Article Marketing - What's the Attraction?

[Charles L Rivera]

Hi guys,

I have seen lots of posts here that refer to article marketing. I'm new to this whole IM thing (and this forum), so forgive me if I sound a bit daft.

I did a search for article marketing on the forums and I've learned a lot about it, how to do it, how to be successful but what I haven't learned is WHY you would want to spend lots of time writing articles.

Is it to gain exposure and become an authority?

It seems you could probably get a lot of traffic. If you wrote, say 10 articles and each of them got 5 views a month that equates to 50 extra visitors.

But doesn't that traffic kind of die off? Seems like you would get an initial set of visitors and as the article aged, the traffic would die off.

So why would you spend time with article marketing rather than just keeping those articles for yourself and building up your SEO and content?

I dunno it seems like you're giving away your content for nothing.

edit - Maybe I also don't have a firm grasp on the concept... My understanding (if that's what you would call it), is that "article marketing" is where you write articles and put them on a site like Ezinearticles and have the resource box pointing to your external site - is that right?

[Andrew Maule]

Article marketing is a challenge but it's worth mastering. Once you learn good keyword research, how to scale lots of quality+targeted articles and submission to the directories you can cheaply get traffic/free if you do it yourself.

[Slin]

Um what? (not really sure what Madden is talking about)

K article marketing is popular because it is free, your costs come to zero for the traffic.

If you build SEO around your articles they should not drop out of rank in search engines. This means that you will keep receiving the traffic you want.

The drawbacks is, it is very time consuming for the pay off.

But heck I have articles written a year ago that still send in a few visitors a week.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by Charles L Rivera

But doesn't that traffic kind of die off? Seems like you would get an initial set of visitors and as the article aged, the traffic would die off.

It typically dies down, gradually, but you can give it a good boost with some SEO if that's worth while.

Originally Posted by Charles L Rivera

I dunno it seems like you're giving away your content for nothing.

Some people do make exactly this mistake.

It's not really for nothing if you get something out of it yourself first, and then give it away to article directories. And if the article quality's good enough, you can actually get a lot of additional targeted traffic back to your own sites that way.

Originally Posted by Charles L Rivera

Maybe I also don't have a firm grasp on the concept...

My own guess, from reading your post, is that you have a rather firmer grasp of the concept than many people actually doing article marketing!

[adamv]

Originally Posted by Charles L Rivera

Hi guys,

WHY you would want to spend lots of time writing articles.

Is it to gain exposure and become an authority?

That's one benefit.

It seems you could probably get a lot of traffic. If you wrote, say 10 articles and each of them got 5 views a month that equates to 50 extra visitors.

But doesn't that traffic kind of die off? Seems like you would get an initial set of visitors and as the article aged, the traffic would die off.

It dies off pretty quickly but if you do some backlinking your articles can rank in the search engines and bring in traffic for a long time.

So why would you spend time with article marketing rather than just keeping those articles for yourself and building up your SEO and content?

I dunno it seems like you're giving away your content for nothing.

If you put up a new site and start seo it will take a while for your site to rank. If you post an article to EZA you will be getting traffic to your site the day your article is published.

Putting up an article is also an easy way to test a niche for free. If you put up a few articles and don't make any sales you can re-evaluate your article, the resource box, your landing page etc. or you could also decide to move on to a different niche. An article that gets a good click through rate, sending traffic and making you money lets you know that you have a winner and you can put more effort into that niche.

You're not "giving your content away for nothing." You will be getting targeted traffic to your website in return for posting your articles. There's also no reason why you can't put the very same article on your own site, a bunch of other article directories, web 2.0 sites, pdf/ebook directories, software directories etc.

Article marketing is a good way to get started in IM without spending a fortune on paid advertising. Getting your content out to as many places as possible, all linking back to a site that makes money for you is a good thing.

[JackPowers]

I use article marketing mostly because it's fast and cheap (I write myself) and brings very targeted visitors.

[redicelander]

Article marketing is free. Attraction number one.

It can bring you organic traffic for years to come (as long as you keep the same link and site). Some articles to die off but others stay there for years. Attraction number two.

If you do it yourself, it's free. Attraction number 3.

Whoops, I think I said that one twice.

You will eventually get an article that just rocks your traffic if you keep doing it.

It helps build backlinks to your site. Attraction number 4.

[Charles L Rivera]

Excellent info. Thanks for the advice everyone. I suppose I didn't consider that traffic or any other form of presence isn't necessarily "giving away" content. In the end, it does benefit me (albeit in a different manner than I originally thought content should).

I believe that I could probably be a good writer, if given enough time and background information. I guess a concern of mine is that I wouldn't be enough of an authority already to write articles in a niche.

Why would someone want to read about weight loss from someone who's been a web developer his whole life ? Hardly an expert.

How do we get around that fact (the fact that we're not necessarily *really* an expert in our niche) without basically just repeating what other articles are already written about?

[Slin]

Just do market research look at forums, search in ezines, goarticles, and those places for articles on the subject.

You'll actually find most of this information is pretty easy.

[pharris1]

Why would someone want to read about weight loss from someone who's been a web developer his whole life ? Hardly an expert.

The nice thing about this is no one knows you're a web developer. The more you research and write about a topic you become the "expert" in that area.

The other comment I had about giving your content away for free is this - you can build an authority web site related to whatever market you are in and post all of your articles on your site. You may put a link on your main web page titled "articles" that will take a visitor to a list of all of your articles if they want to read more of what you wrote. This is great because you maintain "ownership" of all of your articles and if for some reason an article directory shuts down or decides to ban you (no one will be able to view your articles anymore from their directory) you still have them posted online on your site or blog. Having a website with alot of quality content can also help your rankings in the search engines.

Hope this helps.

Peter

[GeorgR.]

i have done Adwords and Affiliate marketing (clickbank mainly) for years, and the math HARDLY works.

The reason is that the bids are through the roof and the payouts are USUALLY in no healthy relationship to what you pay per click.

Look at clickbank and see that the majority (90%) of products pay well below $30 - while bids for keywords are reaching $0.50 - $0.80 easily.

I started to shift focus on article marketing, and it works WAY better than adwords. I pay less to my writers what i ever paid for adwords, and i get more sales.

Its also easier in a sense that adwords needed a lot of maintenance, observe CTR, clicks, costs, performance, not to mention quality score to cut even, let alone make a lot of money....especially with affiliate programs.

With article marketing you dont have those problems.