Affiliate Marketing Profit Tools

Many online marketers love to use content for either building websites, or promoting websites. And it’s an excellent strategy for making money online. Building a comprehensive website with lots of information on a specific topic can generate tons of search engine traffic, back links, and targeted visitors. And all of those things as we all know, help generate income.

Writing articles to distribute to other websites, is another excellent way to build traffic and links to your own website. Some people even use this technique to generate traffic directly to specific affiliate programs. And it works wonderfully for that as well.

Problems arise though, when online marketers try to enter a niche they know little to nothing about. Or they get lazy, and decide they want to do everything as fast as possible. A popular way to enter a niche you know nothing about these days to buy private label content. If you’re not careful about where you buy your private label content, you could end up looking like a fool. Or worse - a spammer.

You see, many sources of private label content online are extremely poor quality. In some cases they’re actually useless. A couple of years ago I was a member of a monthly private label content site. For the most part all I did was use that content as inspiration for my own articles. After having been a member there for approximately a year, they released some content about photography. This was one of my own niches, and a private passion of mine as well. So I was happy to see another source of inspiration about one of my favorite topics. Once I opened the document though, I was horrified at what I found. The content wasn’t badly written, but it was painfully obvious that the writer had absolutely no idea about the topic. The only way they could have come up with this content, is by doing a brief bit of reading online, then clobbering together miscellaneous fluff.

This experience brought me to a major revelation. I realized that I could not use any of the other information available at that website. Especially if it was on topics I personally didn’t know much about myself. If the photography content was that misinformed and lacking, I had no way of knowing if all the other content with just as bad. And in some cases, I feared that a lot of it might actually be wrong. So I ended my subscription.

Last week I had a similar experience. I’ve been working on a new personal project, and I decided to buy some private label content to use as inspiration for my own articles. I bought two packages from two different sources. One source was excellent both in quality and in knowledge. The second source unfortunately was junk. It wasn’t written very well to begin with, it actually looks like it may have been rewritten by some kind of software, and it’s filled with misinformation and BS. Thankfully this is a topic I am very familiar with and knowledgeable about. If I wasn’t though, I would be shooting myself in the foot if I used this content even as a basis for my own articles.

This problem automatically compounds itself too. There’s a very good chance that other people bought that content pack and they’re using it without knowing any better. Even if they’re rewriting the content in their own words, by using bad information start with, they’re creating bad information of their own. And to make matters worse, articles like that get distributed to places such as ezinearticles.com. And then, other marketers search through that website, read through information that is there, and use it as a basis for their own articles. Thus bad information, wrong information, junk and fluff are distributed far and wide. Don’t do this in your business.

If you really want to enter a new niche that you know little about, spend some time researching, learning, and studying. It’s fine to read article distribution sites, to see what others have to say on the topic. But don’t stop there. Search around the web for authority sites, read magazines, and go to the library to look at books. Find reliable information sources to learn from. Spending even a day or two learning a new topic from credible sources can put you far ahead of the crowd and position you as an up-and-coming expert on the topic.

©2008, Kathy Burns-Millyard

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.