When article marketing, how many words are your articles?

I agree with the individual who said that "it all depends" what you hope to do with your article.

I could see where a short, high quality, article on Clickbank could manifest into a great click-thru on signature links, especially if the content flows seamless into that signature block.

For me, I've gone towards and adsense business model, coupled with Amazon/Linkshare/CJ, etc, simply because I feel it's very scalable. Also, I've found that the RIGHT kind of content can go viral very easily--causing huge viewership on your content.

In that business model, I also don't JUST limit myself to words. My best articles have taken quite some time to write (actually, I prefer to call it "crafting"), because they really have to be well thought out and developed around video and high quality images.

For example, one of my recent articles was entitled "Top 10 Most Powerful and Inspiring Post Tragedy Songs Ever Written and Recorded". In this article, I integrated images and video--both a necessity, I believe, to provide a high amount of quality and value to the end user.

Exactly so.

The mistake is to take a quantitative approach to the traffic and just "try to attract as many people as possible". This is "writing for clicks" and of course it doesn't usually work.

Those are typically the article marketers who think in terms of click-through rates, and mistakenly assume that if their click-through rate increases, their income will also increase. Not only is it completely wrong, but sometimes even the exact opposite can be the case (as it was for me), and there are good and valid reasons for that (which I didn't really understand at the time).

Like so many others aspects of internet marketing, quality and relevance are what matter. For traffic attracted, as well as for articles. It's twice as well-paid to attract 100 people, half of whom become customers, as it is to attract 500 people, of whom only 5% become customers. Actually it's considerably more than twice as well-paid, really, because of the eventual upsells. It's also more fun, easier to do, and less wasteful of resources.

The "easy assumption" is that if you attract the 500 people instead of the 100 people, those 500 people will include the 100 people anyway so "all the rest is potential gain". This isn't how it works. The reality is that attracting the 500 people will almost certainly lose almost all of the 100 people you actually wanted, because different people respond to different things, so the more you filter them out, the better, if you have a way of keeping the ones you want.

We see this with squeeze-pages, too. I split-tested four unrelated niches, with my affiliate sites, and in each of the four niches I built a bigger list with a squeeze page than with my normal sort of landing page, but made less money from those lists over a 6-month period. Not enough filtering. Different people attracted.

I think the main reasons are ...

(i) People looking for content to publish tend to have a certain quantity of space to fill, on a regular or semi-regular basis. Just as when you and I go off blog-commenting, the time-consuming and difficult part of the equation for us is to identify and find suitable blogs on which to comment, the difficult thing for them is finding and identifying suitable content in the first place. The more of their space you can fill for them, the more they'll want you: it's far easier for them to take two 1,200-word articles to fill their space than it is for them to have to find six suitable shorter articles, and they know they'll end up having to use some bad ones, if they do it that way;

(ii) I know that some of this "finding content to publish" work is farmed out to cheap outsourcees in countries where $10 is a day's pay, and therefore the people doing this don't have quite the same incentive to "take care" over it that you or I would have, for our own sites, and again if you can give them a lot of content all in one go, the length alone will appeal to them just because you're making their work easy, and that "gets you syndicated";

(iii) At the other end of the spectrum, where people want real quality and are ultra-selective about what they'll publish, they're also more likely to take longer articles which can much more easily develop a theme, say something new and interesting, and/or provide a "self-contained way of thinking" about a problem/situation than shorter ones can;

There are other reasons, too, I'm sure ...