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Most affiliate marketers have experience it at least once. You go to check your site stats and notice that your site has gotten more than 5 times the amount of traffic you usually see in a month and all that brand new traffic has arrived TODAY. Your heart slams in your chest a little as you check the source and notice that it is StumbleUpon and all those crazed stumblers that have made your traffic go through the roof.

The problem is, and youll discover this the moment you start checking other stats, those Stumblers arent sticking around. The bounce rate nearly matches the incoming traffic and your Adsense account isnt exactly feeling the StumbleUpon love either. No one seems to be clicking on those juicy Adsense boxes at all. So you check your affiliate accounts. Affiliate earnings are better than Adsense money any day, right? Darn it! Those Stumblers arent buying anything either! What is wrong with these people?

Nothings wrong with them actually. Its just a different mindset and its common to all the social networks. Social networkers arent generally in a shopping mood when they are surfing Digg or Stumbleupon or Reddit. Theyre in the mood to be entertained and they want to be entertained quickly. So they move on from one site to the next, barely stopping to read what you have to say as they kill time looking for a fix to their boredom.

This is a whole lot different than what youll see when your article links are clicked. Your articles are usually found during a search at one of the big search engines. The reader is looking for something specific and theyve just found your article. If your article has managed to capture their interest and they actually click a link in your resource box, they are that much more likely to be interested in anything you might suggest for them to buy. Theyll also spend more time reading about the benefits and advantages of what you are selling so the bounce rate for article traffic is significantly lower than that social network traffic.

Sure, it often takes longer to see significant traffic from article marketing, but since that traffic also converts to paying customers at much higher rates than social network traffic, you need much less of it to fatten your wallet.

So stick to article marketing and leave the social network link baiting to the Flickrites and Youtubers. If you want to make money, slow and steady article writing wins the race.

Emma Martin loves to Stumble, but prefers writing articles to bring home the bacon. Article marketing is a brilliant traffic producer and method of pre-selling your buyers. For more tips on how to generate traffic and sales, visit her Article Marketing page to download a free copy of 77 Ways to Get Traffic. No email required.