After roaming this magical land of affiliate marketing for a few years and using articles as a tool to build content, links and traffic, surely somewhere during your travels you began to accumulate a large number of articles in various article directories.
Those items, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, will last virtually forever, with multiple links, each one to their prized domains. This can be very cool and it’s not unusual to get commissions from sites you’ve forgotten about for years because of those articles.
But what happens when your domain registrar sends you an annual notice that a particular domain is up for renewal? It’s time to decide, as I do now on a regular basis, whether it’s better to spend that renewal fee on renewing a domain that accidentally brings in a few bucks here and there or whether it would be a smarter investment to use that money to buy a new domain and with the newly acquired knowledge and skills learned from experience they build a site capable of earning hundreds.
After gaining more experience and learning new keyword research techniques, this is an easy decision. Especially when I look at so many of those domains I bought in my formative years that seemed like winners and now I really don’t want my name associated with them any longer. So instead of revamping those turkeys, I feel very comfortable doing some keyword research and launching a profitable new Google friendly site.
But what about all those articles linking to those now-defunct domains that all those article directories keep reminding me that they have broken links? Well I guess I could put some new links in them to some unrelated sites. But I have chosen a different method.
I bought a domain and put a free WordPress article directory template and script on it. Now the last thing I want is an article directory where anyone can post articles. I don’t have the stomach for that task. So I removed from the template the parts that allow other authors to register and submit articles. This is my personal little paradise where only I am the master.
Many of my articles are product reviews, so on this new site I post at least one of my articles from each category I’ve written about. Next, I go to the article directory where I have broken links and edit the bio boxes to redirect links to articles on this site, which is in effect a general article directory.
I put some AdSense ads and eventually I might put some Amazon ads in there too. Actually, even though the thing has only been around for a couple of months, it is generating some AdSense earnings. Best of all, those dusty old items can still work their magic. I have moved it to a second hosting account that I have where I will only have this directory to give it its own IP address.
Of course, any man-made piece of heaven will have some flaws. The biggest drawback is that some of those articles have been well received by other webmasters and have been placed on their sites. Once those webmasters realize that the links in them are broken, they won’t feel the need to replace the links with my new links, thus I will lose the value of their articles that I once enjoyed. But at least I don’t lose the items completely.
