Is Article Marketing still profitable?

In my not so humble opinion, article directories such as Ezine, GoArticles, etc have never been good marketing tools except perhaps as ancillary article portfolio showcases.

The highest form of "article marketing" has always been to submit articles to online/offline publications which already are targeting your reading audiences and prospective demographics.

My recommendation is to start anew, using classical article syndication practices. An excellent tutorial with timeless best practices (ie "old school") is "Turn Words Into Traffic", by Jim and Dallas Edwards.

Article Marketing fizzled out years ago. Free traffic is largely useless, unless you are a narcissist who craves internet fame by blogging and whatnot.

If you want to succeed in IM, you have to pay for your traffic. The dirty truth no basement warrior wants to hear.

Anyone telling you otherwise is an idiot...or trying to sell you a shiny object.

Article marketing has become pretty much useless in my opinion,
Who still reads articles? nobody!
Video marketing would be a better way to go, nobody reads a word online anymore, everybody just wants to watch and listen to a video

Listbuilding should be your primary goal, and how to get the traffic?
YES paid traffic is absolutely the most efficient way to go about it...
if you have an optimized funnel in place and know exactly what you are doing and what your returns are per lead.
Free traffic still works, but it is a lot of work, costs a lot of time, so it is not actually free!
you either invest yout time, or your money, in both cases you need to have an optimed funnel in place, build a list, and know exactly what you are doing to be as optimal and efficient as possible,

good luck!

I agree with Johnny but it is not that people do not read articles anymore, it is just that video marketing is more appealing now. I mean who spend their times browsing on article directories than on youtube? It is just my opinion and preference but I believe majority of people do the same.

I would say, Article Marketing is still a good way to get free traffic to your websites online.

I don't why someone would say it was "never" a good way to market online. They just didn't do it enough, and are looking for fast results! lol

I have gotten a lot of free traffic to my blog from ezinearticles.com alone. Imagine sharing articles on 10+ good article directories!

The key is in sharing very unique and valuable articles VERY consistently!!!

And I'm talking about a large amount of unique articles being published on popular article directory sites, on a daily/weekly basis.

What most people do not realize is how many people use these article directory sites to search for information!!!

There are thousands of internet users who go to ezinearticles.com to search for specific information, instead of going to Google.com - for an instance!

That fact alone tells you that you can get free traffic from these article directory sites. You just have to learn the right way to do it!

I hope this helps! ..

Welcome back, by the way!

Submitted an article in 2009

Still driving traffic and still converts to sales.....

Depends on how you are using article marketing, if you are creating your own blog, putting an article there and promoting it to educate your audience and for lead generation, then that's exactly how some people are making insane amount of money! It's content-marketing.. more evolved version..

I want to thank those of you sharing constructive insights. I will do some more due diligence work and decide what I will do. Again, thank you for your responses.

Article marketing can be effective if the articles comprise of informative content and if they are published on good article submission websites. The article content should provide value to the people, only then they will be interested in liking and sharing it further.

It still is profitable but it's not like before and it's definitely a lot harder.

Damn, it used to be so easy back in the day...ah...miss those days. haha

I spent hours in writing and publishing the articles to 100s of directories but it didn't really made me much money. I quit it eventually but the articles are still out there. Maybe if I'm lucky I may still get traffic from those articles

I don't believe that writing and submitting articles was ever all that profitable as a singular activity.

It was at one time a popular method mainly for gaining back links, as one part of an off page otimisation strategy - but in and of itself I don't believe that article marketing was ever "profitable" - it was just one method of offpage SEO.

For instance if you invested a hundred grand into article marketing on Ezine articles, Go articles and the like, I think you would be very lucky to get back your 100k along with a profit - either now or 5 years ago.

The same could be said of any individual element of SEO though, if you spent 100k on on-page SEO and did no offpage, then you'd be lucky to get any return, same if you invest all your dough on offpage and generate traffic to a terrible website which has zero chance of converting.

I agree with some of the comments which suggest that if you're looking for profitable marketing look at paid channels rather than organic (look into Facebook dark posts for example) because this is more straight forward in terms of dollars spent vs dollars earned, and it's quicker.

SEO is a longer game, it can take months to start seeing a profit from organic search engine optimisation. I disagree with anyone who says it's not important though and that you should only focus on paid search and ignore organic, I think if you ignore SEO in the long-term it will be to the long term detriment of your business.

If you're asking if article marketing in this sense of the word, using the tactics that were being employed up until a couple of years ago, is still an effective and important part of SEO - then the answer would be a huge fat NO.

Before anyone screams at me by the way, I'm not saying that there is no benefit at all to submitting content outside of your own website. I'm talking about article marketing in the traditional sense, using the tactics that most people were using up until a couple of years ago (which mainly entailed getting terrible content written, spin the heck out of it so it makes as little sense as possible, and blast it all over the web - or to just post the same duplicate content all over the place).

There is benefit to writing high quality content to be published on relevant, high authority websites to link back to your website, both in terms of direct traffic and for seo purposes. From what I have seen though you would be better off targeting niche specific sites that are important within your niche, rather than article networks - as article networks don't score so well on relevance or on authority either now most of the time

That being said, I disagree with some of the comments that have been made along the lines that words are no longer effective and all that matters now is video, etc. That's about as true as...something which isn't true.

Go to Google - search for something, what do you get? Mainly textual content with imagery. Video results usually account for roughly 5-10% of the result on page.

The web is still mainly about text content, most people still love to read content especially when it concerns a transaction of any kind.Yes video is an important media of course and it will grow in it's importance, but textual content is still the most important form of content for marketing and I believe it always will be.

If you're using the web for marketing - selling stuff - whether that stuff is physical products, digital products or services of any kind, then you want transactional traffic. That is, visits from people who are intending to make a transaction - people who are looking to buy your stuff.

Video content is mainly viewed for entertainment purposes. Think about it, how long will you sit and watch a video purely for entertainment? So yes people sit laughing their asses off watching fails compilations, wins compilations, trailers for the latest season of Game of Thrones - but this isn't transactional traffic, these people are in entertainment mode, they have popcorn in their hand, not their credit cards...

For effective marketing we need people who want to buy stuff, and the people who usually want to buy our stuff will search for a specific search term, and then will want to read about the product and get the required info. I'm not saying that you shouldn't include video on a page along with content, I do agree that video has it's place - but video does NOT replace content, not for anyone who want to use their websites to get new business.

And anyone who thinks that web marketing should be done with a video that starts playing when I get to the page, and virtually no other content on the page whatsoever other than the sign up / buy now link, leading to a one time offer if I close the page - AGGHHHHH. That's all I have to say to you. These kinds of websites are to be sworn at, not to be sworn by...

Anyway getting back to the point, what I would recommend personally is that you look at content differently. Instead of thinking about writing articles and submitting them somewhere - write great pages of relevant valuable content and put them on your own website, and also write great content to be published on other high authority relevant websites which results in a link to your site.

Whenever you're writing content of any kind to be published off your website, I think you're better off focusing on generating direct traffic from such content. Focus on sites which are likely to have a lot of visitors who would be interested in reading your content and who would be likely to follow the link and end up on your site, rather than focusing on SEO and thinking of traffic as an afterthought.

Still though, this is only a piece of the puzzle, not the be all and end all.

A little nostalgia...

Haven't seen him around but Steve Wagenheim was very passionate, to say the least, about article marketing I think that was his full-time method of income. Old timers will surely remember him. Years ago you would login back when the post had a folder icon and folders with a lot of activity had little animated flames coming from them. Find a flaming post and you would almost always find Steve in there putting in his dollars worth. Quite the character but he knew article marketing.

There is way more effective traffic strategies now.. Geez, I didn't even know people are still looking into this form of advertising anymore.

I have came in touch with this amazing guy named Justin brooke , google him, he uses article marketing in a really clever way..

It can be if you re-purpose your articles. Turn the content into podcasts, videos, blog posts, email newsletter messages, document sharing sites, and articles on your site. If you have other re-purposing usages.... use them too. Just make sure the usages work.

yes they are still working and you can see them for branding your keywords. Just make sure you submit unique articles to each of those websites

keep your articles on your site or in your email funnel.

bum article marketing for do follow backlinks and piggy backing on high article authority sites is not working these days.

lets take a moment of silence for those article sites of old:

Ezine Articles
Go Articles
Buzzle
ArticleAlley
Hubpages
Inforbarrel

I think that article marketing is still alive and if it`s done properly it will be separate you from your competitors and get you a smart position among your niche.

That said, you should focus only on creating and developing high quality content and publishing them on the highly relevant article directory niches websites to get the most from your article marketing campaign.

As in my point of view, guest posting may replace a little bit the article marketing strategy these days.

If you were in 2007, then article marketing worked like a charm. However, this year, lots of article websites are de-indexed and even if your articles are indexed, it won't ranked high. The best way to get traffic from Google is by creating an authority blog. You can build backlinks via Fb and forums.

By the way, GoArticles is shutting down so what does that tell you.

I was surprised when I logged in for the first time in years and read that. You can still download all your articles if you want to, before they shut down for good.

From an SEO/Affiliate Marketing stand point... Article directories are showing up less and less in the serps because of videos are taking their spots but i still believe they carry "weight" as a backlink for diversity and trust.

Video is definitely much better and easier way to go to gain more traffic if optimized correctly but from time to time I still post articles to article directories because lets face it people still like to read and it looks good in my backlink profile!

Article marketing is not as profitable as it once used to be because Google doesnt like it anymore. However, it still works in case of submission to article directories which accept unique articles and not spun or computer generated gibberish. Even their links have been devalued. It is ok to submit once a while but do not expect it to be magical like before.

Sad to say, articles are no longer as profitable as before because more and more people prefer videos over written content. However, this doesn't mean articles are out of the picture. You can still make profit as long as you know where or to whom you should put your articles. It wouldn't be easy but hey... who said marketing is really an easy thing!?

Sigh

I know circle talk when I see it. I'm outta this thread.

I bet every one of those directories would have been successful had they insisted on original content.

Hello,
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Thanks
Zarajohn@