I Am Getting Killed in Article Marketing

Over the last year or so, I've managed to write just over 300 articles at Ezinearticles. Even though I've made a decent amount of money off these, I can't help but feel that the landscape is changing rapidly.

It used to be that if you wrote a keyword optimized, well-written article, you could make a decent return as your article got a bit of directory traffic and then (hopefully) got picked up by the search engines. Yes, it was competitive, but everyone was playing by the same rules.

Nowadays, your well written, optimized article is likely to be completely buried in a matter of minutes by an overwhelming quantity of poorly written articles with sensationalized titles. In fact, it seems that whoever can put out the most crappy articles before the Friday 5 o'clock deadline, wins. And all you have to do is see the stats climb over the weekend to see that these individuals are making money hand over fist.

So what are the rest of us supposed to do when one author can almost completely dominate the first 20 spots over the weekend? Should we all start playing the same game?

I know that I should be thinking long term anyway, but that also has it's problems. The search engines now have to choose from hundreds of articles that are optimized for the same keyword - only one will make it to the top. As far as finding less competitive keywords with lots of search volume - well, good luck. The only non-competitive terms left are getting 5 searches a day.

It seems the only choice left is to start propping up the articles with backlinks. You can see this starting to happen already and this will be the next battleground I suspect. Where will it stop?

Perhaps the solution is to get into a less competitive niche. The niche I'm referring to is the relationships/conflict category where everyone is promoting the same product.

Maybe I'm doing this all wrong - any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Steve