A Case For Quality Article Writing

Okay, so there are two schools of thought on article writing. According to one school, if you throw enough articles out there, some will stick and get you some good traffic. Using this "brute force" tactic, guys like Sean Mize (20,000 eZine Articles) and Fabian Tan (5,000 eZine Articles) would probably agree with this philosophy. They have both built huge lists as a result of their article writing campaigns.

By the way, Sean and Fabian both send most of their traffic, not to sales pages, but to squeeze pages. What does that tell you about the value of list building?

And I'm not suggesting their articles are not good by any means, but they certainly don't spend hours doing market research for the articles they write or pay to have written.

Another school of thought is to spend a fair amount of time doing market research before you write your articles. I mean looking at the number of competing sites Google shows for your targeted keyword phrase, looking at how many articles are currently showing in Google for your keyword phrase. Looking at the keyword densities for those articles, etc.

I say this all them time, but it's worth repeating, in the vast, vast majority of cases, Google will only show two listings from a top-level domain for any one search term. Example: I just did a search on Google for "dog training". This is way too competitive a search term to hope to get something like an eZineArticle to show for. In fact, the first article of any kind showing for "dog training" doesn't show until page 39 in the listings on Google. And the first eZineArticle doesn't show until page 96!

The problem is that the niche, and the specific keyword phrase, is dominated by relatively high PageRank pages, well optimized and well aged. These factors are all working against you if you are trying to get your own article to show there for that keyword phrase.

Now, about the two listings per top-level domain thing. Let's make up a scenario where you are targeting a keyword phrase in your article of "making rocking chairs". I just did this search and find an eZineArticle showing at the #51 position and the #154 position. Out of the top 100 pages returned those were the only two. What does this mean?

It means that with 99% certainty you will not find any more eZineArticles showing for that particular search term no matter how far down you drill into the pages returned. Google doesn't want any single top-level domain to dominate the pages returned for any search term.

Even if you do a search for General Motors, with thousands of pages on their site, only two pages from the gm.com site will be returned by Google. Try it, you'll see!

So, if you are planning on writing an article targeting the keyword phrase "making rocking chairs", submitting it to eZineArticles, and having it show in Google--you are going to have to beat out one of the two articles already showing for "making rocking chairs". Like it or not--that's a fact!

You will need to get some back-links to your article, have good keyword densities, use your keywords in your title, and (this is a biggie and I won't argue with you on this) you will need to consider LSI in your article composition. That is the one single thing you can easily do to get more Google love than your competitors because chances are good your competitors don't have a clue as to what that is all about. Neither of these eZineArticles was well optimized in terms of LSI factors at all. There is an opening!

Now, even though your eZineArticle article may be better than 99.9% of the pages currently showing for "making rocking chairs", it will never show unless you do, in fact, beat out one of the two eZineArticles currently showing for that term.

Without doing this kind of research, 90% of article marketers are wasting their time trying to get articles to show on Google when the chances are very, very slim that it will. Do things right and you can beat the pants off your competition.

Finally, know that even if your article never shows in Google (even if it is indexed) you can still get a ton of traffic from it. However, for this to happen it must be extremely well written. Quality blogs and newsletters troll the article directories constantly looking for QUALITY content. The AVERAGE article doesn't stand a chance of being picked up. But a very, very well written, high quality article can get snatched up by a newsletter and reach a huge audience in days, maybe hours. And the kicker is, if this happens, that editor may well look to your author page for more articles for future use.

Check the "Most Published" and "Most Viewed" articles under any category in eZine Articles. Many of these do not now up at all in Google but they can have 10,000+ views. People find them searching EZA itself and from seeing them on newsletters or blogs. When you find articles like that copy about 20 words from the article and paste those words into the Google search box. See if you can find pages where they are published. Check the Alexa ranking of those pages and estimate what kind of traffic they are getting. Contact the publisher of the blog site and see if they would be interested in some of your articles.

I just did this under the category of "Pets > > Dogs" in eZineArticles. The most viewed article had over 17,000 views in the past 90 days.
People Food Can Be Harmful to Your Dogs Health - 10 Human Foods to Never Feed Your Dog

So when I hear people say, "I don't have time to do a lot of market research for my articles" I cringe and think, man--you can't afford not to do the research buddy. One single, very well researched, very well optimized article will outperform a hundred of average ones. If you've got 5 hours to spend on an article (that's not a misprint) I would spend four hours and 30 minutes doing research and 30 minutes writing the article.

I hear you laughing at me. And yes, I've written as many as 40 articles in a day myself--but very few of those articles got much traffic. It ain't quantity, it's quality that really brings in traffic (and I mean big traffic) from the articles you write.

A lot of people will spend 6 hours building back-links to a site or blog that will never show in the search engines, but will only take 12 minutes writing an article. It could be me, but I don't follow that line of reasoning. Quality content rules and always will when it comes to article writing.

Another trick for those who have Clickbank products they are selling is as follows. This works especially if you have banner ads on your affiliate page. Suppose that (and I'm not talking about during a product launch period) you are getting 10 sales a week of your product on average. Yeah, that's not a lot, I know. But then, over a weekend you get 30 sales and your Clickbank analytics show that the same affiliate sent you all of those sales.

You could email just a couple of those buyers and say thank you for buying your product and offer them a freebie or something, and ask if they would mind telling you where they saw your ad. If they say they saw it at www.thebestbooksintheworldonline.com you could go there and see if they had one of your banner ads up on their blog. If so, email them and offer them an exclusive article (and I mean a damn good one) they could post with a link to your site at the bottom. This could get you even more sales, possibly quite a few. And--they may want to run some of your articles on an ongoing basis. This can work--trust me.

When someone reads one of my articles I want them to search out other articles I have and want to read more. This can turn one visit into twenty and that means more traffic and more sales. And this is the bottom line: Are your articles translating into sales?

And one final thought. A lot of people submit articles to get link juice (back-links) from them to their sites or blogs. Submitting 100 articles to an article directory, all focusing on one keyword and all pointing to your site or blog will not give you any more Google love than submitting just 2-3. A lot of people don't believe that, but it's true. If what you want is link juice, you are better off submitting 10 different articles to ten different article directories than submitting all 100 just to one.

I mentioned Sean Mize above. Suppose he took all 20,000 of his eZine Articles and pointed his links in his resource boxes to one single web site that dealt with some topic. With 20,000 inbound links he could rank that site for whatever search term he wished if that's the way Google worked; That is not how Google works. Just a little tip.

Article marketing is like any other business activity. You must be willing to do what your competition is unwilling or unable to do to succeed!

(I think I used the phrase One final thought..." three times above. This is my final thought--it's time for bed!"