pulls from eBay listings it almost always can find something relevant to display, unlike similar programs such as Chitika. It’s also not a PPC program, so you can potentially make more if you refer someone to an eBay listing and they’re the winning bidder, since you get a percentage cut of the final purchase price. If someone drops $500 on a poker table, you’re obviously a lot better off getting a percentage of that action instead of getting paid something like .20 per click, like you do with Adsense.
• Sponsored Reviews is a new paid review site, much like ReviewMe, but with a twist. In their system, you set your review price, then you browse through all of the potential reviews that advertisers have listed. If you find one you’d like to review, you subit an application and your price. If accepted, you write the review and get paid. I just signed up so no trip report on payment promptness, etc., but on the surface I prefer the way it works to ReviewMe, as I’d rather see all the opportunities instead of sitting around, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for an advertiser to send me an offer.
• Agloco swears that its rolling out its viewbar thingamabob, that’ll pay users for surfing the Web, but that’s been their claim for a few months now. Honestly, who knows if this thing will really make anyone money in the end, either people using the viewbar to get paid for surfing or affiliates who have referred lots of people. I have no clue, but hey, you’ve got little to lose from signing up and encouraging others to do so. If anyone makes money from this thing, it’ll be people who get in on the ground floor and have lots of referrals under them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A .htaccess file is a simple little file that sits on the root level of your site and can do all sorts of nifty things for you. It’s kind of a freak in the world of HTML, as your site can function just fine without one, so it’s not exactly necessary, but it can also do heavy, important lifting for you, if you use it correctly.

Here’s the official definition of a .htaccess file from Apache, as well as when and when not to use one. One key thing to keep in mind is that the below is for Unix/Linux servers with Apache set up. That’s by far the most common setup for hosting accounts these days, so if you’re not sure what you’re running, odds are that you’re good to go.

For our purposes, we’re not going to worry so much about the permissioning side of .htaccess files, as far as protecting directories, etc. We’re just going to focus on ways to use the .htaccess file to make sure that our content gets indexed correctly, that error pages are handled efficiently, and that we keep spam comments down to a minimum.

First we have to create a .htaccess file. One thing to keep in mind is that it’s a different type of file than others, as far as it’s name and format. It’s not short for anything and there’s nothing extra tacked onto the file name. It truly is .htaccess, nothing more, nothing less.

The easiest way to create one is to open up Notepad and create and save a file that’s called .htaccess.txt. (The .txt part is necessary and unavoidable but we’ll remove it later after uploading the file via FTP to the root of our website.)

So you’ve created the empty file. The first step is to set up how you want your site to handle pages that are accessed and produce an error. Instead of users seeing an unhelpful 404 error page if they try to access a file that no longer exists, you can use the .htaccess file to automatically redirect them somehwhere else, usually your home page.

Here’s a sample bit of code that you’d insert into your .htaccess file to handle error pages:

ErrorDocument 400 /index.html
ErrorDocument 401 /index.html
ErrorDocument 403 /indexhtml
ErrorDocument 404 /index.html
ErrorDocument 500 /index.html

What does that do? Anytime a user on your site encounters an error (400 and 404 errors are the most likely culprit), instead of seeing a stock error page, they’re instead automatically redirected to your home page, which in this example is located at index.html. If your home page was located at index.php, you’d insert that instead.

If you’d rather create a custom error page (such as one that said  ”This page no longer exists, but you can find great information about Wombats on the site here, as well as here.), then you could change index.html in the above example to the name of the custom error page, something like error.html.

You can also use your .htaccess file to ensure that search engines spider and index the preferred version of your domain name. This gets into the world of SEO and PageRank, but the short version is that search engines see gadooney.com and www.gadooney.com as two separate sites. While users can type either and get to your content fine, you prefer to have search engines to simply pick one and just use it, to give you maximum traction in search engine results.

Making that happen is pretty simple, as you just have to enter the following code into your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YourSite\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.YourSite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Obviously you need to replace the “YourSite” with your actual site information. Google also lets you set your preferred domain via their Webmaster Tools interface, which has some other useful goodies as well.

If you’ve changed the location of a file or an entire site, you can also use the Rewrite command to point to the new location, with something like the following (replacing the directory info and html file locations with the specific info for your site and files):

Redirect /OldDir/old.html http://www.site.com/NewDir/new.html

For those using WordPress who get hammered with spam, you can use the .htaccess file to cut a lot of that out at the source, by adding the following to your .htaccess file (with credit to JohnChow.com for pointing out this in a recent post):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*johnchow.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://www.thetechzone.com/$ [R=301,L]

Again, replace the details with those for your own site. All the above code really does is to make sure that a person leaving a comment has a referral, which should always be the case with legitimate comments. Spam comments often don’t have a referral, so disallowing anyone without a referral from commenting impacts only spam comments.

You can pick and choose from the options above, and include the code you’d like to use in your .htaccess file. Once you’re ready to roll, save it. At this point, it’s still a .htaccess.txt file. Upload it to your server via FTP and put it in the root level of your site. Be sure to upload it in ASCII mode, not binary.

Once it’s uploaded, you’ll need to change the name of the file. Change the name to it’s true name, which is “.htaccess”. Don’t out a period after it, don’t put in quotes, don’t add an extension, simply type in “.htaccess” as the new file name.

You may also need to CHMOD the .htaccess file to 644. Do a Google search on “.htaccess chmod 644″ if you need instructions for that, as this is getting long enough as is.

Hopefully that should give you a basic introduction to some uses for the .htaccess file. Poke around some on your own, though, as it can do a lot more than what’s touched on above, and is a pretty powerful little file that’s often overlooked.