I have a friend, Paul, who started into the affiliate industry before me. I met him while we were attending the University of Michigan and he is the person who dragged me into the affiliate industry in the first place. Although I haven't been quite as successful so far as Paul has been, his coaching has helped me improve my sites and make more money. Hopefully it will do more of the same for you.

I was a Freshman in college when I first started my first webpage. It was a gambling affiliate page, while it was still legal, where I tried to bring in visitors by offering poker strategy and get them to convert to poker sites. I was moderately successful, made some money, but wanted more. After searching the internet and reading SEO blogs I read the Content Is King. If I wanted to get more visitors, I needed to get more search engine hits. If I wanted to get more search engine hits, I needed to have more pages for the search engines to index, and I needed to push them up in the rankings. All the websites told me that the best way to get content was to write it myself, so I studiously did so. I stayed up late at night, lived on Tall Starbucks Coffee heavily ladden with cream and sugar, set my Ipod to random, and set to work cranking out words. And it worked. Sort of. I did get a lot of content, and my hits did improve, but I got a peek at Paul's stats and noticed that he was improving much faster than me. He was putting out content four or five times faster than I was, and I couldn't close the gap.

Since Paul was my friend, I asked him how he did it, how could he put out so much more content than me, when I was working my fingers off typing every night. He asked me why I was doing so much work, when there were people out there who could do it for me. Why don't I buy content he said. At first I laughed at him, after all, all of the SEO blogs told me that I should write my own content in order to improve in the rankings. But then he asked me, what was my objective, was it to write a lot of articles and get my opinion out there. To show people how smart I was and convince them of my ideas, or was it to make money? He said, the question came down to, did I want to be an author or a publisher. Being an author was fine. You can make money being an author, lots of people do. But he asked, who makes more money, The New York Times, or one of its columnists. Who makes more money, Doubleday? or the people who write the stories they publish?

Paul told me that what he always tried to do when he was starting a site was to work on it himself to get it up and running. He said that he couldn't outsource the starting the page, the building the initial design, adding the flavor to the page, and doing the initial search engine optimization. He would even write a lot of the content up until the point where the site started to become profitable. At that point, he said, he would buy most of the rest of his content. If he was running a poker site as I was, he would go to Poker forums and Webmaster forums and offer to buy articles at $5-$10 dollars a pop. The people who sold him the articles thought they were getting a great deal, but he was laughing all the way to the bank.

Here is the equation he told me he used when he determined how profitable it would be to buy articles.

First, he only bought articles with a high life expectancy. He bought articles which would still be useful years down the road. In my case, poker strategy won't change much in a couple of years, so he would buy articles on strategy. However the poker sites would be in a constant state of flux, changing on the order of months, so he wouldn't buy site reviews. Paul estimated that the articles he bought had a life expectancy of approximately 5 years, that is that they would continue to get hits and make money for him for 5 years, 60 months.

Next he calculated how much money his page made per month, per page. The magic number is $2/Page/Month. At that point you can't go wrong buying articles. In order to do this take the total profit from your site each month, and divide by the number of pages which are content, i.e. the number of pages which get search engine hits. If this is over $2/page you should be golden.

At this point I saw where he was heading. Say he had a 50 page site, made $100/month and got most of his traffic from the search engines. He could rightly assume that if he had 100 pages, he would get twice as much search engine traffic, and would make twice as much money. So if he bought an article for $10, it would take 5 months to pay itself off. After that, with a 5 year life expectancy, it would be making money for him for 55 months! It would be making money for him for the next four and a half years. Over all his $10 investment would yield a $110 return. Not a bad rate.

So can you do that, change from being an author to a publisher and increase your profits? I don't know, you have to carefully monitor your articles. You have to make sure your authors aren't passing duplicate content off to you. If they are you could lose all of your search engine traffic, and all the money from that site. But if you do it well, and can cultivate good authors, you can make a killing buying articles and turning them into money.