Getting Started; Quality vs Quantity?

You've certainly started out your process on better footing with having better competition. Make sure that before you even generate traffic that people who search your keyword would be looking to buy. I have one site that my main keyword gets 40,000 searches a month and we currently rank #4. Originally, the site only ranked for that term and I made one sale a month from it for my own product. The term was very generic. Now I have inner pages that rank for much lower search volume "buy now" keywords and I easily convert at least one per day with much less traffic. Just make sure your research makes sense before you even begin or you will experience version 2 of spinning your wheels.

Articles you post on your blog you should not publish elsewhere on the internet.

Therein lies the problem; I pulled the plug on that site. Shortly after, RIGHT after the last G update, I was right smack on the front page with 5 of my articles. Talk about frustrating. I guess you can't predict the future.

Very informative. I read the post you linked, too. So, I should come up with some quality content and post it on my blog... then make lots of variations of that content and push it to directories and bookmarking sites. I like that idea better than having to painstakingly create good articles from scratch and put them everywhere by hand. At the risk of sounding lazy, I'm just passionate enough about my topic to make some money off of it lol I don't want to make it my whole friggin' life.

One last thing, landing pages. Should I at any point in this endeavor try to hard sell something? Or simply write informative and useful content while suggesting products? The people searching may or may not be looking to buy, and I'm not sure a "buy now" tone would work. My topic by the way is on controlling your emotions; there's no site as of now dedicated to that topic and I figure I can push e-books on it and mood enhancing vitamin supplements. Any opinions on that?

My contention is that it's easy to imagine that you're getting your traffic from article directories when what you're actually doing is sending your traffic (i.e. generated by your backlinking campaigns) to article directories.

Sure - we agree completely about that.

Broadly speaking, two different groups of people read EZA articles.

(i) Potential customers: these are people who find your article by putting one of its keywords into a search engine and clicking on the SERP's. This is pretty difficult, though (and especially nowadays!) because they don't rank well - and one doesn't want potential customers finding one's articles that way, anyway - at least, I certainly don't - especially after the so-called "Panda update" has knocked the article directories about but benefitted my own sites;

(ii) People looking not in Google but inside the directory (e.g. using EZA's internal search): these are researchers, webmasters, ezine/newsletter-compilers, and so on, but they're not potential customers.

How one uses an article directory depends on which group one's writing for, because what each will respond to is pretty much mutually exclusive.

In the "writing for clicks" model (this is "article directory marketing", which I used to use but will now no longer touch), one is writing for the first group - potential customers. This approach is characterised by producing a large quantity of shorter articles, typically more "salesy" in tone, with a "call to action" in the resource box (all the things that will ensure nobody much syndicates it). It's what Warriors here widely refer to as a "rinse and repeat" model, i.e. you have to keep on and on producing it over and over and over again because it doesn't really produce residual income for most people, most of the time. In my opinion, it isn't really building an asset-based income, either - it's more like creating a job for yourself. I do see that one could effectively outsource and automate quite a lot of it and try to build it up into a steady, secure income, but I strongly suspect that doing so raises, for many people, several new difficulties in addition, and that the overall success-rate of this model is very small.

In the "writing for syndication" model (this is more like "article marketing", not just "article directory marketing"), one is writing for the second group, potential syndicators, and in contrast to the paragraph above, creating one's articles more like this. It's a radically different and (for those of us here who've tried it) a far more profitable, stable and secure approach characterised by building a real, asset-based business based on continually increasing residual income from work already done.

In a sense, it all boils down to one essentially simple, straightforward Big Key Question:-

When a potential customer finds your article by putting one of its keywords into a search engine, what do you want him to find: an article directory copy or the copy on your own site? :confused:

To me, it's a no-brainer.

Most people who go to an article directory don't make it to my site at all, don't opt in, don't become customers, and so on. And that was so even when I was writing for clicks. And of course it's so for most article directory marketers, most of the time. When their potential-customer-traffic goes to a directory, they lose most of it. So there's not much to think about, there. :p

I need to be building any backlinks I build (which isn't very many, I admit, because others do that for me by syndicating my articles from directories and in other ways) to my site and NOT to article directories, otherwise, in the long run, as so many have found to their cost, I'll just be shooting my own sites in the elegantly high-heeled foot.

This is perhaps the single biggest determinant, for the "average marketer" of whether or not s/he actually makes a living at all from article marketing. It's no coincidence that very few people who build backlinks to article directories are successful in the long term. Most of the time it's a simple case of the descending ceiling. This really is exactly how the ceiling has descended on so many people, and why for the last year or two (even before this recent Google algorithm change) there've been so many threads here commenting that "article marketing is dead".

This is the trap into which many people fall. If they have a newish site, their article will of course be on a PR-0 page there. At EZA it'll also be on a PR-0 page (that's how all EZA articles start off), but because EZA's home page has a higher PR, that'll still make the EZA copy rank more easily (fortunately this problem is easily overcome, and people wanting to own their business and promote their own site do need to overcome it!).

Sadly, because of this, a lot of people decide "EZA's easier to rank than my own site, so I'll send my traffic there instead of to my own site" and they then build backlinks to the EZA copy. EZA must love them. :p

And once they start doing that, it can only get worse - not better, because the more they do that, the harder it is for them ever to rank their own site (and to own their own business, really). The outcome is that instead of getting 100% of "their traffic", they're sending it to EZA and getting back only what's left after the AdSense, other distractions and non-CTR have all taken their toll.

As explained here, here, here, here, here, here and so on.

I may not be able to convince you - no problem.

It seems to me that a high proportion of people trying it are successful with it, and that they end up saying (exactly as I did) "I wish I'd known all this in the first place and not wasted so much time depending on article directories for traffic and backlinks".

In contrast, it seems to me from reading this forum that all the people failing in article marketing (and we all know and can readily see that that's a huge number of people) are all failing in more or less the same way, and it's a way characterised by depending on article directories for traffic and backlinks.

I used to be in that position at one time, and I'm relieved that I'm not, any more. Especially after the "Panda update", and I expect there'll be many more "updates" like that on the way (at least, I hope there will).

One thing's clear: people who switch from "article directory marketing" to "article marketing" are not switching back.

Yes, I am.

It's true that some of my sites have gradually done well from all the relevant high-quality backlinks arising through syndication (I even have two sites with PR-5 home pages of my own now, which came as a great surprise, not that page rank really signifies much anyway, in itself), and some do rank well in Google, though not for highly competitive keywords. I do get Google traffic too (and it can be interesting seeing the keywords for which people have searched, because occasionally they're not what I imagined/intended at all!).

Well, this is the big question, isn't it?

I started off (as most people do) trying to use article directories for backlinks and traffic, and made just about every mistake it's possible to make, and initially believed just about every urban myth it's possible to believe ... and I've only been "doing it right" for 2 years, so it's perhaps early to tell.

But I think so, yes.

Because some of those sites are growing, too, and traffic from them improves.

And because I have about 1,250 articles sitting in EZA, and even some of the older ones still continue to get syndicated to new places now. So it is, genuinely, an asset-based business with gradually growing residual income.

Hi Majay, syndication has nothing to do with using the EZA copy of the article directly to drive more traffic to your webpage. Syndication is an alternative method of article marketing which doesn't depend on using article directories for their own traffic.

If you'll excuse the observation, this thread probably isn't quite the right place to start yet another discussion about the basics of article syndication: there are dozens of other threads on the subject, and a lot of information about syndication in the posts just above, here, too! If it helps, you might perhaps also look at this post, made earlier today (there are also many links in it which might help?).