You have probably read all over the internet about how easy it is to make money with something called “content publishing”. Well, it’s true; you can make some decent money online with content publishing. There are however, a couple of things you need to know before you’ll be able to generate any significant money from Google’s Adsense or any of the lesser known context advertising systems like Adbright or even Yahoo.

First on this list is “original content”. Do not fall into the trap of obtaining private label content for use on your context advertising site and using it without truly making it your own. This cannot be stressed enough. In order to get the biggest benefit from your private label purchases, you must re-write the content to make it unique. The search engines love unique content and it makes absolutely no sense to purchase the right to re-write the content, making it your very own, and then not exercise that right. There are so many people who buy private label rights and then do nothing with them. One of your objectives must be to make your content stand out from the crowd. This can be done in a number of ways. The addition of some great related images can draw readers in. If the article is short an general make it longer and more specific. If it is long and complicated break it down for the average reader. The search engines will reward you with a higher ranking when your content is original and new. This will translate into more visitors and more clicks on your ad links.

That brings us to another issue that you must not forget about: traffic generation. You could have the best looking site on the world wide web, but if you get zero traffic you will not make any money from it. Like it or not, traffic generation is something that you must work at to be successful in content publishing. Sure, at some point you should be able to count on getting regular traffic from the search engines, but how long will that take? In the beginning, you will need to drive any traffic that you get to your site. Traffic doesn’t just magically appear. It takes some hard work, but in the end the payoff can be significant.

Traffic generation can be accomplished in two ways, free traffic or paid traffic. Free traffic generation methods include link exchanges with similar sites, signature lines in emails or forum posts, free classified ad sites and many more. Paid traffic includes sites where a specific amount of website visitors can be purchased. Be very cautious about using paid traffic sites as these sites may send traffic that is un-targeted and therefore potentially unresponsive. It’s obvious that the kind of visitor you want is someone who is interested in the content on your site. Although this is obvious, it needs to be stressed. Random web surfers who land on your site are very unlikely to spend much time reading your content or clicking the ads. The kind of visitor you want is someone who is actively looking for the kind of content you have published. These visitors are very likely to click on relevant ads and that is one of your main objectives as a content publisher.

How often have you come across a marketing campaign that strikes you as ill-conceived, slightly out of the times, and generally unimportant in the current climate of marketing and consumer spending. They’re everywhere — unlikely intentionally, but they’re certainly a part of our lives. And while these marketing plans much produce some returns — they’d certainly be canceled or at least modified should they not — they don’t truly connect with us like they could.

Part of this is the massive change in marketing that’s going on currently. With the new methods of communication and message spreading made possible by the social web, companies are desperate to hop aboard the train and get their wares out their and in the open. Twitter, Facebook and other sexy companies are taking up the main view in many marketers’ radars, and entire divisions of companies are being created to decide exactly how to make the most of these innovative new social tools.

The thing is, they’re often poorly planned out. Especially amongst affiliate marketers, the propensity for completely inane and improper social media use is sky-high, and considered a common sense part of our marketing efforts. While it undoubtedly brings around results, much like the relatively poor TV ads of yesteryear, those results are hard to measure in a relative field. How much did your social media campaign really cost you? Not just in terms of cost, since the barrier to enter social media realms is very low, but in terms of the time cost and effort expenditure.

For affiliate marketers, we need to pre-plan our strategies and work around relative results, not just results alone. Opportunity cost should be a huge concern for affiliate marketers, especially if you’re paying other people to work for you. Which metrics bring in the most value and stomp on all the others? Those are the metrics that should be focused on, not those that have the most sex appeal and the greatest amount of attention in the public world.

After all, it’s about sales, isn’t it? We’re all out there trying to boost sales, fight off a lack of spending in a recession, and find the best niches to maximize profits in. But when these diversions and distractions get in the way of finding the most profitable marketing metrics, it’s important to take a step back and take stock of what is and isn’t working. Forcing yourself into a medium that doesn’t sell isn’t the way forward. Finding the most profitable medium, be it SEO, PPC, or social media marketing (or any other) is where the money is.

In order to see truly remarkable affiliate sales results, you need to plan your marketing campaigns to make use of not just the most current and valuable marketing tools, but those that produce highly valuable results. Twitter and Facebook will come and go. What won’t come and go is the customer base that supports you, evangelizes you and keeps on talking.

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