Article Marketing is Over-Rated

[cosmokid]

Recently someone asked me how to improve traffic to their website, which was still pretty new. This person was submitting lots of articles to external articles directories.

I realized as I sent my response that the issue that this person was struggling with is a very common one.

Most of us are so trained by the "experts" to submit articles to external places in an effort to get traffic that we're missing out on something I feel is much more important......

POSTING NEW CONTENT TO YOUR OWN SITE!

I don't think I even have a dozen articles at ezinearticles yet. And yet I earn a full-time living from affiliate marketing and selling my own reports.

Why don't I submit more stuff to articles directories?

a) Because I'm a hog. I like to hog organic traffic from the search engines and have it come directly to my site instead of waiting for people to click on my article at ezinearticles and MAYBE click on my bio to visit my site. What some people don't realize is that even if your site is extremely new and you're targeting a heavily saturated, highly competitive niche, you're going to see traffic from "longtail" searches in the search engines very fast. Some of this traffic might be from smaller search engines like live.com, but some of it will be from Google. So if your keyword is "Weight loss" and you post an article about weight loss on your site, you should start seeing traffic from people doing longtail searches like "tell me about weight loss" or "weight loss tips for idiots" or "how can i have more weight loss" pretty quickly.

And I'd rather turn that organic longtail traffic into sales than wait for the endless loop of the person having to find my article externally and risk that they don't click on my bio link and ignore visiting my actual site. I like to bring them right to where the action is right away!

b) Time saving. I'm a prolific writer. If I add ten new articles or reviews to ten sites per month, that's 100 new pages of content. Each article or review, even on a very new site, might bring me anywhere from 50 to several thousand organic visitors per month (assuming I'm targeting decent keywords.) Those organic visitors are going to see my opt-in forms and be tempted to grab my free reports, or they'll see lots of nice photos for affiliate products and links out to buy those products. I'm monetizing them from the first moment they encounter snippets of my content in Google. They don't have to go through another site to reach my site. For me, this saves time and energy.

c) There are better ways - in my opinion - to get backlinks. Sure, a juicy link from ezinearticles is nice, but after you have one backlink from them, the backlinks aren't as valuable. So I prefer to get backlinks from a small, targeted bunch of places that give me maximum traction in the search engines fast.

d) I really HATE it when I give away lots of good information in an article at an articles directory and I satisfy the reader so much that they don't bother to click out to visit my site. I'm notorious for doing this. I'm just not very good at leaving the person hanging in the article so they will have to click to my site to find out more. So I'm just naturally suited to providing that same level of in depth content on MY site. At least at the end of the article they might click out on my affiliate link. I don't have to lead the visitor through so many steps before I can get my affiliate link in front of them.

So I just wanted to remind people that adding content to your OWN site instead of submitting dozens of articles to external directories might be more powerful than you think. For me, I get far more bang for my buck (or bucks for the time I spend writing a new article for my OWN sites) when I avoid the external directories and boost content and traffic for ME....not for ezinearticles (great though they are!)

Jennifer

[Richard Odell]

Here we go - this could be an interesting thread!

[Jeremy Kelsall]

I can definitely understand why you would say that....

I hate it when I get INSTANT traffic from submitting articles.

I really hate the fact that submitting articles allows me to OWN the first page in several of my niches.

I can't stand the fact that articles deliver XXX amount of visitors to my site per day...

I can see what your strategy is for the most part just from reading your post and I'm sure it works well for you, but Article Marketing has been making making people money hand over fist for a long time.

I think it is unfair to call it over rated.

[Tom Borowski]

Originally Posted by Jeremy Kelsall

I can definitely understand why you would say that....

I hate it when I get INSTANT traffic from submitting articles.

That should read "... INSTANT traffic from getting my articles accepted at EZineArticles." The way things are right now, it's everything but instant

[martinp]

I can see what you're saying but I don't agree that it's over rated at all. It's great if you can get every new article you write for your site onto page 1 of Google, but it doesn't work that way for me (without getting backlinks or targetting a relatively unsearched for phrase). It's much easier (for me anyway) to get an Ezinearticle ranked highly and getting good traffic almost immediately.

Jeremy makes a good point about owning the first page of Google - you couldn't do that with your site alone. I have a few different sub niches where I have 6-10 links on page 1 just from my site, article directories, squidoo, hubs, wikis and the like.

[Jeremy Kelsall]

Originally Posted by Tom Borowski

That should read "... INSTANT traffic from getting my articles accepted at EZineArticles." The way things are right now, it's everything but instant

LOL

True, I should reword that

[cosmokid]

Hi Jeremy,

"I can definitely understand why you would say that....
I hate it when I get INSTANT traffic from submitting articles.
I really hate the fact that submitting articles allows me to OWN the first page in several of my niches.
I can't stand the fact that articles deliver XXX amount of visitors to my site per day...
I can see what your strategy is for the most part just from reading your post and I'm sure it works well for you, but Article Marketing has been making making people money hand over fist for a long time.
I think it is unfair to call it over rated."

I think article marketing IS overrated because all of the things you mention above I'm doing other ways, with less labor intensive methods.

You can own the first page in Google a lot of ways. And many folks are being indoctrinated into believing that the article directories are the ONLY ways of doing this. That's why I want to encourage people to see the big picture...with every page of new content you add to your own site you're increasing your own site's page rank and visibility in the search engines. Some people have what I feel is a very lopsided approach - they're giving all their labor and traffic to the directories instead of their own sites.

I also don't see all of these directories being around forever, and I also see the usefulness of ezinearticles lessening over time since it's getting so over-used. To learn how to own the first page OTHER ways I think is a really good strategy! Then you're "zigging" while other people "zag."

It's easy to get lots of links pointing to your site from the first page of Google. Just take one of your keywords and take note of the first three pages that come up in Google. Place blog comments on the prominent blogs. Use social bookmarking in situations where your keyword shows up on the social bookmarking sites in a prominent way. Do everything you can to get links to your site placed on those sites. (You're right, this can include submitting stuff to articles directories if you want to.)

So yes, submitting articles to directories CAN be a useful part of an overall strategy, but other than ezinearticles you're seeing very few articles directories on the first pages of Google these days. So diversifying how you grab those top spots is really important.

I'm also a huge advocate of writers getting the most money for their time. And rather than showcase their writing skills to make ezinearticles look good and earn Adsense income for ezinearticles, I encourage writers to do as much as they can to boost their OWN sites' prominence in the engines. That way the pathway between the visitor and your bank account can be shorter - you get the visitor to come directly to you instead of relying upon a middleman.

It's all about balance, of course. But I find it a lot easier to use simple backlinking strategies from OTHER sites besides ezinearticles to gain me the traction I want for those first pages of Google. I dunno. Maybe it's a writer's thing - I want to get as much credit and profit for my work as possible rather than making ezinearticles look good!

Jennifer

[zoulkifl]

I understand what you're saying and it's perfectly logical. But submitting to article directories like EZA boosts your search engine ranking and with no doubt drive traffic to your site providing you have eye catching information.

That doesn't stop you from having the same article to your site. It would be preferable to edit it a little as to not have two exact copies.
This can help you get to position 1 and maybe 5 for your keywords.

More traffic.

If you are however linking to many other related websites and they send constant targeted traffic over to you than maybe that's all that you need.

You're implementing your own business model and it seems to work for you and I praise you for that but article marketing has helped out many people including myself.

I don't think it's over rated.

Zoul

[MADMONEY]

Here's My Two Cents

There's nothing wrong with article marketing, in fact, it is often recommended that you post the article on your own Web site and then either use the same article or spin it and submit that to whatever article directory you like.

This is not a new formula for strategy, just one that works.

On a new website, that has very little Google PR, it may be difficult sometimes to get highly -ranked even with a longtail keyword, depending of course on how many searches it has per month.

It only takes a small amount to rewrite the article.

But hey, if you don't like making money keep doing what you're doing, your only cutting your income in half!

Mad Money

[Rob Ferrall]

I think it depends on how you view it - I see it as an effective method to increase my website's visitor count. I do not expect to get direct traffic from article directories - that's not why I do it. I don't expect to increase my website's Page Rank - that's not a worthwhile endeavor either. I do it because it increases my website's visitor count from Google's natural results.

I spend about 40 minutes per article - that includes writing and manual submission to about 20 article directories. The returns for my investment are well worth the time spent. At this moment I cannot think of any other marketing methods that I could use, that could be completed in less than one hour, that offer the same benefits as article marketing.

I think that if you use article marketing in hopes of relying on traffic from your "about the author" blurb in an article directory, you're being wasteful. If you want to consider this an added bonus - that's totally different, but if the only reason that you employ article marketing is to focus on clickthroughs from your article... then I would agree that it's overrated.

Personally, I think it's all relative because article submissions still work for a variety of purposes.

[Steven Wagenheim]

I'm keeping out of this.

Been in enough knock down drag-outs this week.

So, how about them Mets? Haven't blown their lead yet.

And now that the Jets have Brett, look out baby!

I'm sorry, was this about article marketing?

No comment.

[mingles]

This is good stuff. Article marketing works and works quite well. Yes there are many different options to get your website listing on the first page of search engines but for people starting out, article marketing can be the best option. Many people do not have the money or skills to optimize their website if they even have one.

Article marketing is an excellent source for anyone beginner to advanced to write articles and make a decent living from doing so. Where many people fail is they write 5-10 articles and don't see results so they believe it is a waste of time and give up. Article marketing is about quantity rather then quality. Sure quality is important but the key is quantity.

If you write 50 plus articles on a given niche you will begin to make sales.

That is my take...

[Elmer Hurlstone]

Originally Posted by Steven Wagenheim

I'm keeping out of this.

Been in enough knock down drag-outs this week.

So, how about them Mets? Haven't blown their lead yet.

And now that the Jets have Brett, look out baby!

I'm sorry, was this about article marketing?

No comment.

This is, without a doubt, the most unusual reply I've ever read from Steve Wagenheim!

I'm going to go out on a limb--not a very long one, either--and infer a response. I'm going to read between the lines so to speak.

If Steve had replied he may have said, "I like article marketing. I believe in article marketing. I've had great success with article marketing."

But, since he didn't reply, we'll never know.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it", applies to both sides of this discussion. Do what works for you.

If you're satisfied with your results that is all that matters. If you're not satisfied look at other techniques and methods.

Elmer

[Steven Wagenheim]

Originally Posted by Elmer Hurlstone

This is, without a doubt, the most unusual reply I've ever read from Steve Wagenheim!

I'm going to go out on a limb--not a very long one, either--and infer a response. I'm going to read between the lines so to speak.

If Steve had replied he may have said, "I like article marketing. I believe in article marketing. I've had great success with article marketing."

But, since he didn't reply, we'll never know.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it", applies to both sides of this discussion. Do what works for you.

If you're satisfied with your results that is all that matters. If you're not satisfied look at other techniques and methods.

Elmer

Elmer, I couldn't have said it better.

Were you reading my mind?

[Rufus Steele]

Originally Posted by cosmokid

Hi Jeremy,

It's all about balance, of course. But I find it a lot easier to use simple backlinking strategies from OTHER sites besides ezinearticles to gain me the traction I want for those first pages of Google.

Jennifer

And there in lies the rub.

I don't think the "gurus" advocate Article submission and nothing else - they, in general, advocate it as a simple, quick and effective way of getting your site on the map, visited and starting to earn you an income from whichever means you wish to monetize it.

You may well have considerable success at getting links via other methods but I suspect - for those starting out and learning the ways of IM whilst keeping costs to a minimum - articles are THE only way for a quick result.

Should it be the only way?

No - not if you want long term, solid growth.

But for starting - I think you'd be hard pressed to find faster, more effective and cheaper!

[Sarah Harvey]

Cosmo is right you know. It's nice to get articles submitted to ezinearticles but from my own experiences I have kept my content to my site. Therefore people visit my site directly. I recon ezinearticles are good for affiliate marketing.

But when it comes to my own sites, heck no. I do not share my coveted information with other sites. Why should I? I would be a fool.

Imagine the complications of me creating an article on "How to draw Manga Girls" and then getting my article out on dozens of sites and what happens... 6/10 times... they ommit who wrote the article and end up selling that information on ebay. Hell no. That is where I draw the line.

Sure submit articles to sites like that isn't that focused on your own content. As I said, I would probably use it for affiliate products. But I would never offer them my information that I spent hours and hours researching. To me that is a complete waste of my time.

Good luck!

[Richard Odell]

Originally Posted by Steven Wagenheim

I'm keeping out of this.

Been in enough knock down drag-outs this week.

So, how about them Mets? Haven't blown their lead yet.

And now that the Jets have Brett, look out baby!

I'm sorry, was this about article marketing?

No comment.

Oh - gone on!

In the UK we haven't a clue about American Football...

Sundays are a bit a slow day - go for it!

Kindest regards....

[Terry Kyle]

Thank you for another intelligent, independent-minded (is that a word?) post Jennifer.

[cosmokid]

Hi Guys,

(And Steven, don't muzzle yourself unnecessarily - I'd love to see your input as a contrast to my views since I know you make a TON of money from your own excellent article marketing strategies.....I hear you're the king!

If you want fast traffic:

1) Social bookmarking - definitely hit Digg which has huge traffic right now and a handful of other sites which you can see getting first and second page rankings for your keywords in Google;

2) Yahoo answers (not to be underestimated; I get huge mileage out of the lamest, fastest posts there!)

3) Make sure you have a feed - create one if you have an html site, it's easy; ping the sucker every time you update with new content; this will bring a tiny trickle of traffic immediately, but more importantly, it brings the search engine spiders around immediately which helps you start getting traction in the engines for your keyphrases;

4) Link bait - use shamelessly controversial, news-related, opinionated, and/or "gurus in the news/products in the news/stuff being talked about on the Net in a passionate way" posts at your site to drive immediate traffic.

I was telling one lady about a recent experiment of mine. I've never really been drawn to using free WordPress blogs hosted on the WordPress server because they don't allow you to monetize your blogs, so while you can get these blogs excellent page rank very fast, you have to be subtle about linking out to your own sites. But just for poops and giggles I recently started a personal blog ranting about weird stuff of interest to me and about three other people on the planet.

I was looking at the blog as kind of a sociological test and an SEO playground to try different things - and to also rant about things I'm passionate about. Had no monetizing plan for it.

One day I decided to post a rant about the new Batman movie. I had seen it and offered some views. The blog was two days old. Immediately I had something like 1700 visitors in one day; a surprising amount of people stuck around to read future updates and all the flurry of people talking about that post and linking to that post allowed this new baby blog to swell to at least 300 - 500 visitors per day for the life of this new blog. I've done next to zero backlinking, too.

So I encourage people to think, again, about how to DRAW people to their sites.....if you're wary of doing link baiting you're missing out! You can always incorporate rants about stuff in the news in a "keyword news" section of your site. Link out to relevant affiliate products from those pages.

I'm just a huge fan of bringing energy to MY site instead of distributing an overabundance of love and care to other sites.

And I'll list my fourth biggie for instant traffic - offering to write a free, high quality article for a relevant newsletter. Approach other sites which either compete with yours or compliment yours (in a related niche.) Approach these relationships with those webmasters just as you would if seeking a JV (in fact, JV's can also be explored as you dialogue with these folks.) Rather than wait for a webmaster to grab your article at ezinearticles....which CAN happen but isn't always LIKELY to happen....increase the leverage of that article and maximize profits by directly targeting interested folks who have already proven a high level of passion for your subject (by subscribing to somebody's else's relevant newsletter) and get your material in front of those eyeballs.

I get HUGE mileage out of that - massive signups; spikes in traffic that convert into regular visitors (assuming I also keep my sites updated regularly) and much more bang for my buck than I get out of submitting to external article directories and sitting around HOPING and WISHING that someone will pick up my high quality article to run in their newsletter.

Best deal is when you can get someone to put your article into their autoresponder series.....you'll get traffic, signups, and customers for years to come.

Jennifer

[John Wilkes]

I was a bit dubious about jumping in here because I am fairly new to the forum and quite sensitive, so please do not rip me to shreads.
I totally agree with cosmo, everybody tells me to write articles to promote my website but.
Having borrowed the year of the book slogan for my website
"you should read more books", I now hold number 1 on Yahoo UK & Ireland out of about 124,000,000, above amazon and the other big publishers that thought up the slogan.
I have not posted any articles, only have about 12 back links and my traffic is completely organic, based on content.
So I believe she is right to point out it is not the only way.

[kenj]

I think that steve and Jennifer are both right in their own way. It depends what your site is after.
If it is affiliate sales then steven wagenheim's way is the way to go.
If you are creating an authority site in a niche then I'm with Jennifer all the way
Horses for courses as us english people say

[cosmokid]

Don't get me wrong - ezinearticles is tops at what they do.

But whenever anybody talks about how they launched a new site/blog and the first thing they did to get traffic is submit ten articles to ezinearticles....I'm reminded of this:

Us "old timers" remember back in June of 2007 when an x-rated hacker type started spamming the heck out of Squidoo. At the time Squidoo was (and still is) a big resource to gain backlinks and traffic from. Because of the spamming Squidoo suffered, Google DE-INDEXED them for a time.

(This was, of course, the very same week I had spent 40 hours creating lots of high quality Squidoo lenses!

Squidoo eventually was indexed again but you didnt' see any traffic to your sites while Squidoo was down (if you were counting on Squidoo traffic.)

I see a lot of people getting overly dependent on ezinearticles right now. Ask yourself - how much traffic would you get if ezinearticles was de-indexed for a month?

If you can't say "I wouldn't sweat it because I have lots of other traffic sources" then I'd politely encourage you to develop other strong traffic building strategies as diligently as you build your ezinearticles traffic. Because being overly dependent on ANY one site is dangerous to your business.

(And I'm not saying that all article marketers are doing this....but it's a mistake I see a lot of owners of brand new sites making....they're simply not feeling as confident about getting traffic other ways, and people keep pushing the old "Ya gotta submit lots of stuff to ezinearticles" wisdom on them. When in reality there is more than one way to skin a cat.

Jennifer

PS And I'm primarily an affiliate marketer these days - so I'm talking about using alternative traffic building sources for affiliates sites primarily.

[Jeremy Kelsall]

Jennifer,

I think the part of the process that you are missing is, most people that do article marketing do add a similar amount of content to their own site.

I don't think that I have talked to one person yet, that throws up a couple of paragraphs and then never adds more content, unless it is a review type of site.

I'm not saying that the way you laid it out is right or wrong, but what I am saying is that you are probably leaving visitors on the table

[Frank Bruno]

I believe in diversification for traffic sources.

Whether you use Ezine Articles, Squidoo, HubPages , or other Web 2.0 properties and article directories, the premise is still pretty much the same.

You need to use these external sites to bring your rankings up in the search engines.

Can you get good rankings without these external sites? It depends on your linking structure within your site. However it's a lot easier and quicker to obtain good rankings by leveraging external sites.

So while I agree with you about the overuse and the teachings of using EZine Articles for traffic leverage, I think it's also important to use external sites to bring up your rankings in the search engines.

Frank Bruno

[Steven Wagenheim]

Okay, I copped out with my original response and for that, I apologize.

I'm going to take a rather different look at this issue than most people would
expect. Truth is, even though I hammer EZA with submissions, I do know
that it has its limitations, as does putting content on your own site.

Here is the REAL truth.

There are problems with both models which is why you need to do BOTH.

That is of course unless your business model is simply promoting affiliate
products by submitting articles sending people to your product review on
your blog which is followed by a link to the product's sales page. In that
case, you can probably rely on EZA and even then, you run risks.

But I'm talking in circles, so let's get to the basics. I hope you all have
your pen and paper out because this is going to be a long one.

Business Model 1 - Authority Site

Okay, let's say you decide you're going to create an authority site. Now
remember, we're only discussing articles here and no other form of
promotion. Otherwise this gets real complicated real fast.

You just get your site up. It has no content on it, yet. You aren't even
spidered yet. I mean, you're NOWHERE...ground zero.

So what do you do?

Well, for one thing, I hope you create an XML site map and submit it to
Google to at least get yourself indexed.

But you still have no content. So, you have to start writing. I don't know
how much time you have to write, but if you're first starting, you better
have a ton of it if you want to have even a snowball's chance of getting
up the search engines quickly.

So you write 10 articles on day 1 and put them all up on your site.

The next day you look at the search engines and find that for the keywords
that you have in your meta tags, there are 3,173,286 competing sites
and you're on page...well, you can't find you.

You look at your AWStats and you have maybe 3 hits from the spiders,
most like MSN, Yahoo and possibly Google. Their bots usually hit you last.

Now, had you submitted these same articles to EZA, well, as a new
author, you're still screwed. You've got a 7 day wait to get them approved.

Once you get 10 articles approved, however, then it's just a 48 hour
wait. Of course that's been shot to sh*t lately, but that's another story.

However, once those articles are there, you don't have to worry about
search engine placement. You're going to get visitors just because your
articles are at EZA.

Where your own articles will start to benefit you is when your site reaches
the point (and this will vary depending on your niche and competition)
where you can actually find it in the search engines, then you will start
to see an increase in traffic, but not only that, traffic that is going to
hopefully come to your site, stay there, and come back.

But the point is, if you're counting on these people finding you solely from
the search engines, it's a bigger crap shoot than finding you from EZA
simply because you have a disadvantage as a new site that you don't
have when relying on EZA.

But why?

The answer is simple.

YOUR site is a nobody when you begin.

EZA is a great big somebody.

Who is going to get the traffic to start?

In a war with EZA, if I put up one article on my site on one page and one
article on EZA's site, I guarantee you as a beginning site, the EZA article
will GREATLY out pull the article on your site, given everything else is the
same and you do no other outside promotion for your site.

So for an authority site, I would certainly write articles for it, but I would
also write articles to submit to EZA. Not doing so, in my opinion, is a HUGE
mistake.

Now, once your site takes off and can be easily found from the search
engines, I'd then stop writing for EZA and submit all your articles to your
own site. At that point you don't need EZA and are just wasting your time.

Business Model 2 - Sales Or Squeeze Page

This is a no brainer. You can't put articles on sales or squeeze pages, so
your only option is submitting articles to EZA.

But what if you also have an authority site?

Well, then the same thing applies as above. Submit to both and then when
your site gets ranked, submit to your site only.

Make sure your site has links to your squeeze and sales pages.

Business Model 3 - Blog

If you have a Blogger blog, you have an advantage. Google owns it. So, if
you have a Blogger blog with a lot of good content, you can move up the
ranks fairly quick.

However, if you're using a Wordpress Blog either on their domain or your
own, then you've got your work cut out for you. In this case, I'd go
with the same game plan as model 1, submitting to both EZA and your
own blog.

Final Thoughts

So where do I stand on the subject brought up by Jennifer?

Well, most of my stuff is sales and squeeze pages. I only have two
authority sites and because of all the competition neither is doing much
of anything. The one gets like 100 visitors a day and the other gets like
50 visitors a day. And both have been up for years.

On the other hand, my sales and squeeze pages get hammered with
traffic...all from EZA.

In spite of my personal experience, I am a firm believer not to put all your
eggs in one basket. If EZA ever closes its doors, I'm screwed. It's that
simple.

Jennifer made some good points. What I do works for me because right
now, it's what's working.

Nobody, including myself, knows what tomorrow is going to bring.

[nick1123]

I think article marketing is more effective in some niches than others.

Also, to be an effective article marketer you must do a lot more than just plaster ezine articles with worthless crap.

You need to write an article that:
* Fills a need or helps someone with something
* Is good enough that people read the ENTIRE article and see your resource box.
* Is good enough that people will want to post your article on their site.
* Has a great resource box at the end promising more great info.

[Hamida Harland]

Steven I'm so glad you answered - I was disappointed when I came to this thread first time and saw that you weren't going to comment

[Andrew Maule]

DO BOTH!!!

[Frank Bruno]

Steve I knew you couldn't keep your mouth quiet for too long this...lol

Steve if ezinearticles closes doors I don't think you're really screwed.

Your traffic may drop temporarily, but if you'd kept duplicate copies of all your articles which I'm sure you have done, then you can resubmit those articles to Web 2.0 sites and other external sites to bring your traffic back up.

Frank Bruno

[jasonl70]

Jennifer, I like the way you think.. and it takes a lot of courage to advocate anything around here that's countrary to 'submit articles'..

[Rob Ferrall]

Notwithstanding my previous post, I think that the title of this thread may help some people to open up their eyes and see that there are promotion/marketing methods beyond article marketing. Which, that is a good thing.

Now, I know that article marketing works, but the truth of the matter is that it doesn't work as well as it did a couple of years back. Moreover, it'll probably be less effective a year from now than it is today.

Once something moves into mainstream knowledge, we as marketers embrace it, figure out a way to automate it, and eventually all but destroy its effectiveness due to our overuse and abuse of marketing methods that work.

I had huge success with safelists back in 2002 and 2003, then auto-submit, auto-click and auto-delete came in... Blog and ping used to be all the rave - it still works today for sure, but now we've "mastered" it to the point that it's not nearly as effective as it was a couple/few years back. The same goes for social bookmarking and article marketing - we're continually abusing these things and beating the dead horse until there's no life in them whatsoever.

These methods still work - but as was referenced above, "putting all of your eggs in one basket" is not a smart thing to do.

Vary your link building strategies and vary your marketing methods - do not rely on EzineArticles or article marketing in general to make your money. Sure, it works today - but there are no guarantees that it will work tomorrow.

[cosmokid]

Thanks to everybody who has contributed here so far - and thanks especially to Steven for such a clear, nuanced, and thoughtful response (we expect nothing less from Steven - we've gotten spoiled!

Yeah, my original point is that there are a lot of "newbies" or even intermediate marketers - especially those who have in the past relied on PPC paid traffic, for instance - who aren't fully exploiting the MANY other ways to get organic traffic BESIDES submitting articles.

Establish a presence on a well-ranked forum, for instance, and put a link to your site in your sig and you've got instance indexing. If you want to get creative link to just one PAGE on your site if you want extra traction in the search engines for a specific keyword.

That's just one example for pulling organic traffic fast, and obviously there are so many more.

But what I believe in personally is strengthening the depth and breadth and presence of your OWN site as much as you can - while also building quality backlinks. Bring the power, the energy, the interest from visitors right to your home door. Articles can unfortunately sometimes DILUTE that interest if readers get too much info in an article (and obviously some people are real pros at leaving readers wanting more so they will click on their article's sig line....as I mentioned before, I am NOT good at this! I always overwrite and oversatisfy my reader so they don't click enough on my main site. So I do suck at this. And I realize others don't!

Also I believe that smaller review type or sales page sites can ALL benefit from throwing a bunch of articles (possibly hidden somewhere in the back under "blog" or "keyword+articles") on the site itself.....mine do. I focus almost exclusively on building content ON the sites and pull good traffic. And I'm not necessarily trying to create authority sites, either - just respectable little affiliate sites.

One last point is kind of an obvious one....the fastest way to get traffic is of course by having a link on a high ranking website.....and the best way to control traffic flow (without sharing it with anybody else!) is for that high ranking site to be YOURS.

I have a lot of fun with my page rank 5 sites because I throw up one link to a new page or site and it's in the engines a few minutes later. My page rank 5 sites have feeds so the engines are always stopping by to index them. As older, high ranking sites the engines suck up any new links and index everything I throw on it fast.

It takes a) content building on your site b) time and c) backlinks to get your site above a page rank of 4. But I believe that having at least one page rank 5 site in your personal arsenal - a site you completely own and control - is THE smartest strategy of all to help you with fast indexing of new content on "baby" sites.

Heck, it also gets you instant sales. Oprah plugs a product on her site, I throw up a 300 word piece on one of my page rank 5 sites promoting the product, and the sales come in almost instantly (because my page rank 5 site gets indexed so rapidly.)

I just - again - STRONGLY encourage people to build up their own sites and to maximize that effort (if they're going to go to all the trouble of writing a lot of stuff or outsourcing writers to write lots of content for them.)

The investment you make in creating a page rank of 5 or better site is going to pay off for you in SUCH a big way and give so much to your other sites. So keep giving power and breadth to your own sites and make sure you're not giving it ALL away to articles directories - that's what I really mean.

Jennifer

[Mark-Dickenson]

I gotta agree with Jennifer.

Although I think there is some value in article marketing, if we look at marketing basics for a second, I think we can see that Jennifer has a good point.

Marketing 101 says that you need your Ad(or whatever you want them to click on) above the fold. You also don't want a lot of escape routes...and therein lies the problem with Ezine articles

Their ads are in a far more visible area than your resource box is. I still think there is some merit to it, but you are actually building ezine' articles business instead of your own

Now maybe my articles suck lol but for the effort, article marketing hasn't treated me as good as some others...just my 2 cents

[Jean Morgan]

Originally Posted by Richard Odell

Oh - gone on!

In the UK we haven't a clue about American Football...

Sundays are a bit a slow day - go for it!

Kindest regards....

So why is my husband sitting downstairs watching it? Sky have gone from doing one game on a Sunday night to doing 2 back to back plus the option of which you want to watch - I do watch occasionally - I like Tampa Bay again this year and would like to see Seattle do well.

Market forces dictated they show more.

As to this thread, well I do the things that work to get me traffic and stop doing those that don't. As we say around here - there is more than one way to skin a cat.

[Steven Wagenheim]

Originally Posted by BuddyT

"However, if you're using a Wordpress Blog either on their domain or your
own, then you've got your work cut out for you. "

I've not found this to necessarily be true. It depends on niche and keyword selection. I have a WP blog that is #5 for productname-review, #8 for product name review, and #4 for product-name review. It all happened fairly quickly. But it's a niche with only 40-60000 competing sites.

Buddy, a lot of stuff is niche and keyword specific. I think I mentioned that
in my post.

Point is, with the same amount of work that you did on your Wordpress
blogs, if you used Blogger, you'd have even better positions.

Google favors its own and there is just no way around that.

[brucerby]

Steve Wrote: "....If EZA ever closes its doors, I'm screwed. It's that
simple."....wow, that statement does surprise me, Steve.

If thats seriously true, then Jennifer's thinking on this is definitely worth listening to ...particularly the part about building a PR 5 site and all the 'muscle' that can bring to your Google results ranking.

A really excellent discussion about this.
_______
Bruce

[cosmokid]

Yeah, Bruce, there is NOTHING as powerful as having your own page rank 5 site - even if you just have one. And it doesn't have to be in any particular niche, either.

I have a page rank 5 site focused on mystical/spiritual stuff. I hardly update the thing at all these days unless I'm interested in doing some kind of market test. I'll often use it as a testing ground to see if I can gain traction promoting a specific affiliate product or if I can gain entry into a niche I'm thinking about pursuing.

Last fall Oprah plugged a bunch of X-mas gifts she recommended on her show. One of these was a video camera. It cost about $700 and was being sold on Amazon.

I was watching her show quite by accident (I've learned to pay more attention to her now) and saw her promoing all this stuff. I went to her website to get more info and saw the info on the video camera.

I took about ten minutes and grabbed an affiliate link for that camera being sold on Amazon and posted a short blurb of maybe 300 - 400 words talking about the camera's features and video cameras in general (talking completely out my butt because I don't own one.) And within the post I mentioned that Oprah featured this particular camera on her show. I then added a blurb about this little piece I'd written to my feed and pinged my feed. I didn't even bookmark it anywhere I don't think; maybe I bookmarked it at Digg, I'm not sure. But I didn't do much other than ping.

BEFORE HER SHOW WAS OVER I made my first sale. I made a nice bunch of sales throughout that week and have continued to make occasional sales throughout the year - at $30 commission or something per camera sold. Sales dropped off after a while because that particular camera got some bad reviews but I believe that if the press hadn't gotten negative about it I'd still be pulling in $100 or more per month from that page without doing a damned thing more than just leaving that page on my site.

Keep in mind the following:

1) Any time you add a new page or blog entry to a page rank 5 site of your own it will get indexed very fast (if it has a feed which you MUST create even if you have an html site - you really MUST if you want to see results like I get.)

2) It can take all of ten minutes to throw up an affiliate link for something hot you see on Google Hot Trends or on Oprah or elsewhere in the media and

3) Your site doesn't have to relate to the keywords for that product AT ALL, so if your page rank 5 site is about cowboys and you decide to promote women's lingerie your lingerie pages will get indexed and ranked high in Google fast and

4) You'll make sales right away if people are searching to buy this thing online. Period.

When I post something at my page rank 5 sites it gets on the first page of Google and almost always stays there....indefinitely. Competitors for that keyword come along later, but they're always at a disadvantage because they're newer and don't have a page rank of 5 and my article always gets preference in Google.

Now, why are we running around giving all that power to ezinearticles again, allowing our hard work writing articles to put money in their bank account?

Spend six months to a year and make the investment of getting at least one website of your own up to a page rank of 5 and it will be SO worth it for you.

If you're stumped about what the site should be about, why not make it a general interest blog or a review site covering a wide range of topics, or even just a personal site where you post an eclectic mix of stuff. Keep in mind that for that site you don't necessarily need to worry about keywords. Just build it over time with backlinks and content and eventually your site will have the same power I'm talking about, giving you immense leverage to take advantage of hot products and gurus in the news.

Jennifer

[PatDoyle]

I submit articles to get backlinks for my sites, not to get visitors directly from the article directories. I submit to a lot of article directories, not just EzineArticles.

This works especially well in niches where it is hard to get backlinks any other way.

The purpose of the backlinks is to increase your search engine rankings so you get more visitors from Google. In a non-competitive niche, you could be the only one to submit articles, so you could get a top ranking in Google for your keywords.

I do agree with those that said that you should keep your most valuable content on your own site.

If I had 10 posts written, I would post 8 of them on my site and submit 2 to various article directories.

[discrat]

Wow, this is an incredible thread. I just cant believe the amount of valuable info. you guys are sharing !

Thanks so much. I have bookmarked this Thread !!

[Mikev]

I like a lot of the thoughts here, but I have noticed that people talk about using articles as either for 1). backlinks, or for 2). traffic. Frankly, I use my articles (same article) for both, and do not see why these things need to be separated.

If you write a fluff article - then it is only good for a backlink. On the other hand, if you write a decent article (around 500-550 words), then you can get double duty out of it - both backlinks and traffic. Articles this short are not apt to give your readers all you know! You can either reduce your hard work by getting both benefits out of the same article, or multiply your article writing efforts - depends on which you prefer.

I also have to say that if you write an article that is interesting (dynamic) - then high-ranking Web sites will pick up your article (from EzineArticles) and give you even better traffic and SERPA. I have seen this happen a number of times. While not every article is going to have the same results, this is obviously a viral effect. Those who see fewer results may need to learn more about writing articles and what will appeal to their readers. Articles you have already written that are not doing well - give them a little tune-up for greater effectiveness.

I also have to agree with some that said it is best to use article marketing with other methods. For me, article marketing still remains very effective. Jennifer, I do appreciate your valuable information - and this discussion.

[Terry Hatfield]

Great post Jennifer!

Terry

[NickMarks]

umm, you must be joking right? Oh, I won't even bother..

[Chiayee]

Got to agree with Jennifer on building a PR5 site..

An idea from me: instead of building a pr5 site from scratch, why not buy a PR5 site if you have money to spend. With tips given by Jen, you should gain back your investment in no time

[GlynisG]

This is an interesting thread.
Jenn, as a part-time IM'er what I like most about it is the time-saving aspect.

Glynis

[Simon_Sezs]

I don't think that the "pros" bother with article marketing (I am not talking about the article marketing pros like Steven who probably generates more content than most are capable of). Do you really think that someone wanting to rank in the top 3 for the keyword "credit cards" really do a social media and article directory blitz in the hopes that they get ranked? Heck, these guys don't do blogs or CMS....if you look at their sites, they own static sites with one CPA site after another.

Take a look at their links and tell me one of the so called "common ways" that you read in the forums that they use. You would be hard pressed to find one with links from the article directories or social sites.

[Chri5123]

Originally Posted by mrsleep99

DO BOTH!!!

Could not agree more!

Do both together for best results.

Set up a blog on your domain, write article for blog, write another article for Ezine Articles or whatever directory you use and then put a link from the Ezine Article to the one on your website blog.

More work, but better results!

Just my 2 pence!

Chris

[cosmokid]

More great points, everyone!

I think I forgot to explain the real reasons for my personal "bias" against doing too much article marketing. I made my living as a full-time freelance writer from about 1998 through mid 2007 until I was able to transition into doing IM full-time (while retaining a few of my longtime newspaper clients.)

I was lucky to move into full-time writing right at the height of the dot.com boom. Ah, those were the days!

I would find postings for "writer wanted" at various freelance writing sites and back then they were REAL positions - major magazines looking for new talent because those huge ad dollars were coming in and making them feel generous; brand new websites with startup capital coming out their ears; and new newspapers springing up all over the place with nice budgets.

I would literally name a price. I'd wake up in the morning and go, "Hmm, this morning I think I'd like to land a gig with a magazine that pays me $1000 per 600 word piece." And it would happen within 24 hours if I bothered to send out a few proposals to some editors. These were blind proposals, too - I had zero contacts in the print publishing world.

The business climate was so unusual back then. Unfortunately it will probably be the only time within my lifetime when writers' work can be easily priced at a premium and even beginning writers can command decent living wages.

Now ad revenues have shrunk, newspapers are forcing even their long-time employees into early retirement, and websites don't pay their writers anything (because they have been trained to get articles at $3 per article....don't get me started on how much that pisses me off....not that I don't understand it from a business perspective of wanting to reduce costs, or maybe you don't even need high quality material because you're just trying to fill space on an ugly Adsense site...but STILL! )

So in the course of just one decade I've seen a real cosmic shift around the writing world. We went from being able to have anything we wanted to discovering that even if you're an established syndicated writer like me the newswire services don't want to do new projects with you because of the financial risks at their end. One of my longtime clients is the McClatchy newswire (formerly the Knight Ridder/Tribune newswire, they've merged so many times I can't keep track.) They're experiencing a lot of challenges like all publishing giants are.

But....the fantastic part of this cosmic shift that's going on right now is the arrival of eBooks and eReports and how we can make money from those in ways that simply weren't possible before. So in a weird way, if you're publishing your own eBooks, your earning power can be higher than any time in the history of humans setting words down on paper.

We've all heard about how fellow warrior (warrioress?) Alexis Dawes of Desperate Buyers Only fame has been earning yearly income in the MID SIX FIGURES just from her high quality, expensive Ebooks.

(Alexis, you are my goddess! )

When you write tons of articles and distribute them all over the place you are burning out your creative spark. You end up writing crappy stuff, or maybe stuff that is perfectly fine but it could certainly be a lot better if you had more time and energy to devote to each article. Your attention is spread all over the place. And you can't be at all certain that each article will EVER bring you any income. Quite often you're scattering too many seeds, hoping something might take root - and it might not.

By contrast, if you focus in a more cohesive way, setting the goal to complete a nicely composed, tightly written, high quality report or eBook, that thing can be making you money the moment you publish it.

Or, if you focus on creating high quality content just for your own sites and do a bare minimum of article submission - maybe just submitting a few high quality pieces to article directories that are a reflection of what you can REALLY do as a writer - you're drawing people into wanting to know you as a brand, and to visit your sites to get some of that essential "flavor" that you share on your own sites.

Distribute your energy too widely, and it dilutes its power.

That's what I believe, anyway.

The exception is probably the extremely prolific, insanely talented born writers like Steven W.

But his journey is not the "norm."

C'mon, folks. There are huge numbers of people here who struggle with completing just one article of high quality. Not because they're bad writers, usually, but because school trains you to think like you're writing a book report when you sit down to write something and we've all developed major resistance to that! And it takes a while, a lot of persistence and experimentation, to discover your own style for writing on the web - which ideally should be more casual and personal if you want to attract a dedicated audience. Not everyone is cut out to do article marketing. It's not going to be easy or viable for everyone. (At least in high volume.)

I know that those who preach article marketing as the be all and end all of things are teaching something that CAN work, but if writing isn't easy for you, or if you're like me and you prefer to retain some "mystery" (i.e. drawing people to your site to check out what you do instead of finding it readily available in a 1000 article directories,) article marketing might be something you want to de-emphasize or ignore as part of your marketing arsenal.

So I do feel that article marketing is over-rated. People who are new to the game might not understand how hard it can be writing articles in huge volume until they try and then they become overwhelmed. They also might not understand the power of retaining some mystery by only submitting very select pieces to post on article directories so that their "brand" doesn't get diluted and people have to do a little work to find them (by visiting their sites or buying their reports.)

Your dollar value as a writer can certainly go up if you only submit a small selection of very high quality pieces to places you screen very carefully - then people have to come to your site to buy your ebooks and they don't get everything for free.

By the way, I'm a big fan of Travis Sago and his marvelous bum marketing techniques. But in the swell of popular attention that these techniques have received, I've seen a lot of beginning marketers give all their time and power over to articles directories (submitting tons of articles) and to free third party sites (Blogger, Squidoo, Hubpages).....and they never get around to launching their OWN first website. So again, balance is everything. Remember to build your OWN virtual real estate empire and don't just constantly help to build other people's empires (like ezinearticles and the like.)

Jennifer

PS Sorry if this is disjointed - I'm still working on my first cup of coffee! Was up late working last night.

[Steven Wagenheim]

Originally Posted by cosmokid

The exception is probably the extremely prolific, insanely talented born writers like Steven W.

But his journey is not the "norm."

I received a phone call from a gentleman this morning at 10 AM. He is a
very successful Internet marketing with a product that has been selling now
for over 7 years.

In our conversation, where he was asking my opinion on safelists, we got into
the subject of article and ad writing. He said to me that he doesn't know how
I do it. He says it takes him a day and a half to churn out an ad and he
doesn't even want to know how long it would take him to do one article.

He's amazed that I can churn one out in 15 minutes.

I think this all goes back to my days as a kid when all I did was write. It
was really the only thing I enjoyed so much that I didn't even care if I
never made a dime off of it.

Since that time, I have written

700 songs
3000 articles
20 novels
100 short stories
6 years worth of scripts for a daytime drama for a major university
500 poems
8 years worth of diary entries
12 ebooks
Over 15,000 forum posts (all forums combined)

The day I stop writing is the day that they put me in the box for good.

Do something long enough, and you get okay at it.

[rainyclayday]

Jennifer, I appreciate your comments, thanks for taking the time to put them out there.

[alteredskin5]

Hey everyone! I am new to marketing and to Warrior Forum. I like what I see so far. I am still trying to get my website some traffic. Some of what you guys are talking about I feel lost about, but I hope that I can learn from all of you.