Article Marketing--Quantity or Quality?

No real article marketing expert would tell you to submit crap to the directories. So to answer your question, it's quality by 1.6 kilometres.

I would say you need both quantity and quality

To build up the potential traffic you will need to generate you need a lot of articles that are well written and convert readers into link clickers ... the whole point

yes both that does not mean that there is room for crap articles, and there is never room for articles without good keyword research.
La dominatrix

I think it depends on your goals for the article.

Is it just for backlinks? - then quantity rules over quality.

Is it meant to be a presell for an affiliate link, or perhaps it's to warm up your prospects before you send them to your squeeze page? - then you will need quality.

It's nice if you can do both, though. Put out a good quantity of articles that are still high quality.

Well, it depends on your purpose.. Quantity would be helpful if what you do is to submit articles to different websites in order to get backlinks.. But if your articles are for your blog, quality is very much important rather than quantity.. What's the use of having so many articles if no one is even reading them..? Hence, for you blog to encourage more readers, write a quality article..

Article marketing has nothing to do with backlinks. That's why it's not called "Submitting Articles for Backlinks."

Article marketing is about marketing yourself and your product, first and foremost. And it always has been - from the very beginning.

Somewhere along the lines, people figured out that the backlinks you get were a bonus...but we all got greedy and considered this bonus as the REASON to do article marketing instead of a killer by-product - and the whole industry has suffered since then.

Look back at the short history of the internet.

Those who have used articles to get a million backlinks have always lost in the end...always.

Those who have used articles in the true sense of article marketing have prevailed.

To answer the OP - in my opinion, it's about quality. If you could write 100 articles and get , say 1,000 rogue visitors who think your writing is questionable, at best vs. writing one kickass article that gets 1,000 highly targeted, ready to buy visitors, which would you do?

Obviously the second choice is the most reasonable and very do-able these days.

If you don't fall into what I call the "link trap", then you can concentrate on marketing yourself and your product/service and make some real money without having to spend a lot of time doing it!

Respectfully,
Allen

The quality of a article matters more than the quantity of article. Good keywords is the main key of a quality article.

Article Marketing is the best way to get well ranked with Google.

Why can't you do both? Quality and Quantity is a reachable goal.
Several good points have been made here...Your article is a representation of you as much as the product you are promoting. Article marketing does in fact afford good longevity in the search engines, which may equal traffic to you.
So with those two it seems to me that you would want as much exposure as you can get. And you would want that to be positive so you can develop a respectable name brand.

Yeah, and if the other guy (with the crappy article) gets more links to his (which he will be able to do as he has more time for link getting while you are crafting your next prize winning article) then yours is sure to be buried.

Lee

Quantity is fine, in fact it is mandatory (to a degree) for a successful article marketing campaign, but when asked which over which, definitely quality.

Show me an article written like crap that is outranking a quality article for any stretch of time...you won't find one. It may rank initially, but ove the long haul if it doesn't get syndicated, which it wont, it will fall like a ton of bricks while your quality, link phishing article will not only remain, but climb over time.

And eloquent/professional writing DOES make a difference in many niches. Remember that you're building trust, credibility and loyalty as well - you can't get those things if your article sucks - meaning grammar, spelling and/or precision of content.

Allen

My rule of thumb and equation is an EZA backlink is unlikely to be substantially more valuable than a backlink that requires substantially less effort to generate, so the remaining value is clicks.
Let's say an article will get you 20 clicks, those 20 clicks might cost you $4.00 in PPC if you bought the placement on eza with adsense, so don't put more than $4 of what your time is worth into the article.

Steve,

If a good writer believes they are forced to concentrate on quantity over quality, then he or she has no idea what true article marketing is and, frankly, doesn't deserve to have a highly ranked article as far as I am concerned.

Joining the masses makes you a follower.

There is a huge difference between following your competitors and leading them. You can (and will) succeed with article writing if you don't fall into the link trap. There are a lot smarter ways to get your articles in front of targeted prospects than building a ton of urelated backlinks that will probably be devalued at some point in our immediate future. (JMO)

It may work now, which is what a lot of people are thinking, but will it work tomorrow...or next month? Those who are watching things closely will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Times change, rules change. But a few very common sensical things stay relatively the same.

Allen

With Article submission make sure that the same article NEVER goes to more than one Directory. And do not post your submissions to your blog if the article has been submitted to an anrticle directory.

I'm very new to IM and was wondering this myself. It's confusing to a newbie; like you said, some people say go with quantity, and others say quality. It's one of those things where you're not going to get a definite answer, just different opinions.

Personally, when I look at articles (not for IM purposes, just to read) and I see something that's total crap, I tend to not read the whole thing, whereas if I enjoy what I read and the author has interesting things to say, I will click through and see what other information they have. So basically it's best to take on the reader's perspective. Ask youself, would I read this all the way through? Would this get me interested?

Sure, if you write a ton of bad articles you'll get some people clicking through, and common sense tells you the more articles you dish out, the more people will be reading just because the articles exist. However, that sure is a lot of writing to do, to just throw them out for the sake of quantity and bank on those few that are willing to read poor quality articles and click through.

I'd rather spend a little more time researching and writing quality articles so I appear as an authority on the subject, rather than just some joe shmoe who writes crap just for the sake of writing. A key to marketing is building a good reputation, not a crappy one.

As I recently released a WSO concerning this, Quality is what will give you a significant more traffic.

I see so many article marketers fail now because they think they have to submit 1000's of articles to see a decent amount of traffic.

My best advice to you is consider each article as if it was part of your website. Promote it and gain as much as exposure to it. Not only will you get more views, but Google will also rank you above your competing articles because of your additional promotion.

Just my $.02.

Of course, I am going to have to stand by quality over quantity. Having a couple QUALITY articles with well researched keywords can be far more effective than having hundreds of low quality articles floating around.

Hi,

What I have seen , heard, and believe and use myself is both good quality articles, and write them on a very regular basis.
As others have said you can submit rubbish ones and do loads a day, but people will find it out and you will not get the traffic.
Just think if you did one good one a day, (30 a month) and each month some of your articles get spotted and used in other places, your articles are now getting seen and put all over the web.

But take this the next step, your good article, was used by a high traffic site or used in an e-book, and this e-book or site was spotted by say a TV News channel , who contact you to go on a tv show, you are now talking high traffic.

But......................................... if you had sent in a rubbish article you would never ever get to that stage.

Hope this helps someone
AnyUk

It's gotta be both. Invest in quality articles is best for long-term. Personally, I wouldn't want to bother myself reading crappy ones so why write one?

I agree that all things being equal you would fare much better by having someone read 1 quality article then having 20 people each read a crappy article.

But all things are not equal.

So, my way of thinking is that you spend your time promoting your quality articles by using the "quantity" articles to get links to them. I don't necessarily mean that the quantity articles are total crap, they could be decent articles but just not targetted preselling ones that take over an hour to write.

I think this way because, as stated above, some other article marketer targetting the same keyword can blow your quality article off page 1 by getting more links.

But, I wonder, am I just stupid to use articles for backlinks? I've always used articles for promoting sites so I think that when I think about getting backlinks I automatically think about using articles. Maybe I am just making more work for myself......

Lee

Lee

Quality is key - give away your best content then people will be looking for more.

If you give away rubbish, the bounce rate of your article will be high and the search engines will know that your article isn't worth reading.

If you want backlinks, i can think of many different methods of getting them without writing articles, such as searching for blog posts related to your website and posting relevant comments with a link back to your site.

Also, think about this - who is going to republish rubbish? If your content is not worth anything,then who is going to use your article on their website? The whole point of article publishing is so that people can republish your content - the article directories are just the beginning.