There are literally thousands of article directories to submit your articles to. And a beginner would think that the best thing to do is to submit your site to 100 of them. After all, the more sites, the better, right? Not quite. Google will penalise articles that are the same as others (called duplicate content), so it won't endear us to Google. Moreover, many article site owners don’t like you submitting duplicate content. That said, you can still do it for some extra traffic, it’s just that Google won’t rank you well for those articles (but it might provide an extra trickle of content). Also be aware that content posted on these “hub” sites is often spidered and taken by other smaller article sites. I suggest you submit your article to one of three sites:
Ezine Articles (http://www.ezinearticles.com)
SearchWarp (http://www.searchwarp.com)
USFreeAds (http://www.usfreeads.com)
I suggest you sign up to all three and alternate between them – Google seems to love all of them (although USFreeAds is not an article site, Google loves it and it will work for purposes. You can submit ads for free, or become a paid member to speed up the process). Once you have submitted your article, you should expect to show up on the first page of the results within a week, and you will generally stay there for between 3 weeks and 2 months.
You will of course need to repeat this process to make it work – I suggest you write 3 new articles per day, using this method to make $50-200 per day within the space of 30 days. If you do or do not decide to use this method (its a lot of work), be aware that it is a "fool proof" way to make a living from affiliate marketing – and its there if you want it. You may want to use some of the tracking methods that I cover in Section 3 (so you know where your sales are coming from), and I suggest you cloak your links too, once more using the information in Section 3).
Note: with USFreeAds you can link direct with an affiliate link. SearchWarp and EzineArticles will require you to link to a squeeze page or pre-sell page (they don’t allow direct affiliate linking). For this reason, I recommend you use USFreeAds to do the bulk of your damage in the marketplace.
Full disclosure: There is of course a workaround for either site. It is not perfect but I have used it on occasion. Basically, you upload a cloaked link to its own domain so when an editor sees a link straight through to a domain, they don’t notice. The second workaround is simple: link to a pre-sell or review etc (anything but a direct affiliate link), wait for your article to be approved, and then change the review back to a cloaked version of your affiliate link. Either way, you may incur the wrath of an editor – who may close your account (but frankly you can always setup as many as you like), or pull your article. I am simply advising you of the workarounds. And then it’s on you. If you don’t have steely nerves, simply use USFreeAds for your SEO fix.