My CTR on Ezine is Garbage!

[Mad Dawg]

Hey guys,

I have heard people talk about having CTR's as good as 40% on Ezine, yet after my first 1,000 views I'm looking at a mere 3%.

The only articles I have live simply have a URL listed in the author box, and a brief description of who I am.

The articles I have pending have a Call to Action in the author box, as well as the keywords turned into links, instead of just listing a URL.

My question is, on top of changing my author box, should I also take the keyword of the article and make it a link every time, or does that seem 'spammy' to the reader?

What have you all found to get you the highest CTR's on Ezine?

Thanks in advanced warriors!

Mad Dawg

[Terry Hatfield]

Hi,

When you write your resource box you should always have a benefit in the resource box. Study classified ads in magazines and you will learn to write better resource boxes. Also you can study the ads in the WSO section as they are really classified ads.

What you are really doing is writing an ad for your web site you want the reader to go to.

You want them to read the resource box and have it say when you go to my website you will get this and this and this. So much there you are crazy if you don't click now.

You want text of your link in your resource box to be the main keyword you are trying to get your site ranked for in the search engines.

30 percent click through rate is very doable. Hint if you are getting a low click through rate edit your resource box and resubmit the article.

Terry

[gabibeowulf]

Well .. CTR is very much influenced on building curiosity for the reader. Make him think there is something missing that can only be found in the resource box. If your article offers some quality information + building curiosity = high CTR

[David Raybould]

Hey again Mad Dawg,

If you're suffering from a ctr that low, I'd bet you can raise it substantially by using a resource box along the following lines:

"Click here to find out the secrets behind xxxxxxxxx"

or

"Click here to instantly increase your xxxxxxxxx"

Obviously you'd substitute the xxxxxxxx for the biggest benefit your product/offer has, your magic bullet.

Hope that helps

David

[Solidsnake]

Originally Posted by the_writer

Hey again Mad Dawg,

If you're suffering from a ctr that low, I'd bet you can raise it substantially by using a resource box along the following lines:

"Click here to find out the secrets behind xxxxxxxxx"

or

"Click here to instantly increase your xxxxxxxxx"

Obviously you'd substitute the xxxxxxxx for the biggest benefit your product/offer has, your magic bullet.

Hope that helps

David

Wow, great suggestion... Anyway, most people visiting ezines are also advertisers and publishers and I don't think there are substantial customers there.

[David Raybould]

Originally Posted by Solidsnake

Wow, great suggestion... Anyway, most people visiting ezines are also advertisers and publishers and I don't think there are substantial customers there.

Lol dude if that's what you think you're missing out big time...

I get tens of thousands of highly targeted BUYING visitors from eza each month.

Most of their traffic comes from articles showing up in serps, so it can be very very powerful if you know what to do with it...

David

[Daniel Scott]

One thing I have been doing lately is basically using the resource box as part of my article, but the part that sells really hard.

So you have the article, say it's three xxx.

Heading

Intro
1
2
3
Resource box

Don't even try and finish the article... finish it by using your close in the resource box.

Haven't had enough time to do a scientific test on this yet but so far it seems to be working well.

-Dan

[Ephrils]

Don't forget to ask for the click if necessary too. Assuming they know what to do at the end of the article isn't going to get you a lot of clicks. A "call to action" can sometimes be "do this action". Tell them where to go next.

[captivereef]

some articles just have bad CTR'Ss. I have 315 articles published at ezinearticles with an average CTR of 16%. Some are top performers while others are terrible and have little traffic or click thorughs. SOme will just never perform no matter what you do.

But when it comes to CTR what i have found is that the CTR tends to be much higher on articles that are based around "How To" type articles if you give them just enough info they normally will click through to get more.

The CTR of general information type articles is normally pretty low and i try to avoid them if i can.

[Ephrils]

Originally Posted by captivereef

But when it comes to CTR what i have found is that the CTR tends to be much higher on articles that are based around "How To" type articles if you give them just enough info they normally will click through to get more.

This is what I noticed too. I didn't at first, so I wrote a bunch of articles with the "How To" setup against generic titled articles with the same information. So far, my stats show the "How To"s out perform the others.

You should always test this though, sometimes the winners come out of nowhere and get clicked like crazy and DON'T follow this setup. I've got 2 that did just that. I thought they were ok articles, but the readers apparently didn't

[MaskedMarketer]

Originally Posted by captivereef

But when it comes to CTR what i have found is that the CTR tends to be much higher on articles that are based around "How To" type articles if you give them just enough info they normally will click through to get more.

The CTR of general information type articles is normally pretty low and i try to avoid them if i can.

Thanks for a good tip. Makes sense.

The person searching for "how to" information already has curiosity and wants to know a solution to the frustrating problem.

[tommygadget]

Well, to throw my hat in the ring, I have some articles with very high CTR's, over 30%. Those had an outline to a solution of a common problem and in the author's bio, it simply said "to see a more in-depth discussion of blah blah blah, please visit this website" website name has keyword anchor text in URL. Hope that helps.

TomG.

[Emailrevealer]

Can some of you experts take a look at my resource box and make some educated suggestions?
The link to my blog is in my sig.

[captivereef]

One of my best performing resource boxes on my "how to" articles is a short sentence . the reource box says basically this and has a 40% CTR

"for more information on how to maintain and clean your (keyowrd) visit airline tickets cell phone deals at whatever.com

Its so simple but or some reason it works wonders???? The article ws about cleaning an area of the home,

[carik42]

Hey Mad Dawg,

I think I noticed it mentioned above, but I scrolled down quickly to put my reply.

NOTHING generates a click better than curiosity. Whatever the product or service you are eventually promoting, think of a way to make it almost impossible for the targeted reader to NOT click on your link.

Btw...and it might have already been mentioned...

I read recently that the average ctr at EA is 3%, so don't beat yourself up. I bet if you injected a bit of curiosity it to your bio box you could easily get to 10%+

Cheers

[Mad Dawg]

Thanks all for your awesome replies!

There is just one thing that wasn't really addressed.

Do you guys turn your keywords into links throughout the article body itself, or does this appear 'spammy' to the reader and/or inappropriate to Ezine?

Mad Dawg

[TheMagicShow]

Offering a free report tends to increase the ctr problem, "get your free report on growing organic food right now" .Now this would only work if the topic had relevance to organic food of course, this works like a charm and my ctr rate is pretty nice.

[Monetize]

IDK what you're doing so I can't really give sound advice
but I would suggest you diversify with your niches and
experiment until you find a winning formula. I don't think
anyone is going to tell you what works for them since it's
all a big secret

Observe other successful article marketers and don't
re-invent the wheel.

[Mad Dawg]

I just went to Ezine and redid the resource box on all my articles utilizing a combination of all your advice.

I offered my free seminar in them as well as using the 3 varieties of links suggested by TB, and the curiosity factor suggested by all.

Thanks again warriors!

Mad Dawg

[Andrew Maule]

Improve the title and make the reference box better, make them need to click through.

[Max Ramocsai]

I recently wrote about improving your article's CTR on my blog. Click here to read it. Hope that it helps!

[kenj]

Mine was below 10 % when I started out now I expect and get around 20%.
I changed the way I do the resource box so that the content flows from the article seamlessly. It does not look like an add on when published.

I also work a lot harder on finding good keywords and top headlines.

The last change that I have done is take great care with the words that are my link text

[Sean A McAlister]

Originally Posted by nmullett

hello i was a very hard worker but now i relax have a look how you can relax too

YOU HAVE BEEN REPORTED


SPAMMER

[Gunter Eibl]

Lots of great tips here. The question is why somebody is clicking on the resource box link and why not?

The visitors has opened the article because of he found the article title interesting. He clicked the title already. You sold the click already. You can easily sell this click a second time in your resource box by matching it perfectly to the title.

If somebody clicked on the title "3 days to loose weight" then the chances are big that he clicks the resource box "3 days to loose weight" too.

A high CTR comes from matching the title and resource box perfectly, ideally adding some incentive to click a second time. Like adding the word "free" increases the CTR already.

That's why I write a unique resource box for each article I submit.

Gunter

[Geshem]

Thought I'd add my two cents since I recently managed to improve more formerly very sad little CTR at ezineartles.

I just ran a little experiment using the same resource box on three articles. The articles have been there for almost two months. It's very few data, but it corroborates what some other people were saying in earlier posts.

For example, the product is on "Widget Painting" and the articles are:

How to Paint Your Widget 41% CTR
Widget Painting -- Why You Don't Need [expensive well known system] 35% CTR
Why not All Widget Painting Systems are Alike 26%

The resources box is very similar to this:

"Looking for a system for widget painting that covers 95% of your widget
(higher than [expensive well known system]), but that's easy and can be done at home?
Get started now at my blog about widget painting."

Just some ideas for you...

[Chris Hunter]

Originally Posted by Tom Borowski

- Use all three links allowed by EZineArticles in your resource box. What I usually do is have one link with my main keyword phrase, one link with the title of the page I'm linking to and one link with the URL spelled out (so readers can still copy and paste the URL if the links are made inactive on a publisher's site or newsletter).Tom

Tom,

Time to update your copy-and-paste responses.

EZA only allows 2 links now in the resource box.

[Chris Hunter]

Originally Posted by Tom Borowski

Hey, I meticulously handcrafted that response

Oh, I could tell. (snicker)

Dang. They're always making it harder on us, aren't they. Thanks for pointing that out, my next submission would have been rejected because I always used all three links.

There's more!

They also will only allow you to use 3 words for anchor text in URLs in your resource box so no more really long tail keyword anchor text.