Article Marketing Might Not Be Dead...

Nothing dead, unless your lazy. You can do anything, just pour out your whole spirit into it and you'll see magnificent results!

In the make money online and internet marketing niche, I personally think that for someone new it is a WASTE of time.

There are plenty of other niches in the world that don't have much competition when it comes to articles so you can try it out.

EzineArticles even admits that there are some niches on their site that are performing BETTER even after all the Google changes. But MMO/IM is a wrap. Penis enlargement articles will still get you some play - if they allow you to write in that category.

The problem is: traffic is now way lower than it was couple of years ago, so article marketing as main strategy is not worth of time anymore.

You can still use it to back up your main project or your brand, but as main source of traffic and income is terrible, at least in my opinion.

I mean, I recently checked some articles at EzineArticles, and traffic counter is like 10 - 20 reads on weeks old articles. Even if you post that article on 100 directories, you will get 1k - 2k visits. Not too bad, but when considering how much work is involved, not worth it in my opinion.

Why? Because even if you get 5k visits to your article, clickthrough rate on your links is low. Even if you get 10% CTR on your links, that's 500 visitors.

You can get that on Facebook for 10 bucks, in just couple of minutes of work, and traffic will be even more targeted.

Writing articles can still be good and profitable, but in some other way of content marketing, like posting articles to your blog, then turning them into PDFs and sharing on doc sharing sites, then turning them into videos and sharing that format too, then social media and some web 2.0 properties. In both short and long term that could bring in more traffic than article directories.

I mean, that's just my 2 cents.

Article marketing is quite certainly not dead just like guest blogging...

However, unlike guest blogging it takes lot of work and time, creating and posting articles to hundreds of directories, for possibly getting few thousands visitors...

The amount of work that goes into it is definitely not worth of hard work that goes into it, not to forget investing valuable time as well...

It's kind of the same thing as content marketing however with articles, hence the name.

There are more places to submit articles to gain traffic.

Forums, other blogs, Facebook and LinkdIn to name a few.

And yes content syndication has worked for me a little bit in the past if you can explain to the prospect that it's not exactly duplicate content...

I don't think article marketing is dead at all. It's just evolved.

Article marketing in the sense that we all used to remember it is certainly a waste of time, but writing great content and posting it to your own websites and then properly marketing that content is alive, well, and extremely profitable.

I've never been much for spending a lot of time on my blogs. I used to put one up, add 20-30 unique articles to it and some banners and opt-in forms, and let it run on autopilot. Sure, that works. I get leads from my blogs every day.

However, I decided about a month ago to take my blog in the MMO/Biz Opp/List Building niche and really work it. The results have been fantastic. I have been posting lots of unique tip articles as well as reviews, and I have been making a lot of videos where I try to speak to my blog visitors as if they were standing right in front of me.

I have only been doing on-page SEO and not building any links at all. I share on social media and that's about it. I am working under the assumption that Google is looking for good content and is not putting a lot of weight on backlinks. I think I'm right about that. I have been getting quite a bit of organic traffic and I have noticed that a lot of my articles have made it to the top of page 2 and some have even made it to page 1 for my chosen keywords.

The end result is I am getting quite a few opt-ins from my blog every day now. I have always been big into list building, but I've built my list through solo ads, Facebook, and Bing mostly. That's all well and good, but it's expensive, and it's difficult to find winning campaigns.

I am starting to see just how powerful a highly trafficked blog can be. BTW, I firmly believe that people who like your content so much that they subscribe to your blog's newsletter are about the best leads you can get, and for the most part, they're FREE!

One of my goals for 2016 is to get my blog to the point that I am getting 100 new subscribers a day from it. It will take a lot of work, but I am positive that it can be done.

I think that list building is evolving, and this is the best way to get leads. Ad swaps, click banking, and even solo ads are beginning to become redundant, and the autoresponder companies are getting much more strict towards people who are in the MMO/Biz Opp niche. I firmly believe that marketers who continue to use ad swaps and click banking to build their list are going to run into lots of problems. I also think that marketers who don't make the change to focusing more on building their list through great content are going to get left in the dust.

BTW, the opt-in form that performs the best is the one I put at the bottom of every blog post. I also have one in the sidebar and a pop up box that fires when the visitor goes to leave the site.

Article marketing was a pretty powerful strategy when you were able to get your articles to rank on the first page of Google. Back in the day articles from EzineArticles.com would show up all over the first page of Google...not anymore since Google doesn't look at article directories in a favorable light.

One suggestion is to post content on sites that:


1. Rank well in Google


2. Deliver internal traffic


An example of this is a site like Quora. Quora pages tend to rank well in Google and can give you readers directly from Quora members.

It's far from dead, like anything else, it's just constantly changing..

It's not dead.

It has just EVOLVED.

Gone are the days of "EASY" article marketing.

Now, it's all about LASER-TARGETED outreach.

Thankfully, there are tools out there that AUTOMATE outreach for you.