12 Powerful Reasons Article Marketing Does Not Suck!

[Sean Donahoe]

In another post from yesterday another marketer started a big controversial thread about why Article Marketing sucks and all new marketers should steer clear of it. This came a quite a shock to successful article marketers making 6 figures who clearly thought this was a ridiculous opinion. The OP also stressed that new marketers should focus on PPC techniques only.

[Edit - This is not an attack on the OP of that thread, just a differing opinion]

Well, as a long time and very successful marketer in all areas of marketing I can quite confidently say (as will be backed up by almost all successful marketers) that this is a very shortsighted view. Here is 12 reasons why (and I could churn out a lot more as I am sure many marketers will add to this list) Article Marketing does not suck:

1. Article marketing does not cost a single cent
2. You can churn out a profit pulling article in just 20-30 minutes
3. Search engines love articles, they are pure spiderbait
4. Article marketing is a powerful way to build backlinks to your websites
5. You can create a web of articles that can help you dominate and entire niche in a matter of days
6. Your articles can be indexed in the search engines in a matter of minutes
7. People are always looking for answers to questions or solutions to problems, articles are a perfect delivery tool for solutions
8. Anyone can start article marketing in a matter of minutes regardless of experience
9. Unlike PPC you can presell your reader about the solution you are presenting, you can't do that as effectively in 3 lines of PPC ad.
10. You can establish credibility and a powerful reputation in any industry with just a few articles
11. You can turn that credibility and reputation into profit through other promotion activities
12. With the right guidance, skills and strategies you can turn your article marketing into a 6-7 Figure business empire

If you have any doubts about the viability of article marketing in any way just look around this forum, there are many successful article marketers who are proving what I say here every single day.

Now, I am not bashing other marketing strategies in any way, everything can be used together to create a very powerful mix and disregarding any area of marketing is just insane. Sure, every market or niche is different but as the old theater adage goes "it's all bums on seats!". Just drive your customers to your website and make some money!

So, do you still think article marketing sucks?

[Steven Wagenheim]

Sean, while your heart's in the right place and these are certainly 12
excellent points, this thread, the way it's presented, is just going to start
more arguments and lead to more of the same nonsense that the other
thread led to.

Just my opinion of course.

But for whatever it's worth, I agree with you.

Hopefully, this thread will stay civilized.

[Derek Pankaew]

13) It's a proven method of marketing used even by $20+ Million dollar/year marketing experts.

Article marketing is very powerful. I've built successful sites and got them a lot of traffic, including search engine traffic, from just article marketing.

[Sean Donahoe]

I certainly hope this thread stays civilized as is my intent. I hope this post is taken as a positive outlook and a caution against dismissing any type of marketing is handicapping yourself before you start.

New marketers mostly fail because of the first few steps they take and get easily disheartened. I am sure we have all seen that many times.

As a 6 figure article marketer yourself I appreciate your comments and input.

[Sean Donahoe]

Originally Posted by Derek Pankaew

13) It's a proven method of marketing used even by $20+ Million dollar/year marketing experts.

A very noteworthy point in addition to the dozen, thanks Derek

[Loren Woirhaye]

If you suck at writing or pick sucky things to write about it does
suck though. Basically with all internet marketing if you don't
"get it" with a particular method you can expect frustration.

[Jared Alberghini]

Originally Posted by Sean Donahoe

I certainly hope this thread stays civilized as is my intent.

Sean, you suck, everyone that posts a reply here sucks (including myself)... whoops... Sorry, I forgot which thread I was in...lol... couldn't resist

Anyways, I'm no big time article marketer, but I can tell you this: An article I wrote back in 2004 about open source stuff STILL to this day brings me 20-30 unique visitors PER DAY! Now that's a 'set it and forget it' plan that works. I just did the math real quick, and that roughly equates to 36,500 unique visitors to my site, just from one silly little article that took me probably an hour to write way back then, and it shows no signs of stopping or slowing down anytime soon. I've only got a few dozen other articles out there, but this one has brought me the most traffic.

I Thank you for your post Sean, and it sure makes me think, geez... why aren't I doing more article writing/marketing?

- Jared

[Sean Donahoe]

Originally Posted by Jared Alberghini

Sean, you suck, everyone that posts a reply here sucks (including myself)... whoops... Sorry, I forgot which thread I was in...lol... couldn't resist

Anyways, I'm no big time article marketer, but I can tell you this: An article I wrote back in 2004 about open source stuff STILL to this day brings me 20-30 unique visitors PER DAY! Now that's a 'set it and forget it' plan that works. I just did the math real quick, and that roughly equates to 36,500 unique visitors to my site, just from one silly little article that took me probably an hour to write way back then, and it shows no signs of stopping or slowing down anytime soon. I've only got a few dozen other articles out there, but this one has brought me the most traffic.

I Thank you for your post Sean, and it sure makes me think, geez... why aren't I doing more article writing/marketing?

- Jared

Thats another excellent point, the residual traffic that does not cost anything. Extrapolating that out, 20-30 visitors a day for over 4 years is 29,000 - 43,000 visitors from one article over that time period. If you had to pay a minimum of 5c for each visitor that traffic would cost $1450 - $2150 if you could get the 5c traffic. So 20 minutes of work could be worth over $2000 worth of traffic and that was 1 article.

Imagine 5 articles a day for just 3 days a week all optimized for traffic which could concivably take just 2.5 hours of time to write and imagine how much traffic they would pull over a 4 year period.

Article marketing is a very powerful method indeed...

[TimG]

Sean,
Thought I would add some additional strength to your thread. Here are my current stats from Ezinearticles.com

Submitted Articles: 1546

Article Views: 3,034,564

Articles Published: 37,818

URL Clicks: 252,000

Using an extremely conservative amount of 5 cents a click I estimate that my articles sent traffic to my sites that would have cost in excess of $12,600.

This doesn't take into account the indirect traffic that arrives from the 37,818 articles published by other webmasters on my behalf and the fact that Ezinearticles just recently started tracking the URL clicks (within the last year I think).

And, lets not forget these clicks to my sites generated income for me so not only did I save well over $12,600 I was able to make thousands upon thousands of dollars.

Anyone can achieve or exceed these same results because I'm a bit of a caveman and have always had time limitations going against me.

Article Marketing is money in the bank, plain and simple -

Respectfully,
Tim

[WinsonYeung]

I dont even though that article marketing is bad in the first place

[Sean Donahoe]

Originally Posted by TimG

Submitted Articles: 1546

Article Views: 3,034,564

Articles Published: 37,818

URL Clicks: 252,000

Those are some very healthy numbers and a great example of what I am talking about. Thanks Tim

[Steven Wagenheim]

Originally Posted by TimG

Sean,
Thought I would add some additional strength to your thread. Here are my current stats from Ezinearticles.com

Submitted Articles: 1546

Article Views: 3,034,564

Articles Published: 37,818

URL Clicks: 252,000

Using an extremely conservative amount of 5 cents a click I estimate that my articles sent traffic to my sites that would have cost in excess of $12,600.

This doesn't take into account the indirect traffic that arrives from the 37,818 articles published by other webmasters on my behalf and the fact that Ezinearticles just recently started tracking the URL clicks (within the last year I think).

And, lets not forget these clicks to my sites generated income for me so not only did I save well over $12,600 I was able to make thousands upon thousands of dollars.

Anyone can achieve or exceed these same results because I'm a bit of a caveman and have always had time limitations going against me.

Article Marketing is money in the bank, plain and simple -

Respectfully,
Tim

Tim, those are very impressive stats.

Way to go.

This is definitely a great post...

Regardless of how much I prefer to stay away from Article marketing(or how much it sucks to me) - it can't be argued that it has it's benefits.

Each of your 12 points are strong.

I also think that this is an excellent way to share a positive view of article marketing.

Take Care

Marc

[HervinBalfour]

I am with everyone in this thread! Article writing is the way to go! Some people view the response rate to article writing as slow but I beg to differ. I have only recently begun my article writing "career" but with the 9-10 articles I have written I have been able to build my list immensely. To top it off, the very fact that othes have posted several of my articles to their pages is even more awesome. In 2009 Im going into overdrive with article writing.

And dayum Tim! Wow! You're an article writing machine! Very impressive and very inspirational.

[TimG]

Originally Posted by HervinBalfour

And dayum Tim! Wow! You're an article writing machine! Very impressive and very inspirational.

Hervin,
Appreciate that kind comment but I'm nothing compared to some of the more polished writers that frequent this forum. Steven Wagenheim, Dean Shainin and Allen Graves immediately come to mind, but there are others that are doing just as well.

Sean Mize is amazing with what he has done over at Ezinearticles.com and Fabian Tan has submitted lots of articles in a short amount of time.

Truth is, anyone can accomplish this if they take the time to write and submit the articles after learning how to construct them correctly.

Respectfully,
Tim

[Ken Leatherman]

I don't have a lot of stats to throw out, but I can tell you that a huge number of people believe it works. My statement is based on the fact that I have customers from around the world that use my article writing service.

By using the articles I write for them, (and yes they are SEO), they experience increases in unique targeted traffic. Which in turn leads to them having sign ups to their list and making sales of their own products and affiliate sales.

Yea! For Article Marketing. I make a living writing for people who believe very strongly that article marketing is the way to go. So yes I'm biased but it's the truth. Long Live Article Marketing!

Ken
The Old Geezer

[jjpmarketing]

I have yet to use anything for Article marketing other than Qassia. Not that it wouldn't benefit me to use Ezine Articles and all the other sites... its just that good quality writing takes time, and I just really haven't spent that much time on it. Believe me it will be a big part of my marketing efforts in 2009 not just for the backlinks, but also for the traffic.

Here is why...

Forums are not that different from Article sites, only there is a lot of static or noise in between the good content. However, it never ceases to amaze me exactly how much traffic I get from posts on forums that are several months old... some even well over a year old.

Forums and Article sites are alike in that they both drive traffic to your site, whether they contain dofollow links or not, because those sites get indexed. While it may only amount to a few visits per month for any specific post or article... over time it adds up.

If you post 1 post or article per day... that is 365 per year. If you were more agressive you could ramp that up to 1000 or more per year. For most sites, that will amount 1000 links to your site. Now the advantage of article marketing is that these articles get posted on other sites, creating an exponential amount of links back to your site.

Now lets say after 1 year that your links totaled 10,000. Now lets say that each of the sites containing the link only got 1 view ever.

That is 10,000 views. Now lets say you only turned 1% of those view into sales on your site. If the products made you $47 each. That is $4700 just for writing articles. Just for 1 view per site. Average 10 views and at that same conversion rate $47,000 per year.

Isn't that worth spending a few hours a day writing articles? And most of these articles aren't going away... they will continue to get views beyond when they were originally posted on a site.

[trippmarxx]

Good posts here guys.

Point blank - Article Marketing works, and it works well if you know what you're doing.

It comes down to time and money. Those with less time and more money will be better off with using PPC, while those with more time and less money will be better off using article marketing.

I only write an hour or so per day (sometimes more if I'm on a roll), but I would rather spend that hour writing some articles that will work to bring me in residual income than spend an hour trying to tweak my PPC campaigns to prevent me from losing more money than I already lost.

[HervinBalfour]

Originally Posted by TimG

Hervin,
Appreciate that kind comment but I'm nothing compared to some of the more polished writers that frequent this forum. Steven Wagenheim, Dean Shainin and Allen Graves immediately come to mind, but there are others that are doing just as well.

Sean Mize is amazing with what he has done over at Ezinearticles.com and Fabian Tan has submitted lots of articles in a short amount of time.

Truth is, anyone can accomplish this if they take the time to write and submit the articles after learning how to construct them correctly.

Respectfully,
Tim

You know I outsourced a number of articles when I first started in this industry and while I got a lot of articles I was not at all satisfied with the content.

What I learned was that the best way to go, imo is to write it yourself. I truly believe that writing an article yourself that comes from the heart will get a better result.

When I started writing my own, though not a lot so far, more people seemed to gravitate towards my page.

Some people seem to just crank out a ton of articles a week but I try to over-deliver with info and give my reader something of value and insight.

But I agree with you totally. Article writing is not hard at all. And once you get rid of that block it becomes much easier. In fact I find it to be fun. I plan on writing a ton of articles in 2009.

[jjpmarketing]

Imagine the potential of spending 8 hours per day doing nothing but writing articles... not just for ezine but squidoo and all the other mediums you can present content to users. That could create a lot of traffic and conversions for your niches.

[HervinBalfour]

Originally Posted by jjpmarketing

Imagine the potential of spending 8 hours per day doing nothing but writing articles... not just for ezine but squidoo and all the other mediums you can present content to users. That could create a lot of traffic and conversions for your niches.

Well that brings us to a very important point. I just happened to check my Twitter and Squiddo accounts the other day and 20 people have subscribed to may articles! Talk about me being in total shock. It was amazing because just a few days before I had one subscriber and then *BOOM* 20 subscibers.

[raynman]

I really appreciate this thread since this is the next direction I am going to be going in. IMO, it is going to be the best use of my talents.

Being profitable doing something that you love is a dream. I'm glad that there are so many enjoying such success with it.

Thanks for everyone who has testified to it's ability to make you successful.

[Allen Graves]

Works for me!

[Keith Callister]

Thanks for this, I am about to start writing articles as a new technique and this post has given me the extra boost I needed.

[Lance K]

You can...

• Compile them into a short report, ebook, etc.
• Repurpose them into podcasts, videos, etc.
• Sell "picks & shovels" (plr, ghost writing services, etc.) to the article marketing "prospectors"

[seobro]

I think it is great as long as you can place a link inside the article back to your site. The link passes PR. The article will get a lot of readers. Lastly, that Google does not decide to penalize the article hub the way they have with directories.

[Lance K]

Originally Posted by TimG

Article Views: 3,034,564

URL Clicks: 252,000

Nice. An 8.3% click through rate. And the fact that they already value your content/expertise (they wouldn't have clicked through if they didn't) should ensure a good sales conversion rate as well.

Originally Posted by TimG

Article Marketing is money in the bank, plain and simple -

Most proven tactics and strategies are if they're implemented correctly.

Good work, Tim!

[lynwil]

Thanks, for all your comments. It certainly is an eye opener for new ones coming in.

[Sean Donahoe]

Article marketing is definitely a very powerful way for all new marketers to get going. As some of the excellent points and numbers show in this post, there is no reason whatsoever to not use article marketing as part of a marketing strategy for any business, be it affiliate marketing, promoting your own products and services or large multinational corporation.

I really do hope that this thread has opened some eyes up to some new possibilities.

[TimG]

Originally Posted by Lance K

Nice. An 8.3% click through rate. And the fact that they already value your content/expertise (they wouldn't have clicked through if they didn't) should ensure a good sales conversion rate as well.

Most proven tactics and strategies are if they're implemented correctly.

Good work, Tim!

Lance,
The CTR is actually much higher because the number of page views is tracked from 2005. The number of URL clicks just started getting tracked in the 12 - 15 months (not exactly sure) so those clicks have all occurred in the last 12-15 months and not since 2005.

Hope that makes sense and yes, the sales conversion/income generated has been exceptional!!

Tim

[thebrokenbox]

WOW! After seeing all these figures I guess there really is no denying that article marketing is a great way to go! I'm new to this whole internet marketing stuff so I have been trying to find the right thing to spend my time doing and since I don't have thousands of dollars saved up to waste on PPC I think this is the right way to go.

[myob]

I write articles for offline trade magazines, as well as for niche newsletters. The greater benefit derived from article writing that has not been mentioned is that it gives the author a degree of credibility and even authority within the niche. This translates into higher conversion rate than any other advertising I know of whether free or paid. Writing from a position of expertise brings in better quality traffic, and in my case also warm phone call leads.

[jjpmarketing]

Yes. I have to believe that is true. I don't know if anything would have converted or not... but I have recommend products section that I haven't really gotten around to adding products to... and visitors click on that link daily. They apparently want more than what is contained in my posts... either that or they were just curious what I recommended.

[Emmanuel Betinis]

Do you article writing pros tend to focus on using only a handful of article directory sites or do you typically prefer to spread out your articles across as many article directories as you can find?

I ask because there's two methods of thought here: Approach #1: Write a ton of articles for one directory (or maybe just a handful of the top ones) like eZine Articles.com for the primary purpose of capturing the readers that are actively cruising for information/readings from within the site directory...OR...Approach #2: Write a single article and repeat the submission of that single article across HUNDREDS of article directories for purposes of building theme-related backlinks to your page from different IPs for SEO/organic SERP results of the link in the BIO box. Then write another article & repeat Approach #2 over and over.

Between Approach #1 and Approach #2 which do you pros typically use? Between the two methods which do you suggest? Why? (Perhaps I should look into the possibility of this forum having "Poll creating" capabilities).

You may think, "well, do BOTH and you've got the whole sha-bam!" Right...but if you were pressed to make a choice between only one or the other, what would it be any why? I'd love to hear all your opinions/thoughts/feelings on this methodology of article marketing.

P.S. If questions/discussions of duplicate content arise in your head as a result of reading Approach #2 you may want to read SHOCKING: Is it just a ploy or not?! first.

[aboutalhah]

I've built my ENTIRE web business from ONE article!

Article can get anyone started online (though it was even easier a couple of years ago). Anyway, its still going strong.

Franck

[jbreezy]

I can tell you this - I created a website in 24 hours, wrote the sales letter, wrote the ebook and wrote an article with ezines. As soon as my article got approved I got a sale today.

[Emmanuel Betinis]

That's great, jbreezy! Congrats!

Still, I will highly value anyone's answer/opinion to my above question above that still stands regarding either Method #1 or Method #2 in order of priority.

[Sean Donahoe]

Originally Posted by anapest

That's great, jbreezy! Congrats!

Still, I will highly value anyone's answer/opinion to my above question above that still stands regarding either Method #1 or Method #2 in order of priority.

I have found that only a few directories have really performed well for me and my business as well as many of my clients who use article marketing. Of course ezinearticles is the preference but many other top article directories can perform equally well.

One of the best tips i can give is this:

Write an article for ezinearticles on the topic of your choice with the resource box pointing to your website, then write 5-10 more unique articles and have the resource boxes point to the ezinearticles article and your website. This will boost the ezinearticles PR for that page and also your own site. It is easy to get your ezinearticles article highly ranked for the search term you are focusing on and you can rinse and repeat that approach time and time again.

I am actually putting together a new master class course on video regarding the absolute best ways to turn yourself into a article marketing expert and create a 6 figure business from article marketing and will need some beta testers so keep an eye out for that post in the near future.

Regards

Sean Donahoe

[derrickp]

Sean,

Have you tried this method you promote lately? Linking to your article from other Ezinearticles? The reason I ask it people have been reporting getting articles rejected.

I used to do just what you say and it did work well now I just link with outside sources(think link network).

Derrick

[Sean Donahoe]

Hi,

Yes I do do this a lot and I have very rarely had any issues. This is what I do as part of a much larger strategy:

1. Submit to ezinearticles.com first then wait a week
2. Write my articles and submit them to my top 20 list of article directories randomly
3. If I got an article rejected for that link I would actually create a 301 redirection to that article from on my own site and that had the same effect and no rejections.

To do that just create a folder on your own website and create a file that has the following code:

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.ezinearticles.com/yourarticle");
header("Connection: close");
?>

I have only ever had to do this twice in over 3000 article submissions but it can be a very useful trick to achieve the same goals as more and more directories are likely to take exception to linking to their competiton.

hope that helps you out of the problem your facing.

Regards

Sean

[Emmanuel Betinis]

Originally Posted by Sean Donahoe

One of the best tips i can give is this:

Write an article for ezinearticles on the topic of your choice with the resource box pointing to your website, then write 5-10 more unique articles and have the resource boxes point to the ezinearticles article and your website.

Sean, YES! I agree this is DEFINITELY a GREAT tip! Thank you so much for taking the time to share this with myself and everyone else here. This good stuff and I am familiar with this method.

Here's where it gets a little vague for new internet marketers...

Originally Posted by Sean Donahoe

...then write 5-10 more unique articles and have the resource boxes point to the ezinearticles article and your website.

Vague point #1: Are these "5-10 additional articles..."

a.) "Unique" in that they're all 5-10 of the same exact article (they're just "unique" from the original one submitted)?
b.) "Unique" in that article #1 is completely different from article #2 which is completely different from article #3, and so on...?


Vague point #2: Are these "5-10 additional articles submitted to..."

c.) An article directory OTHER THAN the directory the first original article was submitted to?
d.) Many different article directories at random (some may be submitted to the same directories)?
e.) More carefully submitted: one article per unique article directory?

[jjpmarketing]

Re-direct? Why? It is your content isn't it? Throw up a blog and just link to the blog with your other article as the content. This blog could also link to your main site by including the bio box along with the post.

The duplicate content is not really an issue. You don't need that site to be indexed. It is only there for the purpose of being linked to from an ezine article. Then you could put this blog on blogger or wordpress.com and also get the benefit of the traffic received from those networks. This could also lead to more people posting that ezine article of yours on their site. This would get you more backlinks and traffic.

[naruq]

Article marketing should be part of the marketing mix. It is a good Idea to diversify your marketing sources.

[Sean Donahoe]

Originally Posted by anapest

Vague point #1: Are these "5-10 additional articles..."

a.) "Unique" in that they're all 5-10 of the same exact article (they're just "unique" from the original one submitted)?
b.) "Unique" in that article #1 is completely different from article #2 which is completely different from article #3, and so on...?

The approach I have found most successful is to have 5-10 additional articles that differ from the first promoted article and are based around the same keyphrase or topic and I vary the link anchor text.

For example if I was targeting a keyword such as "Long Tail Keyword Research" then I may have article titles such as:

• Long Tail Keyword Research - How to Find Powerful Keywords That Sell
• Long Tail Keyword Research - Top 10 tips for finding high performing keywords
• How to Find Keywords That Sell Using Long Tail Keyword Research
• Why Long Tail Keyword Research is Essential to Your Success

You get the idea. If you know your subject matter well and have done your research then you should be able to easily write a few articles directly about this topic.

Originally Posted by anapest

Vague point #2: Are these "5-10 additional articles submitted to..."

c.) An article directory OTHER THAN the directory the first original article was submitted to?
d.) Many different article directories at random (some may be submitted to the same directories)?
e.) More carefully submitted: one article per unique article directory?

There are really only about 20 top performing aritcle directories from the 600+ out there. I usually have a list of top PR article directories that I post to. I post 1 article to Ezinearticles then 1 unique article to each of the top performing article directories.

I hope that clarifies what I was meaning and helps you achieve the success you are looking for.

Regards

Sean

[Sean Donahoe]

Originally Posted by jjpmarketing

Re-direct? Why? It is your content isn't it? Throw up a blog and just link to the blog with your other article as the content. This blog could also link to your main site by including the bio box along with the post.

The duplicate content is not really an issue. You don't need that site to be indexed. It is only there for the purpose of being linked to from an ezine article. Then you could put this blog on blogger or wordpress.com and also get the benefit of the traffic received from those networks. This could also lead to more people posting that ezine article of yours on their site. This would get you more backlinks and traffic.

Just to clarify, the re-direct is to avoid article directories blocking your article submission because you may be linking to an article on another directory. For example if you had a post on articledashboard.com that linked to ezinearticles.com then articledashboard.com may not want you linking to their competition directly as you are leaking their PR to their competition.

By using the method I described you seem to be linking to your own website when in effect you are passing that PR directly over to your primary article on ezinearticles.

I have not had too much problem with this but I have had other clients and marketers mention this to me in the past and the solution I present is very effective.

Regards

Sean

[Emmanuel Betinis]

Originally Posted by Sean Donahoe

The approach I have found most successful is to have 5-10 additional articles that differ from the first promoted article and are based around the same keyphrase or topic and I vary the link anchor text.

Right...so is your answer a.) or b.) then? This answer could still be either one! I made it multiple choice so it would be simple for you as to not have to take much of your time explaining as you already have.

Originally Posted by Sean Donahoe

There are really only about 20 top performing aritcle directories from the 600+ out there. I usually have a list of top PR article directories that I post to. I post 1 article to Ezinearticles then 1 unique article to each of the top performing article directories.

So then your answer would be e.) then to this one?

[Sean Donahoe]

Originally Posted by naruq

Article marketing should be part of the marketing mix. It is a good Idea to diversify your marketing sources.

Definitely, article marketing is a great starting point and should be used in combination with many other streams of marketing.

In the course I am putting together I show how to perfectly balance all these marketing tools into the most cost effective and efficient means of marketing anything.

I am actually just taking a break from recording it while I have a cuppa tea and check the forums. I am very excited about this course and I really think all of you will get a hell of a lot of benefit from the strategies I have used over the years to create business empires for my clients.

Anyway, back to recording, cuppa's done and I will be back in a while...

Regards

Sean

[Sean Donahoe]

Originally Posted by anapest

Right...so is your answer a.) or b.) then? This answer could still be either one! I made it multiple choice so it would be simple for you as to not have to take much of your time explaining as you already have.




So then your answer would be e.) then to this one?

To be very specific:

Question 1: B - Completely unique in every way, unique content, titles, resource box, everything. Like I say, if you know your subject matter well, this should not be difficult.

Question 2: E (Kinda), Careful submission to any of the 20 top performing article directories selected at random. If I have 5 articles then I just select any of the best performing ones from my list that are currently performing well for me but this can be random.

Regards,

Sean

[Dotcomlink]

Basically if you dont understand how to get noticed on Google, through search engine optimization or your not a copywriter. You should expect frustration in your article marketing. This is not something that is easy until you have learned and understand how to use it and make things easier for oneself. Its always frustrating in the beginning until we have learned what it takes to make it easier. Once we know then we come up with a routine or system and continue to do it making it less complicated.
You must have the correct keywords placed in the article, articles are at least 400 words or more, dont put to many keywords in one article about three keywords or better yet keyphrases will get you better results to get noticed in google. You must do the homework first before applying your articles to the directories and throwing them out there. I would learn more about google and its search engine. i would also learn about copywriting and what kind of words get attention. I would get a keyword tool and start searching what people are looking for online. i would write the articles based around those keywords which im targeting my prospects and product to offer them. I would also search for old articles that sold products well and learn the copywriting secrets from those articles. Im sure once you get informed you will see much better results than what is mostly being posted. I get that most arent doing the homework and trying to cut corners to make real money online. Let us not forget it take work to make real money no matter what business you are in. If it seems easy thats because the person has been in business for 20-30 years and they have much knowledge of how things work. You must learn as well and it doesnt stop there. Life itself is a forever learning process. I hope this make sense and im able to help make a difference in your marketing efferts. I am learning as well and looking for answers.

[Dean Shainin]

One of the major benefits about article marketing that some marketers don’t realize is that your prospects look at you as a well known advisor and your articles are not sales pages. They are in a much more receptive mood. So unlike a PPC lead or other types of advertising methods these prospects are looking for more valuable information and are more apt to give you their information if you are sending them to an opt-in within your article bio.

You have some rapport with your prospects and after they read your article they have a connection with you and are much more likely to purchase what you have to offer even without using an opt-in page. In the end these types of prospects are much more likely to continue to listen to you and continue to purchase your products and services that relate to their needs and problems.

Here are some stats for December from 2 articles submitted within a tech niche. 2,451 actual visits from 2 articles submitted. No big deal I know. However, these 2 articles by themselves have generated over 40,000+ actual visits to one of my niche sites since submitted and will continue to do so for who knows how long? Just those 40,000+ visits to my site alone would have cost a lot of money and I'm still getting targeted traffic to this very day.

Some people think you have to submit hundreds and thousands of articles to make money. This is NOT true. You just need to learn how to do your research and do things the right way. I get more traffic from a single article than I did from 100 articles when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when first starting out. You want to keep learning new things and always be thinking "out of the box". In fact I just learned some fantastic tips from TimG yesterday from his Article Marketing Answers that I need to be using that are right in front of me but sometimes it's tough to see when you're so laser focused in one area of marketing.

With article marketing you don’t have to manage your business like you do with many other strategies that keep you tethered to your computer day and night. Before you know it you can become a slave to your business. I'm kinda lazy and like to travel without having to log into my computer day and night when doing so.

I’d rather have my business working for me instead of me having to work in the business all the time. I prefer residual income from articles that work for me 24/7/365. They are like sales people that work for you without calling in sick, complaining and always wanting more from you. They continue to do their job without hassles... Got to love it.

Cheers & Happy New Year,
Dean Shainin (The Article Marketing Wiz)