Welcome to another exciting edition of Wednesday Links:

Avoiding the snare of trash traffic by Jonathan Leger

Anyone who has spent any time at one of the million webmaster forums on the web has seen people promoting programs that will deliver “thousands of unique visitors” to your site for low, low prices. They’re obvious scams but Jon Leger took the time to go out and prove it. The moral of the story is that the only paid traffic that is worth it is PPC, but I think in our hearts we all knew that to begin with.

MarsEdit: Helping the Personal Publishing Revolution by Shawn Blanc

Shawn Blanc’s latest review of a piece of Mac software is an in-depth look at the blog editing application MarsEdit. This review is massive, like his other looks at Mac apps, so if you’re on the fence about purchasing a copy of MarsEdit (like I am) then check out Shawn’s breakdown.

Getting Results With Article Marketing at Affiliate Confession

Article marketing is one of those link building and traffic strategies that I always seem to be too lazy to put effort into. I’m going to try and get over the hump and get into it more so this affiliate marketing article over at Affiliate Confession should be a nice starting point for me.

Craigslist founder talks about open source, banner ads at InfoWorld

I think Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, is a pretty interesting character so I found this article at InfoWorld to be a good read. He’s always good for a great quote like this:

“Banner ads are often kind of dumb, and they slow the site down. I’m not interested,” he said.