Fustrated With Article Marketing

That's how it works. Try building backlinks to your articles to keep them up in the rankings.

Yes. After you submit it to directories you:

Bookmark it.
Re-write the article and submit to your blog as well as web 2.0
Then create a video of your article and submit it to video sites.

Doing any or all of the above will give you backlinks and keep your article ranked high longer.

Aaron

Unless you target a keyword that you can get some search engine results for OR you get on the most viewed page, that's exactly what will happen. The former will lead to the latter, which is nice.

For instance, I have one niche in which I have fourteen articles published at EZA.

None of these are particularly keyword researched or optimized, so the only traffic they get is from people browsing Ezinearticles.

So I got 400 views in January from the four new articles. This dropped to 90 views the next month, then 50 and so forth until JUly, where I have, lemme see, 6 views.

So yeah, a spike and then a drop off is normal, although you will get some residual views (which is not to be discounted - enough articles can lead to a decent trickle of sales for no work).

Ahh, my favorite topic. You MUST... let me repeat that... YOU MUST pick conquerable keywords. This is so absolutely critical and it's what almost every new article marketer gets entirely wrong.

So, what's "conquerable?" It's a keyword that has very low competition. You can go one of two ways here: quality or quantity. Quality = digging in and really taking the time to find keywords in your niche that have extremely low competition AND get a good number of searches. Trust me, they're out there, no matter what niche you're in. I promise. I've done a ton of keyword research in more niches than I care to remember. Every one of them had at least a few conquerable keywords that got anywhere from 100-1,000 searches per day.

The other approach is also viable (quantity). You simply find a whole lot of low competition - low search volume keywords in your niche and start writing until your hands turn blue. Takes a lot less time to find good keywords, but you'll more than make up for it churning out articles for all those keywords.

Either way, the common denominator is low competition. The lower the better.

Which do I prefer? No contest... I go for the Quality approach. I don't want to write all day unless I'm getting paid (and paid nicely) for it by a client. I don't have the patience.

Anyway, I'll give you a good example of the power of the Quality approach...

Search Google for the phrase pellet gun hunting. Competition is scarce. But that phrase gets about 250-300 searches per day at Google. The #2 site in the search results for that phrase is one of my EzineArticles articles. That article has gotten (by far) the most page views of any article in the Hunting category at EzineArticles. And it's only been live for about 4 months. Yep... just 4 months (April 6). More page views than articles in that category that have been there for years.

A bit further down Page 1 at Google is a YouTube video I made from that same article. So I hold 2 spots in the Top 10 at Google for a keyword that gets 8,000-10,000 searches per month.

And it took almost no link building. That's the point. It's ALL about the keywords you pick. In fact, I'd say that is the single most important factor in determining article marketing winners from losers. If I had to narrow it to just one factor.

Learn how to do keyword research at a professional level. It will make all the difference in the world in your success - regardless of the niche you're in.

John

I always work differently when i submit my articles to ezinearticles compared to other article directories. For starters i will create a free wordpress blog about the article thus creating a backlink. I will also bookmark it to at least 15 bookmarking sites.

here is a bookmarking list:

Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites | myeasyonlinepay.com The Samantha Milner Blog

if your article is a top ten list send other articles to it. Say if it is the top ten plugins for wp do a review for each of these plugins and send them to the source.

After a few weeks has passed i always look on google to see who has reused my article with my resource box in it and then when i find them i will also bookmark these blog posts as they are heading straight back to me.

I also recommend showing off your link to the article on twitter, facebook, myspace and any other social site your involved in. I also do a favourite blog post and favourite article on twitter once a day showcasing ones that have gone off the radar.

hope that helps and good luck with your articles.

kind regards


sam
X

I use Micro Niche Finder, but then I verify what it reports by checking Google's External Keyword Tool manually. There are sometimes significant discrepancies. MNF costs about $100, but honestly the time it saves me makes it worth easily 10X that.

In terms of numbers, I honestly do not submit that many articles. I don't have to because I spend so much time finding the really good keywords. In that pellet gun niche, I have the aforementioned article and about 6 others. I have several EZA accounts (you're not supposed to do that, but many of us do) and I sometimes spread them around depending on the niche.

I used to use the more common Quantity approach, but unless you really enjoy writing a lot, it's a quick trip to burnout. I once wrote about 40 articles in the span of about 4 days and submitted them all to EZA. But I didn't do a lick of keyword research. I just sat down and wrote and wrote, because it was a niche I knew by heart.

And you know what? Those 40 articles combined don't even come close to the number of page views and link clicks that ONE pellet gun article has gotten. The Quality approach is so much better in every way. But you have to put in the time to really learn how to do proper keyword research. Get yourself a good tool like Micro Niche Finder or something like it... think there's one called Market Samurai that others say is good as well. That will cut way down on your research time. For many niches, it only takes a handful of great keywords and some backlinks to drive a nice steady flow of targeted visitors to your money page. Seriously.

John

Great post John ( Zeus66 ). You have really opened my eyes to why keyword research is great. One question though ...Is the payment for micro niche finder one time payment?

Nice posts, this helps out a lot.
Thank you.

Just to clarify, for searches John you feel 100,000 (in quotes) results is low competition and worth going after? And 300,000 if there is enough searching for it?

To make a hit you need to include as many ingredient as you can in your articles. Obviously they need to be relevant. Use as much backlinks you can in the articles and always try to use the hot keywords.

Keywords are the way the SE's find your article.

Put it this way Keywords are the keys to get found for whatever you write online be that a blog, article, or any text for that matter.

No keyword = No one knows your text exists as your text (article) will probably be sitting on page 987 of Google! I don't think anyone goes that far except they are paid to!

I guess it then comes down to which keywords you use.

Go for popular keywords like "affiliate marketing" and you just get lost in the crowd.

you go looking for keywords with less competition say "affiliate marketing for newbies" and you will more likely get less competition.

Most truths online are half truths and just mislead people. It's no wonder people leave the long chain keywords and target elusive keywords that everyone else is targeting. It's either that or they spend time looking for keywords hardly anyone uses at all.

You really have to do some work here and choose a good keyword search tool for your keywords.

That said you can get a grip on keywords and use the free Google Keyword search tool and still do well.

I'd say that between Zeus66 and Steven Wagenheim you got the ultimate advice.

All the best

Great contribiutions by the way!

Khs

I am not new to marketing but pretty new to article marketing . I searched for a long tail that was under 10,000 competition and found several even in the money from home niche .

So far every article I have submitted has been 1 or 2 on google's first page . Course I also bought the long tail domain names ans optimized these for their namesake .

What really surprised me was one of the longtails gets over 100 searches a day and had no exact competition. I have 6 places on googles 1st page for it and will have more when my site gets crawled again . The longtails were searched for articles but I have figured out that sometimes the content on your page is just as good if there is not a lot of competiiton.

I didn't learn this for the fact that I am super marketer or anything . I do well with this because the person I learned from stressed long tails first . I just didn't know any other way to do it .

I have found that the same thing happens to me with most niches but not all. The ones that die out quickly, I simply do not commit a lot of effort to. I try to focus my efforts on the niches that tend to give me consistent views and click through s.

Take the duds and post them elsewhere after your EZA traffic has died down a bit. If you have a ton of original content then start blogs on specific niches with that content. Build some links to your new blog network and start seeing results. This isn't as easy as submitting an article to EZA...it takes work, but the payoff's are much better. You'll then have an entire blog network that you can control.

How are you measuring "competing" sites? You're not just referring to the sites that come up when you do an exact match search in Google, are you? My understanding is that the NUMBER of results returned don't matter... it's the page rank of the sites returned by a quote-less search...

???

It's not really about PageRank. That matters, don't get me wrong, but there's a lot more going on. If you let JUST PR scare you away, you'll miss out on a lot of good keywords you could rank for without a lot of work.

Really, when you get right down to it, the most important part is analyzing the SERPs Top 10 for that keyword. Worrying only or even mostly about the numbers of results with and without quotation marks, etc. will just have you spinning your wheels needlessly. I mean, sure, have some benchmarks if you want (I use them sometimes), but it's easy to clutter up your mind and get stuck, when in reality this stuff's easier than that.

John

John, I noticed your article has a PR of 2, yet according to SEO For Firefox, it doesn't have any backlinks.

Any idea how it got a PR 2? Is it because of the popularity of the link itself, or do you have a couple of backlinks tucked away?

You can try using secondaring keywords so you stand a higher chance of staying popular for longer and to maintain high traffic levels

Hi john, excellent post.... its definately given me some food for thought.


I just wanted to ask you a question, so i can get an idea of this process from start to finish, finish obviously being a sale. I notice from your pellet gun article, you link to a site selling pellet guns.

I am considering doing something very similar to your approach but within a very different niche/product, and what i wanted to ask you is, do you own that pellet gun site, and if so, how do you get your stock - is it from a wholesaler etc?. The reason i ask is because i notice there is no affiliate linking to CB or Amazon etc, you seem to sell the guns direct from your site..... this is similar to what i want to do.

I think press-release article posts work great. I can keyword and article and have it listed on the top pages on google in 2 hours time !! If your good at SEO, you can really cash in using this.

Turbo,
Your article marketing campaign doesn't stop when you submit your articles. What you have to do in order to rank with the search engines is to start building backlinks to your articles. That's one of the single most effective ways to increase your page rank and your sales.

one of the things I look for when targeting Keywords is to check the backlinks of the sites already on page one of G the lower the easier it will be to overtake them.

Go to the next level and turn the article into a podcast. From there turn it into a video. Submit to other article sites as well. As you do this the search engines will start picking up your links. Google really like video.

Hope this is helpful.

You could try social bookmarking your articles. It can't hurt.

Thanks for the reply John, you've answered all i needed to know. I suppose the challenge here is finding a decent dealer willing to dropship, i may make some calls myself as we all know how bad some of these wholesale/dropship websites can be.

Anyway, not wishing to hijack the thread, back to article marketing

I have to chime in with you and agree about quality and pre-planning before you write an article. I'm new to article marketing so i'm certainly no authority, but after submitting my first 10 articles, i noticed instantly that the first 8 articles which i wrote basically with no decent research, gained very little views and url clicks.

For my last 2 i did some keyword research, and both of these articles surpassed my first 8 articles in terms of views and clicks by about 10 times the amount! - and that was within a day of writing them. My first eight have been up for weeks!

So i couldnt not agree more, and i'll definately take a more calculated approach with all my future articles.

Sometimes social bookmarking is still not enough for me. You have to find other ways to find backlinks.