Ezine Articles vs. GoArticles vs. SearchWarp - The Results Are In! (See Screenshots)

[Derek Pankaew]

Real Data to Back Up Article Marketing

One of the biggest challenges with Article Marketing is that so many people say it works ... But so rarely do people back it up with real data.

That's why I decided to conduct a little test and track it all the way. I submitted six articles each to SearchWarp, GoArticles and EzineArticles to see which articles generated the most traffic.

Now, it isn't entirely fair to say these are indicative of which sites are "better," as every article is a little different. However, once you see the data it'll be pretty clear which site is best for us marketers.

General Statistics & Results

First of all, lets take a look at what results these 18 articles generated.

Over the course of ten months, these articles generated 6,692 unique visitors. Now - That's not the whole picture. 63% of the site's traffic came from search engines, even though no SEO had been conducted at all.

33% came from referring sites (ie. Article traffic) and the rest was just repeat visitors.

That means that if you just look at referring traffic, each article brought in over 100 visitors. If you count search engine traffic, each article brought in a hundred and seventy one visitors!

To take a look at the general stats for yourself, take a look at this screenshot:

EzineArticles vs. GoArticles vs. SearchWarp

One note: SearchWarp approves your articles far, far quicker than any of the other two. You'll have your articles up in a day with SearchWarp, where it might take a week with EzineArticles.

Another note: To get your articles approved as quickly as possible with EzineArticles, submit your articles on Monday or Tuesday. They don't approve articles over the weekend (as far as I could tell,) and tend to be slower on Thursdays and Fridays.

After taking even just a quick look at the stats, it became so clear why EzineArticles is the most popular site for submitting articles to. It outpulled SearchWarp by over four times. Check out the stats here:

Search Engine Data

We're all heard that Google doesn't weight links from article directories very highly. Based on this data (remember, the only promotion for this site was article marketing,) that seems completely true. Yahoo brought in 30%-40% more visitors than Google did.

On another note, search engine traffic didn't really start coming in until several months after the articles were launched. The articles started with a big initial spike and then died down, while the search engine traffic started very slow but gradually ramped up.

You can see that data here:

Conclusions

- EzineArticles far outpulls SearchWarp or GoArticles
- Search engine do give you credit for having article links pointing to you, although Yahoo seems to value them higher.
- Each article will generate over 100 visitors over 10 months. At a 1% conversion rate, that's $20-$100 an article! People complain about how little traffic a single article brings, but that's because they're not looking at the stats over the long run. While an article might only bring in 10 visitors a month (ie. 0.3 a day,) over the course of a year that adds up very quickly!
- Article traffic will eventually die, as will search engine traffic if you don't update your website. It takes about a year of inactivity for both to die down.

Hope these article marketing stats will help ya'll have a more solid sense of what you might expect if you get into article marketing.

Cheers,

- Derek Pankaew

[Mary Green]

I was really interested, but couldnt see the screenshots, any way they can be blown up? Im still reading what you write of course

Mary

[HomeBasedBusinessPLR]

Awesome post! Article marketing rocks

[Derek Pankaew]

Hey Mary -

Just click the screenshots and they should open in a new window.

Cheers =)

- Derek

[Tim Dixon]

Thanks for sharing that. It's a very nice piece of analysis and especially as it highlights the long term benefits of article marketing.

Re. viewing the screenshots, you can click on them to enlarge them and then you can zoom in some more (at least I was able to in FireFox).

Good job.
Tim

[sree94]

I don't know, I have found that on the first page of Google, a LOT of the top results are from EzineArticles

That is probably because Google knows they are human approved.

[richinca]

Excellent article and data.

[jmidas]

Great work. Thanks for sharing.

[John34]

Some nice testing,Thanks.

[lockflow]

Excellent work Derek!

[crystalq]

Excellent post! Great insight.

[ryon1]

Hi Derek,
Thanks for sharing. I've realized the power of article marketing.
Rudy

[AMKiller]

Hi Derek,

Great post - thanks for sharing.

Reminder to self: think longterm

[WinsonYeung]

hey, thanks for sharing the stats detail dude !

[Ron Killian]

Great stats, thanks for posting!

[John S. Rhodes]

It's critical to look at the total returns over time. Internet Marketing
is often treated as a short term game but that's a poor approach. It
is far better to treat your work in the context of a business. Look out
6 months, 12 monts, 5 years, and beyond. Are you building your biz
or not?

~ John

[Shane Lowry]

Great post Derek,

Great to see you are getting such consistent traffic to your sites.

Now to write more articles.

Cheers,
Shane

[dclodge]

One question.

The articles you posted to the directories - did you also have those same articles accessible on your website?

Dean

[BigRedNotebook]

Nice job, Derek. It's always good to see more numbers re: article marketing outcomes.

[Allen Graves]

These are some great numbers to see. But...there's always a but, right?...these numbers are for 6 articles...six.

There was another really nice experiment done a few months ago too...but it was only done with a single article submitted to three different mass-submission sites...one article.

I sit in front of thousands of articles every single day and watch what they are doing as far as traffic and search engine activity goes. From what I see, the numbers from experiments like this...even over several months...are not very consistent with what I am seeing on a day to day basis with the "average" article.

Also, there's no way to tell if visitors from the article directories found your article via a search engine or they were just surfing the directory.

There is a bell curve going on and testing with so few articles is like throwing darts with a blindfold on. I liken it giving a math test to 6 random children from a school of 2,000,000 kids. What if you happen to test the 6 smartest kids in the school? You cannot say that the school has awesome math teachers because it could have 1,999,994 other kids that totally suck at math.

The variables that must be considered in experiments like these are so huge that even I can barely comprehend them all...and I've been studying these numbers for years. I certainly cannot even begin to list them here.

Again, these are awesome numbers to see, Derek, and they may shed some light on which directory out of these three is the best to submit to as far as traffic goes.

But again, had you chosen 6 other articles to submit instead of the 6 you did, the results could have very well been reversed.

I promise I am not trying to rain on your results, nor am I trying to say that article marketing doesn't work.

Thanks for your time and effort to conduct this experiment. It should provide some much needed incentive for people to get out there and either give article marketing a try, or to get back into it and submit more articles!

Respectfully,
Allen Graves

[Gunter Eibl]

Thanks for sharing. Just proves again what most know, that ezinearticles is #1. Just see this chart that compares these three and you see the huge difference:

SnapShot of ezinearticles.com (rank #129), searchwarp.com (#3,681), goarticles.com (#9,558) - Compete

Gunter

[Derek Pankaew]

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for the great feedback =)

Allen -

I absolutely agree. It was actually 18 articles, 6 to each site. But yes, you're right - I've heard of articles that have generated $2000+ on their own in a month, and I've of course heard of articles that have generated near zero traffic.

You're also right that you don't know where the traffic is getting to your articles from.

But, to whatever end it helps, personally it's still good to have some data on what I can expect.

Cheers =)

- Derek

[Kiwigal]

Good Info Derek, Thanks

[seye]

I love this , you wrote things out the way they are ... actually ezinearticles approve articles slower becuase of the huge amount of articles submitted to them on a daily basis

[typedrobin]

Derek,

Very helpful informations,
Thanks and good luck.

[morwanneg]

Good information. EZA too gives me huge traffic.

[jatt]

I think everyone is using EZA now.That's why it is slower.However, just add up all articles in EZA.It never harm you

[ebooks4u]

You confirmed what I already discovered, Ezinearticles.com is the best place to get your articles listed, because of their tight cooperation with Google. => High listings for your articles => more traffic. It's that simple. Now, get started writing! :-)

[Valeriu Popescu]

Good article here that confirm my theory: IF you want to succeed in article marketing, do it in a bulk way! Post at least 100 if you want to get some decent traffic.

Val

[Jon Alexander]

fantastic post Derek - some hard evidence that confirms what everyone has long suspected - ezines is the 600 pound gorrilla, but the size of the jungle is rapidly diminishing...

[anan7alp]

Hi!

How can i get the result like that? i tried but no good result.

[DrewG]

+Thanks!

"- Each article will generate over 100 visitors over 10 months. At a 1% conversion rate, that's $20-$100 an article! People complain about how little traffic a single article brings, but that's because they're not looking at the stats over the long run. While an article might only bring in 10 visitors a month (ie. 0.3 a day,) over the course of a year that adds up very quickly!"

^awesome results

I love case studies, but how come their was such a high bounce rate? Was it just because this was strictly a case study and no content was on the site?

[Maria Gudelis]

Derek - fantastic for sharing!!!!

Always enjoy working with you too so neat to see some stats.

From an SEO pt. of view - Ezine is the best - one of my pr4 blogs - when I did a backlink analysis on it - ezine was showing as a PR7 backlink - so indeed you are doing SEO when submitting to Ezine that helps increase your PR.

Cheers, M

[MIB Mastermind]

Very good info. I have always found ezine articles provide me with the most traffic over the other directories.

[Simon74]

Very good post, and again showed that articles marketing really works.

Thanks for sharing.

Simon

[Zeus66]

Awesome data! One of the best posts I've seen here on the subject. I want to emphasize that much depends on what you do before you write and submit. Build a list of keywords that are longtail and have relatively little competition. Programs like Micro Niche Finder are excellent sources to determine these things. Then, make sure to use that keyword in your article's title (at the beginning of it is best), and then use the keyword a few times in the article, along with many variations for LSI effect.

If you really want to completely own Page 1 at Google (eventually), get a few quality links to your articles. You can set up a Squidoo lens or Hubpages page and link to your articles. Social bookmark the articles. Enable your EZA author RSS feed and submit to RSS directories. If you combine links + smart use of longtail keywords, you will rise to the top.

But be patient... I have a couple articles I submitted to EZA back in 2005 that still pull in several visitors per day to one of my sites. If I'd taken the time to write about 50 articles for that site, I'd likely be getting 500+ visitors per day to that site right now without having done one other thing to promote it. Keep yourself focused on long-term success when you employ article marketing and forget the "get rich quick" mentality. This is a powerful long-term form of marketing, but it isn't gonna make many people rich quick.

John

[H3x]

Quite clear on which sites are the best, thanks for the post mate

[ajetayo]

Clap Clap Clap...... Very good research, There ia always something to learn in WF