2 YEAR Article Marketing Case Study - $55 An Hour Profit (PICTURE Proof!)

It's my 100th post here, I have learnt a lot and want to give something back.

I LOVE Article Marketing. It has been one of the best sources of traffic for me, both for my own sites, and for sites I have setup to promote affiliate products. I want to give an insiders sneak peak, showing the POWER of article marketing. Here is a screenshot of some article marketing I did almost 2 YEARS ago for just one small website:



I submitted just 70 articles , 50+ of them in the space of the first 3 months of this timeline, and then just occasional batches of 2-3 articles going live at once for a couple of months thereafter. As you can see this traffic has not spiked then just died away, but remains a consistent source of visitors almost 2 years later!

50 of these articles I wrote myself
20 of them I had written. I paid $1.50 per article.

They made me $750+
So minus $60 for the 20x outsourced articles leaves a profit of $690.
I write approximately 4 articles an hour so for 12.5 hours writing time I was paid $55.20 an hour.
.. in reality probably a bit less due to the time taken to post them, but still a pretty decent enough salary.

Is Article Marketing Better than PPC?

Look at these stats a different way.

Take my wages out of the equasion and imagine that I bought the whole lot of them and paid for submission for a figure of $300 in total (this is a cheap yet totally plausible $4.20 per article including submission)

The articles brought in aprox 1400 visits.
This would work out at 0.21c per click (Cheaper than PPC!)
And if you take this away from the Per Visit Value of 0.54c this would leave a profit of $462

That's only the TIP OF THE ICEBERG!

So the total profit for the articles themselves was $690, but this is probably only a fraction of the true profit.

Above I mentioned that article marketing has been one of the best sources of traffic - my real best source of traffic is natural search traffic. I didn't do a lot of other SEO for this website apart from a few directory submissions, and a little more article marketing on other article sites. It is hard to say exactly, but I would say these 70 articles account for probably 20-30% of the total "SEO work" I did - overall the amount of backlinks I gained from these articles helped to push me up in the search engines for the keywords I used.

My site did rise and still does hold decent positions in the search engines for moderately competitive search terms, which bring in further visitors and profit every month (and this exceeds the money I make from these articles).

It could of been even better! ;(

Some more experienced article marketers may even turn their nose up at these figures as it is very possible to do a LOT better - to get better click thrus, do better research on keywords, rank articles better in the search engines and get MORE TRAFFIC.

• This was early in my IM career and I didn't know all that much - the keyword research was POOR. Practically non existent. With better keyword research (identifying terms that people are searching for yet are uncompetitive) these articles could be getting even more traffic.
• I didn't do any SEO for the articles themselves - I didn't bookmark them or build any backlinks to the articles themselves - again with just a little TLC they could of ranked even better.
• My writing itself wasn't that great - I know that 2 years later (and 100s of articles, pages, reviews etc) I could write these articles a LOT better - after a while you just know how to write and what works and what doesn't.
• I didn't have an autoresponder setup - I could of captured more emails and built a fanbase - useful for up-sells, discounts / sales, doing JVs with other companies etc.
• My conversion rate itself wasn't that great - I could now write the product copy better, or even back then I could / should of done more tweaking and testing to improve it.

If you aren't doing article marketing, in my opinion you are not only leaving a lot of money "on the table", but missing out on a great way to grow your business in so many ways.

I hope this inspires some people to get into a little article marketing, and if you are inspired but brand new then you will still probably have 101 questions - how to find products to promote, how to write titles, where to submit to etc etc.. You could ask 10 people these questions and they would likely have different answers.

Just TAKE ACTION NOW: pick a product if you haven't already, sit down and write 10 articles and submit them all straight away - then write another 10 to submit over the next week. Don't worry about the details, JUST DO IT! I promise you that you will learn more about article marketing through this experience than reading any amount of spammy guides.