Ezine Articles Views and CTR

Yes ... sorry; I wasn't trying to be "mysterious". I switched from "writing for clicks" to "writing for syndication".

A few are here ...

Both your views and your CTR depend largely on the niches and subjects that you choose to create content in.

I personally write for "clicks" because I'm extremely good at monetizing traffic once it gets to whatever site I use in the resource box, and don't generally care about syndication from EZA because there are easy ways to get content syndicated outside of EZA's platform.

Generally you will find:

less information = more clicks and less syndication
More information = less clicks and more syndication

To me though, it boils down to how well you can monetize traffic. Plus, there are ways that you can force syndication on EZA by targeting the right keywords regardless of the niche.

I think this often happens.

Broadly speaking, two different groups of people read EZA articles.

(i) Potential customers: these are people who find your article by putting one of its keywords into a search engine and clicking on the SERP's;

(ii) People looking not in Google but inside EZA: these are researchers, webmasters, ezine/newsletter-compilers, and so on, but they're not potential customers.

How one uses an article directory depends on which group one's writing for, because what each will respond to is pretty much mutually exclusive.

In the "writing for clicks" model (this is "article directory marketing", which I used to use but will now no longer touch), one is writing for the first group - potential customers. This approach is characterised by producing a large quantity of shorter articles, typically more "salesy" in tone, with a "call to action" in the resource box (all the things that will ensure nobody much syndicates it). It's what Warriors here widely refer to as a "rinse and repeat" model, i.e. you have to keep on and on producing it over and over and over again because it doesn't really produce residual income. In my opinion, it isn't really building an asset-based income, either - it's more like creating a job for yourself. I do see that one could effectively outsource and automate quite a lot of it and try to build it up into a steady, secure income, but I strongly suspect that doing so raises, for many people, several new difficulties in addition, and that the overall success-rate of this model is pretty small.

In the "writing for syndication" model (this is "article marketing", not just "article directory marketing"), one is writing for the second group, potential syndicators, and in contrast to the paragraph above, creating one's articles more in line with the sort of outline described in this post. It's a radically different and (for those of us here who've tried it) a far more profitable, stable and secure approach characterised by building a real, asset-based business based on continually increasing residual income from work already done.

One thing's for sure (as you can see from what many others here say on the subject, in so many threads): people who switch from "writing for clicks" to "writing for syndication" don't switch back.

Of course, I completely agree with Jeremy's observation that there are plenty of non-article-directory-based methods of writing for syndication, too (and I'm using many of them, myself, though using article directories for syndication is what gets many people started, and still very valuable to me).

In a sense, it all boils down to one essentially simple, straightforward Big Key Question:-

When a potential customer finds your article by putting one of its keywords into a search engine, what do you want him to find: an article directory copy or the copy on your own site? :confused:

To me, it's a no-brainer.

Most people who go to an article directory don't make it to my site at all, don't opt in, don't become customers, and so on. And that was so even when I was writing for clicks. And of course it's so for most article directory marketers, most of the time. When their potential-customer-traffic goes to a directory, they lose most of it. So not much to think about, there. :p

Absolutely.

You need to be building those backlinks to your site and NOT to article directories.

This is perhaps the single biggest determinant, for the "average marketer" of whether or not s/he actually makes a living at all from article marketing. It's no coincidence that very few people who build backlinks to article directories are successful in the long term. Most of the time it's a simple case of the descending ceiling. This really is exactly how the ceiling has descended on so many people, and why for the last year or two (even before this recent Google algorithm change) there've been so many threads here commenting that "article marketing is dead".

This is the trap into which many people fall. If they have a newish site, their article will of course be on a PR-0 page there. At EZA it'll also be on a PR-0 page (that's how all EZA articles start off), but because EZA's home page has a higher PR, that'll still make the EZA copy rank more easily (fortunately this problem is easily overcome, and people wanting to own their business and promote their own site do need to overcome it!).

Sadly, because of this, a lot of people decide "EZA's easier to rank than my own site, so I'll send my traffic there instead of to my own site" and they then build backlinks to the EZA copy. EZA must love them. :p

And once they start doing that, it can only get worse - not better, because the more they do that, the harder it is for them ever to rank their own site (and own their own business, really). The outcome is that instead of getting 100% of "their traffic", they're sending it to EZA and getting back only what's left after the AdSense, other distractions and non-CTR have all taken their toll.

With apologies for repetition (not to say "duplicate content" ) it's as explained here, here, here, here, here, here and so on.

Oh, I agree 100% And I've long ago given up chasing after them. It's not worth the time, frustration and trouble. I was just mentioning that is does happen, especially with the longer articles full of good content. The good thing is, the blogs they usually pop up on are just crap that most likely attract no traffic anyway.

Alexa, I like your posts and I think you provide very useful insights.

I do want to take issue with one point: I do not believe a new article on EZA would start with a PR-0. A new page on a high PR site that starts out linked to other established pages on that site is not going to start at zero.