article marketing - numbers game or not?

I used to believe the same thing. But Trust me when I say that it is better that you learn to utilize the articles you have already written, so that you can leverage the traffic you will recieve. Trust me, it is better to rank well for 10 articles then to have one hundred that will bring you in a initial flood and then dwindle down. With proper backlink building you will continue to see the fruits of your work way down the line.

wow, great answer! thanks

very interesting, would be good to hear from anyone who has experienced both sides of the article marketing world

If you just submit articles, you get an initial rush of visitors (I personally have a CTR of a bit more than 10% while 100-150 people view it in the first place) and, without tweaking, I guess i get 5 visitors per month per article. If you SEO them properly and show up high in Google then you can get hundreds of visitors per day.

well at the moment, it seems that SEO the articles rather than blasting them out seems the most effective - and cost effective form of article marketing, especially me as I outsource my articles.

My view is that Google discount the SEO benefit of article back links and have for some time.

The approach is to submit SEO optimised articles that rank in their own right, using carefully chosen keywords.

To this end it is a much better use of time to create say one quality, optimised article per day, rather than write articles for the sake of it.

The best place to publish is WikiPedia if you can post a unique contribution in the required format.

Simon,

If you haven't already seen it you might want to check out Mid West Mike's excellent thread:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...le-market.html


Nigel

i think it wont hurt if you apply both tactics. lets say in the begininning you try and write as much as you can, and then once you get tired with it, try building your backlink from one of those posts you made. i guess, it all depends on what works for you.
goodluck

It depends on how much time you have and how much time it takes you to write articles (and if you are posting articles to build backlinks to another site or whether you are just trying to get traffic from the articles.There are different reasons why people post to article sites.)

At the risk of repeating the advice that has been given previously, but hoping that my contribution helps to add to the debate, what's the point of wasting time writing something that brings in a few visitors and a few dollars today, when for only a small amount of additional effort you can get visitors consistently over time?

Articles can become a perpetual traffic source if you do the research, pick the right keywords and get your articles to rank #1, or even to rank #1, #2 & #3, dominating the first page. In this regard I'd highly recommend learning about SEO and about writing the kind of content that Google will reward above your competition and apply that knowledge when you write articles. Good luck.

Quality is where your focus should be, if you write good articles that people derive value from then after a while you will be view as an authority in that field and then you may build your business. Write good quality articles and the rest will take care of itself. Article marketing is just one of the strategies in attraction marketing, so it is better to be consistent all the way around.

I've come to my conclusion:

let say I write 3 quality PLR articles each day
(each has the same keywords that I want to rank for)
and submit it to ezinearticles.com

then i send a lil' bit of traffic to those 3 quality articles
until each achieve 1000 views mark

Results:
Quality article A: 40% CTR to landing page
Quality article B: 10% CTR to landing page
Quality article C: 25% CTR to landing page

My point I want to prove here is that
both quality and quantity are essential
in developing great content.

But, our thought can be deceiving,
the truth is in the statistic (split testing),
we want as much as visitors to land on our page.

What we think might work (in this respect all of the three articles
are of high quality with optimized keyword), but until you split test it,
only then you know which converting and which not

thus, there's nothing wrong in integrating quality into quantity.

last word, quantity is also important.

do you see my point, lol...

Mohd

so it seems overall... quality is definitely the key... getting to higher rankings rather than seeing an initial surge or traffic then it dying off

I'm no guru but I have to agree, quality over quantity...which will eventually result in quantity over time.

When I first started out writing articles I was challenged by ezineartcles themselves to write 30 articles in 30 days, so as a newbie I thought heck, this is a quantity game.

Then I was also bomarded with offers to buy expensive auto submitters and again as as newbie I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of article directories out there and thought how the heck am I going to keep up with this.

Having a personal quality over quantity mindset in the first place I chose to ignre the autosubmitters and stay 100% in control of my articles, but in the end the fact is that it is impossible to really create true quality articles when your under the pump. Yes, you can rehash other articles, PLR's etc, but in the end all it is is rewritten material.

So, I busted my butt to do the 30 day challenge. Out of those 30 articles 2 still bring in consistent traffic, the rest just faded away, and why wouldn't they, they weren't really good, as in really really good....they were rushed....quantity quantity quantity. Imagine how much better the two articles would have been if they were the only 2 that I wrote!

So, I got in on the 'set it and forget it' thread mentioned earlier, followed Mikes system and now its a different story. I might go a whole month or more before writing an article. But when I do put one together it is darned good. Then I backlink (such joy) until I get to the number 1 spot, then I backlink a bit more until I'm pretty much stable at the 1-3 spot. Done and dusted.....now time to start thinking about another article.

Of course, in the mean time there is a whole lot of other promotional stuff going on, you can't rely on articles alone, but for me quality articles are simply the best way to get free traffic.:rolleyes:

For me it's a balance between the 2. I have been submitting articles on a wide range of niches daily for myself as well as for my clients and I am getting good returns.
My articles are all 400-500 words in length and have a decent mix of theme keywords + long tail keywords. Also, I pay good attention to the resource box. I try to write unique resource box for each article. That's working fine for me.

Being a writer, I can't compromise on quality and definitely, for me more articles I submit, better for me.

Hope this helps.

Sincerely,
Jay B.

All business is a numbers game and especially online. I would imagine article marketing to be exactly the same.

Tom

I stand on both sides of this argument. You need both. I've been using article marketing to promote CPA offers for quite a while as I'm too cheap to pay for PPC. I put together a report of method for this and thought of selling it, but I'm not sure if there is a market for it or not.

For a long time I did not believe in the effectiveness of article marketing as I thought it was better to keep all your content under your control. I changed my mind once I figured out some things. Bottom line is you should write quality SEOed articles and a lot of them, then with some other tricks you can rank very well for the niches you promote.

hth
Bruce

Hi All,

I have to say that I've been article marketing for a long time but not as an affiliate direct strategy. I've tried to generate sales directly from articles but have had little success. I've been more successful using articles to improve my search engine rankings for web sites sites and blogs.

I've also has some success with giving away stuff via article (but requiring registration for the download).

Yes, it's a numbers game no doubt, but you will win
better if you add some QUALITY to the QUANTITY,

Why choose between the two? There's no reason that you can't do both approaches. Why limit yourself to one approach when you can do both? Both approaches are valid. Both approaches make money.

For example. Maybe some niches that you really enjoy and know about you do the more personal approach with magazine quality articles but for niches that maybe you aren't as interested in or know as much about you go more the numbers route.

I do both. I have 180k PLR articles on my hard drive. I will spin them, load them in an auto-submitter and let it chug in the background submitting to hundreds of sites. In the mean time I'll write a few high quality articles and those are the ones that get submitted to EZA and GoA.

With this method I get the best of both worlds because it doesn't take long to re-write an article and the submitter is no effort at all.

Writing quality articles AND getting them to rank in the top 3 spots of the serps through good backlinking is a much better strategy than just cranking out massive amounts of articles...

When I first started article marketing over a year ago I subscribed to the numbers game approach. A few articles ranked well in the serps and continue to bring in a residual income.

But most didn't... and I ended up with hundreds of articles that are basically just lingering out there is cyberspace with little to no views.

Now I know better and concentrate more on backlinking. I wish I had focused more on this in the beginning. Lesson learned.

My attitude towards this subject really changed when I saw that the top searched keyword for one of my niches was an EZA article. Using yahoo site explorer, I saw that this article had around 6,000 backlinks! And those are just the ones that are showing! The article to date has over 145,000 views. I conservatively estimate that this one article brings the author at least and extra $500 per month if not more.

Imagine having 10, 20 or more articles performing like that...

Of coarse its a numbers game, you don't have be a amazing author but the article needs to make decent sense but its all about numbers and outweighing the competition. JMO

Quick question regarding article marketing, Do you guys submit the same article to more than one article directory? I know google doesn't like duplicate content, however I keep reading things that say you should, and some that say you shouldn't.

Any thoughts ><!

It is only a numbers game if you are on the right track otherwise it is an exercise in futility.

Google is a reflection of human behavior, not the other way around.

You have to remember this.

What google cares about is traffic, along with the backlinks.

If lots of people keep reading the article, it will maintain the ranking even if it has few or no backlinks.

This tells the SERPS that your article is RELEVANT and USEFUL which is good for them, and their advertisers.

Google WANTS people to have easy access to great content.

I've written articles that have gotten thousands of views and maintained that position for days or weeks, and became syndicated. Without any backlink work on my part. I just wrote the article and submitted it.

I've had other articles that I had to backlink in order to maintain rankings because they only had a few dozen to 100 or so views.

More often than not, its the articles that had the most PASSION behind them in a PASSIONATE niche which get tons of views.

In other niches where the users want to gobble up as many tips as possible, you need to submit lots of articles.

GIVE THE READER TIPS OR ACTION STEPS THEY CAN DO RIGHT THERE WHILE READING THE ARTICLE and you'll get a MUCH higher response rate.

You bridge the gap between yourself and your computer this way.

THIS is what makes the difference between one sale, or none, and 5-10 sales or opt-ins per article.

Understand?

As pro copywriters often say, SPEAK HUMAN.

Tell the truth.

If you focus on telling people what REALLY works in your niche, you'll write unique content effortlessly, especially if its a topic that YOU enjoy (or learn to enjoy) also.

If you try too hard to be unique, you'll sound just like everyone else.

From there, whether you backlink or not is up to you. It can only help, however

It's worth putting in the extra effort to land more home runs

When you nail your writing quality and style just right and "line everything up", it's exciting to watch your article skyrocket to 13,000 page views and 300-500 resource box clicks in one day