The Power Of Article Marketing - One Article 546,721 views

[affilcrazy]

Look's like i've been beaten to it! Some other great threads today about the relevance of article writing...However, i have also seen a number of people on the forum recently talking about the power of article marketing and whether it still has the same oomph it used to! So this post is merely a chance for me to write about one of my recent (insert your own over the top adjective...e.g. incredible/extraordinary/unbelievable...)findings!

I have being doing some keyword research within a few niches, just to make up keyword lists and during my research i came across an ezine article that kind of took my breathe away.

It's in the Health & Fitness niche, which is something i know a lot about and focus on quite heavily. i read the article, which was 559 words long and it was based around exercises to help you lose belly fat. The article was decent enough, not a masterpiece and there are many, many writers who could produce a higher quality. However upon scrolling down to check out the views, i found out that the article had been published on November 13th 2005 and had received 530,288 views by Sunday 15th March 2009.

Having checked out the article again this morning, it is now up to 546,721 views. So an additional 16,433 views to this article in the last 16 days!

Now working on the law of averages, i came to the following conclusions about this article...and please forgive me as a lot of this information is based on assumptions:-

The article has been viewed 546,721 times over the last 3 years and 5 months.

If an average 15% people clicked through the author's resource box to his main site (and that's not a great clickthrough rate), then this would be the equivalent of 82,008 visiting the author's main site.

Of these people, let's assume that 1 in every 100 made a purchase of the affiliate product that was being promoted (Yoga exercise mats via Amazon and again not a great conversion rate), that would be the equivalent of 820 sales. Having done a little further research i found out the Yoga mats were selling for between $12 and $87 and the most popular one retailed at $37. Again i will assume that the commission is say approx 20%, so on average per sale would net $8. So 820 x $8 = $6560.

So let's put all these assumptions together! In the space of 3 years and 5 months, this author has produced just ONE article that has netted him $6560 in profits. So how many articles would he have written in this time? 100, 1000, 10000? How many of those articles will be producing results? If this author had just 100 articles producing the same results, that would be in excess of $200,000 per year in affiliate sales for the last 3 years!

The point is with article marketing you can't expect the same results everytime. Hell i know i have written better quality articles and had them better optimized for search engines, but i am yet to produce these type of results from just one article...and that's the point! I can guarantee that this author has written 1000s and 1000s of articles and not all have been successful and even some of what he probably thought was his best work may not have proved as popular with his readers, but through continually putting out content, he discovered this gem...and maybe many others!

The article was written by Steve Chaballa and entitled "How To Lose Belly Fat With A 10 Minute Workout".

The primary keyword in this article "How To Lose Belly Fat" has 391,000 (in "quotes") competing websites in google and an average of 40,500 views a month. However, this article does not even rank on the first page.

The mis-spelt term "How To Loose Body Fat" only has 5190 competing websites in google and an average of 2400 searches a month and this article ranks at number 1. In addition on the first page of google for this term, there are also 2 x Yahoo Answers, YouTube Video, Squidoo Lens, Buzzle Article...sites that we can all provide content to and rank for FREE.

Thanks
Partha

[Chris Kent]

Is this a copy and paste? It seems very nicely formatted and I'm not sure what your final point is???

But I do agree, don't expect to get half a million hits of a single article. Anyone who does is just lucky enough to get an SEO anomoly.

I know one marketer who has such an article and is selling a report on "how to get XXXXXX no. of views", despite the fact that not even he can repeat this feat!

Better off lowering your goals to more realistic levels.

[affilcrazy]

Originally Posted by ProductCreator

Is this a copy and paste? It seems very nicely formatted and I'm not sure what your final point is???

But I do agree, don't expect to get half a million hits of a single article. Anyone who does is just lucky enough to get an SEO anomoly.

I know one marketer who has such an article and is selling a report on "how to get XXXXXX no. of views", despite the fact that not even he can repeat this feat!

Better off lowering your goals to more realistic levels.

LOL!! No not copy and pasted! That's very harsh (i take it if i had 10,000 posts here at WF, you would never have made that comment) So i will take your first comments as a compliment..

The point i am trying to make is that through consistently writing articles, if your quality is good and you can produce information that people are interested in, you may ocassionaly produce an absolute gem of an article.

That doesn't automatically mean half a million views, but it can mean lots & lots of views, lots of url clickthroughs and lots of visitors to your site.

[Chris Kent]

lol Partha, no offence intended of course. I was just struck by how well formatted it was, it reminded me of...an article!

Yep, I think this is the "magic" of articles, that they produce occasional gems that seem to be largely out of your control, no matter how great your keywords are.

e.g. sometimes you can write 30 articles and you'll get half the traffic from just one of them, despite the keyword or title being no better than the others.

[affilcrazy]

Originally Posted by ProductCreator

lol Partha, no offence intended of course. I was just struck by how well formatted it was, it reminded me of...an article!

Yep, I think this is the "magic" of articles, that they produce occasional gems that seem to be largely out of your control, no matter how great your keywords are.

e.g. sometimes you can write 30 articles and you'll get half the traffic from just one of them, despite the keyword or title being no better than the others.

Cheers Mate..None Taken!!

[MeTellYou]

Originally Posted by Imran Naseem

Content will always be king on the Internet. Well done on your success buddy, keep it up.

Amen to that Always focus on great content.
Sebastian

[xlfutur1]

Amazon commission would be 4%, not 8%, right?

[indycine]

I read a quote recently that the amount of information on the Internet in any recent year is more than the amount of info published over the past 5,000 years, combined! I wonder what, if any, significant percentage of that is informative articles.

[Shakul]

Originally Posted by xlfutur1

Amazon commission would be 4%, not 8%, right?

Hmm.. I guess you are right, may be 8% on some products?

[affilcrazy]

Originally Posted by xlfutur1

Amazon commission would be 4%, not 8%, right?

Not 100% sure, but i was just giving an example of potential visits and sales of affiliate products, etc!

The main thing to take from this is, even though the article was written well over 3 years ago, it's still had over 16k views in the last 2 weeks, it's still dominating the search engines for certain LT keywords and to the author this article must be like gold-dust!

So we may not always "hit the jackpot" with every article we write, but this is living, breathing proof that article marketing is still one of the greatest methods of targeted traffic generation!

Thanks
Partha

[Gunter Eibl]

Well done Partha.

I wish every article would be like that but the average article has only a 250 views in the first 10-14 days (ezinearticle.com stats)

Gunter

[slma88]

Is there any secrets to writing a well conversion article besides providing solution to the readers? I think the best conversion is still providing a solution to the problem they faced.

[NaturalStyle]

Originally Posted by slma88

Is there any secrets to writing a well conversion article besides providing solution to the readers? I think the best conversion is still providing a solution to the problem they faced.

.. it needs to be a partial solution. The really juicy bit will your prospects get when they come to your site. Otherwise they would read the article and have all they want (and not click through). Makes sense?

[bingbong]

well done! that means article is still alive and kicking.