Money Earned with Articles is Sustainable

The amount of money which can be made from placing articles and affiliate links on your website differs from person to person, mainly because the amount of money you are able to make will depend largely on how successful your site is, based primarily on the number of visitors it attracts; and in order to attract a large number of visitors to your site a few things must be in order.

Your site must be getting good search engine rankings through your SEO efforts, and your site must also be enjoyable for your visitors to read and it must also be informative through engaging content built around a great niche (specialized) topic. Some experts contend that the size of your website (number of pages), and the number of sites you own are also important factors in determining your success, but no one desputes the importance of great original content and SEO.

As far as earnings go, some webmasters (website owners/publishers) have made claims of earnings as much as $10,000 per month ($120,000 per year) through building and promoting niche sites. However, these claims are not considered average earnings; furthermore most beginning webmasters (and even those with some experience) should not expect this kind of success, as such success is achieved only by seasoned and highly skilled webmasters.

A reasonable income to expect from a niche site, after you have worked for months to gain traffic and have have acquired good affiliates, reliable supporters and reputable vendors (merchants) may be $500-$1,000 per month. However this is recurring income, so you will make that much monthly from the efforts you put into that one site, it is not a one shot deal.

After you have a successful site, you could choose to continue building niche sites as many others do, since you can a reasonably assume that the more sites you build, the better an income you can generate. You can choose to build very fast sites with a limited number of pages, instead of sites which consist of larger volume of content articles that are slightly longer in length.

If you approach site building with the thought that the longer visitors stay on your site the greater a chance they will click on one of your promotional banners, then you will probably accept the premise that the larger each of your sites are, the more income you will likely generate off of them, and therefore create larger sites, but the choice is yours to make once you get going.

When starting out, it is important to remember that your first site will always be your most difficult task, since you are just learning the ropes of a new business; and that not everyone is cut out to market and promote niche sites.

You should also be prepared that in the event it does not work out, it could result in the loss of your money used to launch such a venture, but that is a risk everyone in this affiliate marketing business has to take, and hopefully you will be able to stick it out and weather the early storms that you are bound to encounter.

The important thing is that you don’t give up without a good fight, because if this is really what you want to it deserves your best “hard-fought” efforts. Your first site may take a long time, the work may be tedious, and you may feel like throwing in the towel; but if you give up too early, you will never know what could have been, and who knows, you may be the next great affiliate marketer.

Free Article Content as Money-Making Resource

Some webmasters (website owners and/or publishers) set out to make money by using articles from free content directories in the hope of attracting visitors to their website and product pages.

Among webmasters who employ this tactic are those who have just begun working as affiliates for various companies and, as such, have little to no cash resources to purchase articles, although they need to build small niche websites to attract visitors and begin earning money.

Although this can sometimes be the only option for those who are operating on an almost non-existent budget, it is not the most suitable way to effectively build your website or revenue.

There are a few reasons why this is potentially detrimental to your business building efforts, and under these circumstances detrimental translates to predicament. Here are a number of problems that can result from using articles from free content directories.

Predicament #1 – Search Engines

Search engines will look down (frown) upon your site if it is found to have exactly the same (duplicated) content found on other sites; and the more sites that share your content, the less it will help you achieve good position on SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings.

Good search engine rankings are essential in getting visitors to your site so that they have a chance to click on your affiliate links. If you cannot even attract visitors then will never make money; so working on the search engine optimization of your site so that you will eventually be high enough in the SERPs to get customers, should be priority one.

Predicament #2 – Getting visitors to click

Although getting your site high on search engine result pages and acquiring site visitors is hard work, unfortunately this is only half of the battle. You must also be able to convince those visitors to click on your affiliate links, and if your visitors see the same content they have seen on a number of other sites, they will be less likely to click on your links. This is because most people want to buy things that are recommended by people they consider trustworthy or whom they believe to be experts on the subject they’re writing about.

If your content is just duplicated from other sites, you will be exposed as someone who does not really know what they are talking about and therefore will not look favorably on your product recommendations. This will reduce the number of website visitors who are willing to click through.

Predicament #3 – Author Bylines

Most free content is only given to you if you agree to place the authors byline under the article (you can get into trouble if you try to use it without following the stipulated rules) and this poses a problem because in the sense that most author bylines include links.

Therefore when a reader gets done reading a really intriguing article, there is a strong possibility that they will click on the author’s byline link rather than your affiliate links.

This is the entire reason why these authors offer free content to begin with, so that they can get their names and links out there to the public. Using this type of content may mean shooting yourself in the foot and losing any profits anticipated from your website visitors.

Once you put these three problems together, you are looking at a serious decline in revenue simply because you used free website content from article directories. Although it may be the only option for some you should buy your own original content if you have the money to so.

If, on the other hand, you don’t have the money, you may be better off writing your own content about a subject you are familiar with and then hiring professional services once you have made enough of a profit to work with.