ezine articles finally dead

I understand what you are saying...I just think that the point I'm thinking of and the way I'm wording it makes it seem like I am in disagreement :p.

Yes, people looking to solve a problem will generally start out with Google. Hell, while at work at the smoothie shop today I used Google 3 times to try to fix a reciept printer, a computer monitor, and a fax machine. The store is a wreck.

Article marketing as I understand it though is not looking to capture that traffic straight from Google to your site. If it happens, it's nice; but it's not the strategy. I am under the impression that article marketers want their traffic coming from reputable, in niche sites. Does it matter how the traffic got to the syndicated article? I believe not. Just that it got there and goes through to your site.

So I get that, in one form or another, your traffic has a chance of funneling through a search engine. What I'm saying though is that pleasing Google is not the part that article marketers need to worry about. That just muddies the water. Article marketers should focus on providing the best content possible and getting it syndicated. The traffic comes by virtue of value to the reader, not taking any and all steps to rank in the search engines.

Bretski,

I love you chap, you're a great person and I love reading your stuff. Don't ever think I'm against you and please don't take this as a rebuttal of what you've said. It's not.

Some people go to sites they trust (not necessarily Google) like some people come here. I'm not in the IM niche but I am looking for the same sort of people in other niches outside it. They are already on a particular site, they trust it, they don't search Google, they ask their friends on their site of choice for advice.

That's where I want my articles.

I think the point he's making is that it's not so much about putting a link on an EZA or whatever article, it's about getting your article syndicated on a site/ezine/whatever that has a bunch of people, in large numbers preferably, that are extremely and intentionally, interested in what you have to say.

When I pay for articles like this, that I want to have the effect I desire, clicking on my link to find out more information on their subject of exceptional interest, sometimes an obsession, becomes second nature.

They come, because I've just stuck a bloody good article they want to read, right in front of them. That's targeted marketing.

It works and it works well.

EZA TOS says:
"If you wish to publish/reprint any article from our site in your ezine, website, blog, forum, RSS feed or print publication, you must:

Respect the copyrights of the authors by publishing the entire article as it is with no changes.

Agree to include the FULL Resource box or SIG line at the end of the article.

Agree not to change the title or content of the article in any way.

Agree to make all links so that they are Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.

Agree to include the article source credit below each article reprinted with the link active:

Article Source: EzineArticles.com"

So what you are doing is against their TOS, not to mention being plagiarism.

That is stealing!

I'm sorry ... and I can try, yes.

When I first started off in internet marketing, I was doing "article directory marketing", imagining wrongly that it was "article marketing" - in other words, I was stupidly trying to use article directories for their own traffic and their own backlinks.

This was a couple of years before the Panda updates (which devalued the article directories so much) started, but even then, it didn't work.

Stupidly, I had a business model which depended mostly on attracting traffic from Google (as so many Warriors have found out, during 2011, you're only ever going to be one algorithm-change away from a potential disaster, if you have that).

I made the beginner's mistake of trying to build my business with SEO/rankings.

I was naive enough to believe most of the nonsense I read in forums about article marketing, about what "duplicate content" was, about all sorts of things like that, not realising that a lot of it started off in the Urban Myth School of internet marketing and was lovingly propagated by people with their own financial interests in promoting the kind of spinning and/or auto-submission software and services and "bots" which need people to believe all that cr@p, in order to make it look potentially advantageous to buy them. :p

I was gullible enough to believe the occasional person saying that "syndicated content" is a form of "duplicate content".

I was ignorant enough to believe that Google penalizes "duplicate content".

I didn't check.

I didn't find out - because I didn't think about it - that Google likes and welcomes syndicated content (and even holds conferences at which its panel of experts openly explain why and how), and that it's a totally different thing from duplicate content.

I believed all the wrong people, in other words.

I did just about everything wrong that you can do wrong.

So I made no money at all, to speak of, for about 4 months.

The reason for that was that although I knew how to write articles and I was getting enormous numbers of backlinks from all the misguided nonsense I did, imagining that it was "work", my articles weren't written for syndication, and my millions of backlinks weren't relevant ones to my own sites, so however many of them there were, they weren't worth anything realistic to my SEO efforts.

I put a lot of effort into SEO, used a lot of software and bought a lot of services, in the early days, but it was all misdirected effort and it didn't help me at all. However good the keyword research I did/bought, I couldn't rank at the top of Google. And it was the same in every niche I tried.

Without quite realising it, I was looking at it quantitatively, imagining that "numbers of backlinks" and "page ranks" were going to help me.

I didn't understand that SEO (even then, long before the Panda updates started) was about quality and relevance.

The good news is that this is all in huge contrast to the off-page SEO which you get done for you by others when you have your articles syndicated as widely as possible. That way, without thinking much about SEO yourself, without "doing SEO" much, you end up with backlinks from relevant pages. And that makes it a whole different world. Successful SEO becomes far easier, without spending much time or money on it, and you can easily end up with some really good rankings for keywords of low, low-to-medium and medium competitiveness.

So, I switched from an "SEO-based approach" to an approach that "almost ignores SEO", and the results of my SEO went from very bad to very good. It sounds paradoxical, I know, but it isn't really. It's easily explained (says she, having read plenty of SEO textbooks now, which I never did when I started ) by the facts that (a) other people - by syndicating my articles - are basically doing my off-page SEO for me, and (b) the backlinks I'm getting now are relevant ones, and that's what matters.

So, the result is that (in round numbers) although 80% of my traffic comes directly from the syndication of my articles, the other 20% that comes from search engines is still far, far more search engine traffic than I ever got before I understood how article syndication works, when I was doing article directory marketing instead of article marketing, and when my main sources of "information" were misguided and/or deceptive people in forums.

You can get traffic to your site from EZA, but it just isn't a good thing to do it that way, because you lose most of it. It's very fully explained in this post.

EZA's own backlinks are almost worthless, but the future backlinks you can get on other people's relevant sites if your articles are syndicated from EZA can be very good indeed.

Sorry, but this thread is about "Ezine Articles".

There's a whole SEO section of the forum for questions like that.

A big strategic re-think will help you.

So will these two threads ...

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-articles.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...necessary.html

Now why in the world would I be swayed away from facts?!? I don't attack people. I attack the misinformation that they spew. People don't like that and I couldn't care less if they like it or not.

If a troll wants to stop trolling and bring up an actual point for debate, I'm all for it. I will give a thorough read and come back with my interpretation.

We can do civil debate if you want. Doesn't only have to be trolling.

I don't think that myself, or any of the people that I have learned from, have been saying that Ezine Articles is what makes article marketing profitable. It is just one aspect of a larger strategy.

1. There are no facts to back up EZA's profitably for authors because EZA is not where the money is going to come from. It is a website that allows our work to be published. Nothing more, nothing less; and none of us are pretending otherwise.

2. EZA only limits exposure if one is foolish enough to use that as their only avenue of syndication, the same way that limiting your traffic strategy to Google's serps sets you up for failure. Diversity is the key. User Richard Van told me that article syndication makes up about 30% total of his traffic strategy. I'm sure others like Alexa, myob, tpw, and others that I follow would say the same thing.

Diversity is the key in any business. That fact does not change online.

The judgment call I am making may in fact be bizarre, if it is incorrect then I am sure that I will learn sooner rather than later. I do not participate in this business with a closed mind; and will be glad to change my viewpoint if I am given sufficient reason to do so.

I think that is as far as we can civilly take this discussion without starting the cycle of circle talk. I would actually like to thank you for the debate, it is much more engaging than the trolling I would usually use against you. I disagree with you still though. Which one of us is right will be revealed through our respective efforts online.

Yeah.. you could do that or use AMR or any of the other products out there but if I can I want my stuff going to to blogs where nobody else can go.

I'll read your thread, Kurt. I promise. Promise I'll be open minded, ok?

Once again Alexa you've completely failed to acknowledge my point, and you've resorted to quite a condescending tone to try and minimize the validity of what I'm saying.

If you continue to believe that the traffic to your website, via whatever route they arrive, is not somehow influenced by Google search, then it's really hard to take all the good information you provide to this community very seriously at all. Linking me away from this thread has no bearing on the outcome. Regardless of how your traffic arrives, this statement is still false - "Google is entirely unconnected with the traffic-attracting process..." and as for this comment - "Nobody, at any stage of the story, has used a search engine at all" - well, the plot just thickens.

Have a smashing Holiday