Ezine articles - constant traffic ?

I've noticed that there is more traffic in the earlier stages after submission, and then it slowly begins to decrease as time goes by. It just reinforces the idea of submitting on a consistent basis.

Guys, this thread is from 2009. :p

Relying on article directories for traffic wasn't really a viable method of doing article marketing in 2009 and it still isn't in 2011.

You say "even" as if that's something special or unusual, Liza, but that's what an article directory is.

That's why Ezine Articles exists.

It's a depository of freely available content for websmasters (and ezine compilers) to be able to republish. That's what the whole thing's about.

That isn't its purpose, at all.

As commented above, relying on article directories for traffic wasn't a viable business model in 2009 (when this thread started) and it still isn't, now. Especially after Google's recent algorithm change: it's even less of a viable business model now.

You can, of course choose to "build up" the EZA copy of an article by sending traffic there, by building backlinks to it, but this is the great mistake of the "descending ceiling".

Getting traffic to your site via EZA is a bad method. You'll lose a high proportion of the traffic in the process (to EZA's AdSense, other distractions, and some will just not "click through"). It's much better to concentrate on getting traffic directly to your own site.

In this very helpful thread a large group of successful, experienced article marketers explain in great detail, and with great unity and clarity, why they publish all their EZA articles on their own sites first, and then build their backlinks to that copy, not to the EZA copy.

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.

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:

You need to be building 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 to 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.