I don't understand it! Why submit to article directories when ..

[Congrats]

.. your own site ranks better, getting more traffic to your articles and make more money and the site is yours.

So why would I write for ezinearticles?

But it's not of my business what you guys are doing. I know what works for me. I was just wondering why people do it all the time.

[Ron Douglas]

Originally Posted by Congrats

.. your own site ranks better, getting more traffic to your articles and make more money and the site is yours.

So why would I write for ezinearticles?

But it's not of my business what you guys are doing. I know what works for me. I was just wondering why people do it all the time.

You don't write for them, you write for yourself:

- To get more targeted traffic to your site from people reading your articles
- To establish yourself as an expert on other sites besides your own
- To to build high quality links to your site and improve search engine rankings
- To get ezine publishers to potentially pick up your articles and publish them

[traceye]

Originally Posted by Congrats

..
So why would I write for ezinearticles?

Traffic and backlinks.

The more backlinks you have the better your website ranking in the search engines.

Article marketing also gives me tons of free traffic - why would I give that up?

It's no effort for me to write a 300 word article, I enjoy it, and I feel it boosts my credibility on the topic too. win - win.

[Solidsnake]

Originally Posted by Ron Douglas

You don't write for them, you write for yourself:

- To get more targeted traffic to your site from people reading your articles
- To establish yourself as an expert on other sites besides your own
- To to build high quality links to your site and improve search engine rankings
- To get ezine publishers to potentially pick up your articles and publish them

Very well said...

To increase potential PR is another reason...

[Phil Jacobson]

The question is then. If you don't submit articles (which some people don't), how do you succeed online? I am not saying you can't succeed without articles, but it seems to be at least one part of the artillery.

Just wondering what you do instead.

Thanks.

Phil

[JayXtreme]

I have to say that to some extent I do agree with your thought process..

BUT..

You can't ignore the power of Ezine.. any articles I do submit to any directory usually go to Ezine, but I try to split my content 70-30 with the larger amount going on my own properties..

Peace

Jay

[Steven Wagenheim]

Originally Posted by Congrats

.. your own site ranks better, getting more traffic to your articles and make more money and the site is yours.

So why would I write for ezinearticles?

But it's not of my business what you guys are doing. I know what works for me. I was just wondering why people do it all the time.

Your own site MAY rank better. There is no guarantee that it will. I have a
site that's been up for 5 years. It's ranking is crap. It was my first site and I
didn't really know what I was doing with it.

Submitting articles to an established ezine like EZA is gold, at least for me
it's been.

[traceye]

Originally Posted by Phil Jacobson

The question is then. If you don't submit articles (which some people don't), how do you succeed online?

Oh you don't. You shrivel into oblivion never to be heard from again.



Article marketing is just one of many ways of getting traffic - not the only way. I like it, but then I consider myself a writer first and an internet marketer second.

I suck at PPC, but I write really good articles. I do what works for me. Others do what works for them.

Tracey

[Daniel McGonagle]

On compettive terms and topics, you don't see too many EZA articles atop the SEs.

Articles are good for links, just like writing blog posts that get stumbled and Dugg are good for links. The only thing that articles can do that blog posts cannot is get publishe don others' sites.

Oh wait, wp-omatic does that.

Speaking of automation and re-publicatiion, if you want backlinks by the ton from just one article, check out Unique Article Wizard. 1 article = tons of backlinks from blogs and the service virtually guarantees your articles get published elsewhere.

Usually though, the places that republish your articles are junk automated sites anyways, so not really sure of the true benefit of Articles over blogposts.

A WordPress blog post will outrank an article any day, if the blog is SEO-ed properly

[Dana_W]

I started two blogs last October and wrote posts for both of them and then I ended up just letting one of them fall by the wayside. I never wrote any articles linking to it. I wrote a bunch of articles and linked them all to the other blog.
Result? The neglected blog, even though it's got about a dozen posts of original content, has zero page rank and zero traffic. The other blog makes me a steady $125-$150 a month in adsense even though I haven't touched it since last February and it was a page rank 3 for about six months (Google just smacked it down to PR 1, but I'm STILL making the same amount of money!)

I find articles to be the perfect way to get indexed, get page ranking, and get steady ongoing traffic. I'm not saying it's the only method, I'm just saying that for me it's been one of the best ones. I'd never give it up.

And believe me, ezinearticles ranks higher than my site.

[lakshaybehl]

Originally Posted by traceye

Oh you don't. You shrivel into oblivion never to be heard from again.



Article marketing is just one of many ways of getting traffic - not the only way. I like it, but then I consider myself a writer first and an internet marketer second.

I suck at PPC, but I write really good articles. I do what works for me. Others do what works for them.

Tracey

Tracey

To say that articles are the only way of making money on the internet is undermining what a lot of top marketers are doing. A simple approach is to get your own product in a non IM niche that is highly in demand and then use PPC traffic to sell.

If you are selling at $147, then even if you have to pay 50 cents per click, you have a winner at hand as long as your site converts at over 0.4%

So yes, while articles are a great way to drive traffic, I have seen many people becoming big successes online without submitting articles etc.

Especially with Network Marketing like EDC, CTC, PP2W, Abunza etc

[paul65]

Hello,

Backlinks is one benefit that many get from article marketing, however, I get more out of the organically ranked articles. If an article of my from a directory gets a first page ranking it can drive quite allot of traffic to my site. The key, is in the content of the article. If the article has value to the visitor and you write it in such a way that entices the visitor to click on your site link in the article then you get traffic. I have been doing this for years.

Having an article organically ranked to me is like having a PPC ad running 24/7 and better yet you have allot more space to attract a click through. Don't let me miss lead here you don't want to write an article like an ad, but again answer a question that will benefit the visitor but leave enough open for them to want and visit your site for more information.

This is were I have gained the most from article marketing.

Cheers,

Paul

[traceye]

Originally Posted by lakshaybehl

Tracey

To say that articles are the only way of making money on the internet is undermining what a lot of top marketers are doing.

When did I say that? I just said I liked writing articles because they gave me free traffic. I also said that it was JUST ONE of many ways of getting traffic.

And I never said that it was the best way of making money - good grief no! I make money from email marketing, creating my own products, adsense, affiliate marketing .. a great number of different methods.

But now we are getting away from what the original question was - so let's get back to the good ol' article question again ...

[Congrats]

I have been testing this for myself for the last two months. My own site is a decent site with a PR5 on the home page and lots of deep links coming in. I setup a seperate dir and added articles to it, then we also rewrote those articles and submitted them to EA with a linkback to one of the articles and main index dir. The thing is I see no improvement for the rankings for the pages on my site after two months.

What I see is that the current roi of an article is much more when I submit it to my own site. I can rewrite it but that cost time or money and it doesn't bring me much or any results, ok i get a few clicks here and there.

With EA I see a surge in traffic the first couple of days and dies off after that.

On my own site is see a continues improvement almost of all articles I submit to my own site. So, I see it as a waste of time to submit to article directories and I receive much more traffic to my own site. Also I can offer to have my articles distributed ofcourse.

But what I aim for is natural backlinks, and that happens in time I noticed, people will link back to your articles if it's good content.

I have tested it out and this is my experience ofcourse, others will likely have different experiences. The only thing I haven't tested out is to submit to multiple directories with different sig files, that's what I'm going to do next.

Well, all in all, I like to build a good recourse site and grow it like a business and that doesn't happen when I submit to EA. Ofcourse it's branding but it takes double my time to do so, I could have made two sites in the same time.

[Congrats]

Also watch out submitting your articles to social sites, google will put that page in a sandbox. I tested this and that was the result a couple of times. Best would be to leave it on your site and let it find it by their spiders, or maybe another site picks it up, that would be natural. Google is way to smart for us to try to manipulate it.

[Zeus66]

With EA I see a surge in traffic the first couple of days and dies off after that.

Think about that. Write and submit an article a day to EZA (takes maybe 30 minutes total of your time). By your own words, you get 2 days of traffic surge for every article. If the page you're sending people to from the article converts for you, you've got a nifty little sales generator going there - all for a measly 30 minutes per day of your time.

Now extrapolate that basic model and I think you can easily see why so many people advocate writing and submitting multiple articles every day to EZA.

I think it's really important to add that there is a right way and a wrong way to craft articles for submission to EZA. I have an article I wrote back in early 2006 that has almost 14,000 views. But it only has a few hundred click-thrus (a ridiculous 3% CTR) because I had a truly lame resource box at the end. It didn't give the readers a good reason to click the link. (I've since updated it and it's doing a lot better now).

Contrast that with one of my most recent articles. It has 139 views and 36 click-thrus (26% CTR). That article took me about 30 minutes from start to submission to EZA. I'll trade 36 visitors (so far, it will only grow as time goes by of course) for 30 minutes of my time any day.

Do some maths and it's easy to get excited about the possibilities, as long as you've got articles working smartly for you. It's easy to get discouraged if you do what most people do - don't give readers a good reason to click your link.

John

[James Schramko]

I have found ways to make my own sites much more powerful using articles on them in strategetic ways.

I do still have articles submitted externally but the ones on my own sites do the heavy lifting. This is possible when you use the anchor text links and pre-sell properly.

My submission guidelines are more flexible than some directories

[wellymulia]

Although article marketing is not the only way to make drive traffic, submitting articles to article directories:

- can help you improve on your search engine rankings
- can bring you visitors when readers click on your link at the resource box
- can help spread your name out there (branding)

[shrinagesh]

Well, I write blog posts, wait for a few days till my site gets indexed, then paraphrase it to submit to article directories.

Your marketing strategy usually depends on your niche. You must try mix & match to arrive at your own formula that works.

[Dana_W]

"With EA I see a surge in traffic the first couple of days and dies off after that." I see that too, BUT...the combined power of those articles seems to last a long time. First you get the initial traffic surge, and then Google indexes the articles and once you get enough articles out there, it results in a steady stream of traffic for a long time to come. I have not written any Ezinearticles since Feb. 28 for my adsense site...and yet 1/3 of my traffic still comes from Ezinearticles!

[Andres]

To get back links and more importantly you can write a lot of articles with long tailed keywords that perhaps your site doesn't rank well for.

Just my opinion.

[MikeLantz]

Originally Posted by Phil Jacobson

The question is then. If you don't submit articles (which some people don't), how do you succeed online? I am not saying you can't succeed without articles, but it seems to be at least one part of the artillery.

This is a great thread and the above is a good question.

First off, let me say that I have never submitted an article anywhere.

The problem that a lot of marketers have is they are asking the wrong questions. (BTW, I am not knocking the OP or any post in particular here).

Here is the question I see most asking here:

How can submitting articles to [insert site here] help me?

I truly believe this is the wrong question and it is questions like these that are making the internet more and more cluttered, and thus more difficult to navigate successfully.

On the surface, the question seems innocent enough, but what it shows is the wrong mindset.

Let me tell you what the right question might be and perhaps you will see where I am going.

How can submitting articles to [insert site here] help others?

I think you can quickly see the different keyword in each question, and thus the difference in mindset.

If you are asking the first question, you may be prone to SPAM and engage in activities that are only designed to benefit you.

If you ask the second question, I believe you may be able to make the internet better for those using it.

There are some websites out there designed only to help marketers get what they want, and not help the user/consumer. I am not saying EZA is such a website, but it could be...

Overall, search engines do their best to penalize sites that are not designed to truly help the average internet user who is searching for information. Search engines are only as valuable as the useful content they return, so you can see why they do this.

So, what is my advice to you?

Create useful content that internet users want to share with others, and make it easy for them to share it.

Thats it, really. I mean, think about it. When it comes to "articles", isn't Google already the ultimate article directory? It should be...

If you find that when you type in a search for "[insert keywords here]" and you waste time clicking through to sites that don't have the information you want, perhaps you will see why we are not really doing a good enough job.

Something to think about.

Mike

[napoleonfirst]

Another reason to use article marketing is because you get really fast traffic. If you are in a very hot niche it might mean very good traffic.

[Angela V. Edwards]

Originally Posted by napoleonfirst

Another reason to use article marketing is because you get really fast traffic. If you are in a very hot niche it might mean very good traffic.

This is because the articles themselves usually rise to the top of the Search Engines. Ezinearticles often gets great placement in the SERPS. When people find your article, they will often click through to your website, and this is how the traffic is obtained. That is, unless you've gained top placement for your website itself.

[Congrats]

Great post Mike!

[jhongren]

Originally Posted by Angela V. Edwards

This is because the articles themselves usually rise to the top of the Search Engines. Ezinearticles often gets great placement in the SERPS. When people find your article, they will often click through to your website, and this is how the traffic is obtained. That is, unless you've gained top placement for your website itself.

In addition, the article directories bring in lots of readers and they are looking for articles of different niches. So in a way, you are leveraging on their traffic for free. Free is good

Cheers,
John

[bkbiloxi]

IMHO article marketing is just one piece of the puzzle when building a website.

It serves me in 3 ways:

1.) Establishes credibility
2.) Gives me some clicks
3.) Provides back links for my site

But there is a 4th reason that sometimes is overlooked.

It gives you a chance to write teaser material.

I try to make my articles good but I make it well known that I provide incomplete information. I save my really good stuff for my site. In other words "dating me is one thing... getting into my pants is another".

The truth is that building a successful website is a lot like dating and article writing is just letting you hold my hand. You get the real good stuff later.

Wow. I can't believe I said this stuff.

Paul