Writing articles still worth the time? Best Traffic Advice?

Banned 11 years ago

Writing articles is still very much worth the time.

Large and increasing numbers of Warriors are successfully making our livings from article marketing.

But it has nothing to do with SEO.

Originally Posted by iNeverBehave

The frustrating thing about articles (on Ezine) is that the website is very picky of what kind of links I attach to it.

Those of us using Ezine Articles for its intended purpose (which is also, nowadays, the only purpose it can actually serve) don't find that frustrating. I suspect that what you've been reading may have been about "article directory marketing", not "article marketing". In other words it was terribly out of date and/or plain mistaken.

"Article directory marketing" refers to the submission of articles to article directories (and maybe to Web 2.0 sites) with the intended purpose of gaining potential customer traffic and backlinks from the directory (which is futile, and based only on a fundamental misunderstanding of how article directories work). "Article marketing" refers to the widespread re-publication of copies of articles in front of the already-targeted, non-SEO traffic the author intends to attract to her own site.

For all the reasons explained here, no article marketer would want potential customer traffic to arrive at their site by getting there from a search engine via an article directory. That would be very counterproductive.

Originally Posted by iNeverBehave

Am I wasting my time doing articles

It depends what sort of articles you're writing, how you're trying to use them, and what your objectives are for them.

I strongly advise you not to bother with them at all, if your intended purpose is to use them "for backlinks". There's very little sense in that. Partly because the type of backlinks you can actually get, that way, without having articles syndicated to relevant sites on the basis of their quality and relevance, is really very poor.

Originally Posted by iNeverBehave

is this is a must-have tool to use to drive traffic?

Not at all; many people make a living through internet marketing without using articles at all.

Originally Posted by iNeverBehave

I'm also looking for recommendations on the best books to buy on SEO

The latest edition of this book is absolutely tremendous, and far better than any information I've ever found on the web (and there are reasons for that):

Search Engine Optimization For Dummies: Peter...

But all SEO questions belong here: Adsense / PPC / SEO Discussion Forum

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DoubleOhDave

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Writing articles is still very much worth the time.

Large and increasing numbers of Warriors are successfully making our livings from article marketing.

But it has nothing to do with SEO.

Hi Alexa,
this reminds me of an argument on another thread and since you are far more knowledgeable in this area than I am I am prepared to bow to your expertise..

but as regards article marketing for SEO - Does latent semantic indexing not play a part in how an article is found by the search engines in terms of relevancy to the topic?
As I understand it - should I be writing an article about say, skiing in Italy, and the top pages on Google for that term have keywords that relate to skiing - winter sports, skiwear, apres ski, poles, winter sports etc., then an article with those keywords is far more likely to be found and shown to a searcher due to its high relevance, rather than one that doesn't mention any of those terms, or very few of them in comparison (of course, I understand other factors come in to play such as domain age and page rank etc.)

Am I wrong in how I understand this?

Also, are tools like Web Content Studio redundant if this isn't the case? Those things seem to have a very high price tag and perceived value.

Would be very interested in your take on this..

Thanks

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iNeverBehave

11 years ago

Thanks Alexa! very helpful.

Thanks

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ddev

11 years ago

It all depends on where you distribute your articles.

If it's on your site and your site is new, it may take time to get traffic from it.

For external sites, pay attention as many traditional article directories are dead since 2012.

Example of a dead site: ArticlesBase.com
Example of a site that still works for article marketing: Squidoo.com

Tip: Using SemRush.com it's a nice way to study the traffic coming from Google to X site (like an article directory), so you can check the trends and find punished sites before posting your work.

I'd suggest to do a mix between Video Marketing & Article Marketing as (if you automate the process), you can create 10's of videos (to target multiple keywords), in the same time that you prepare a single article.

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Steve B

11 years ago

Originally Posted by iNeverBehave

Am I wasting my time doing articles or is this is a must-have tool to use to drive traffic?

I've gotten my feet wet but I really want to dive in and start seeing results.

iNeverBehave,

I have also had a good experience publishing my articles (lately - not in the beginning) but if I were you I would take Alexa's advice - she knows article writing / marketing / syndication as well as anyone on this forum.

I just want to add something that has helped me tremendously that may help you as well.

When I first began writing online I thought the best thing to do was spread my articles as far and as wide as possible. That meant (I wrongly assumed) getting my content into article directories, article farms, other people's blogs, yada, yada.

I worked hard spinning my wheels with little to no actual benefit to my business even though I thought I was doing what was needed.

Since coming online in the mid-late 1990s, I have tried lots of article publishing tactics but today, I feel I was missing the point entirely.

What is the point?

It's simply this: quantity of articles and article "reach" are only icing on the cake and by themselves mean nothing. The critical element that I was missing was putting my articles in front of the right group of people. I was not too concerned with targeting an audience. Today, that is my top priority and that one change in focus has made all the difference!

Others may not agree, but now that I look back on my own experience, I know where I went wrong and I have no doubt it cost me a lot of time, wasted effort and money.

I hope you have tons of success,

Steve

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zdebx

11 years ago

I would personally say that the days of writing tons of articles and then submitting them to article directories for the sake of getting traffic/sales is pretty much dead.

Yes, it was BIG back in 2007-2008, but nowadays it's a massive waste of time, simply because the directories are very picky with what they accept and your articles won't easily get ranked anyway, like they used to do before.

So yeah, writing articles is definitely effective, but for your own website, not directories...

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JohnMcCabe

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Steve B

It's simply this: quantity of articles and article "reach" are only icing on the cake and by themselves mean nothing. The critical element that I was missing was putting my articles in front of the right group of people. I was not too concerned with targeting an audience. Today, that is my top priority and that one change in focus has made all the difference!

I hope you have tons of success,

Steve

Short and sweet. Nice.

Saved me a bunch of typing, too.

As for automating article/video creation and using some sort of digital manure spreader to clog article and video sites, even if it works somewhat now, I'm sure there's still some animals left in the Google ark chewing on this garbage. Maybe the "Billy Goat" update?

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Fazal Mayar

11 years ago

Its worth the time as you practice your content writing skills which you will use in real life. You can always outsource it but I dont recommend if you are a blogger.

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iNeverBehave

11 years ago

Thanks for the help everybody! very good info.

Thanks

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TimothyTorrents

11 years ago

Yes I believe it is still very important to write unique and informative articles. Article directories are not the best place to submit articles though. The back links are not very high quality and the amount of traffic you receive from article directories is very low. I would submit the articles to your website first and then ask webmasters who are in similar niches to syndicate your content. Sharing the articles on social media like Twitter and Facebook is also a great way to get views. Find Facebook groups that are dedicated to blogging and share your links there - just be careful not to spam.

Basically, forget about article directories for now. There are so many better places to submit your articles.

Good luck.

Thanks

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jllagu01

11 years ago

I still think it's very much worth it and in my experience, I do get amazing traffic from there. However, it's not the only place I go to. I only devote a few hours in a week to article marketing because it really gets a big chunk of my time. Find out other internet marketing strategies, find out what works and what not.

Thanks
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JohnMcCabe

11 years ago

Originally Posted by TimothyTorrents

Basically, forget about article directories for now. There are so many better places to submit your articles.

There is still one reason to drop a copy of your article on directories. Some publishers (like me) still check them when looking for talent. When I find someone whose writing I like on a topic, I'll use one article as a test. If I get a positive response, that writer goes on my watch list for future articles.

Originally Posted by DoubleOhDave

As I understand it - should I be writing an article about say, skiing in Italy, and the top pages on Google for that term have keywords that relate to skiing - winter sports, skiwear, apres ski, poles, winter sports etc., then an article with those keywords is far more likely to be found and shown to a searcher due to its high relevance, rather than one that doesn't mention any of those terms, or very few of them in comparison (of course, I understand other factors come in to play such as domain age and page rank etc.)

Am I wrong in how I understand this?

Also, are tools like Web Content Studio redundant if this isn't the case? Those things seem to have a very high price tag and perceived value.

Would be very interested in your take on this..

Dave, if I'm reading you right, you almost have it right.

The idea behind LSI is that relevant terms will naturally occur, and provide a means of distinguishing the relevance of topics that may share a common keyword.

Pulling an example out of thin air, you might find articles discussing altitude sickness whether the actual topics is skiing in Italy or climbing Mount Everest. The related terms help distinguish the relevance of one over the other.

Trying to cram in LSI terms spit out by some tool is similar in my eyes to more garden variety keyword stuffing. Your readability will suffer. Even if you fool the spiders, you still have to impress the real audience (humans), and very few of them are going to be totally ignorant of a subject they are actively interested in.

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DoubleOhDave

11 years ago

Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe

Dave, if I'm reading you right, you almost have it right.

The idea behind LSI is that relevant terms will naturally occur, and provide a means of distinguishing the relevance of topics that may share a common keyword.

Pulling an example out of thin air, you might find articles discussing altitude sickness whether the actual topics is skiing in Italy or climbing Mount Everest. The related terms help distinguish the relevance of one over the other.

Trying to cram in LSI terms spit out by some tool is similar in my eyes to more garden variety keyword stuffing. Your readability will suffer. Even if you fool the spiders, you still have to impress the real audience (humans), and very few of them are going to be totally ignorant of a subject they are actively interested in.

Thanks John,
So in effect, if you are a competent writer and can write not only a human readable article, but one that is genuinely informative or entertaining and still use LSI *properly* i.e. not just stuffing in words just for the sake of it - it is possible to "SEO" an article?

Thanks
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JohnMcCabe

11 years ago

Originally Posted by DoubleOhDave

Thanks John,
So in effect, if you are a competent writer and can write not only a human readable article, but one that is genuinely informative or entertaining and still use LSI *properly* i.e. not just stuffing in words just for the sake of it - it is possible to "SEO" an article?

Possible, I suppose. Write that human-readable article that is genuinely informative and/or entertaining, and you won't need to "use LSI" - it will happen naturally.

As you said in your first post, though, there are other factors in play.

LSI makes it more likely that you will be found for the "right" searches.

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Alexa Smith

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by DoubleOhDave

if you are a competent writer and can write not only a human readable article, but one that is genuinely informative or entertaining and still use LSI *properly* i.e. not just stuffing in words just for the sake of it -

It isn't possible to write well and not "use LSI" properly, in my opinion - without even thinking about it at all. "LSI" is just a fancy way of saying "the incidental vocabulary that anyone necessarily uses in the course of writing about the topic".

(Actually, it's not even really a "fancy" way: the skepchick perspective is that it's just an "SEO service seller's way" - it's one of those concepts like "link diversity" that they like to use, to try to sound like they know what they're talking about, know something you don't, and encourage people to buy their services

).

Originally Posted by DoubleOhDave

it is possible to "SEO" an article?

Maybe so ... I don't really know, or care, to be honest: with the very little bit of SEO I pay attention to, I've had such good SEO benefits (ranking at the top in Google, for quite a big variety of keywords of what I think most people would call "moderate" and "moderate-to-high" competitiveness - I'm not ranking for terms like "make money online" or "lose weight fast", of course!) that I don't think about anything else much to do with SEO anyway. The SEO benefits I'm talking about are the ones referred to in the last paragraph of this post.

The truth is that in my business, across my entire range of niches, search engine visitors to all my websites typically stay the least time, view the fewest pages, opt in the least often and actually buy anything by far the least often. So I don't really care about them very much. I wouldn't have been able to build my business on SEO traffic - but that's why I do article marketing: so I don't have to. Search engine traffic is about 20% of my traffic and about 3% of my income, I think, because "all other traffic, on average" is about 7 times as responsive and productive, for me. The little bit of SEO I do look at, I do only because it's so quick and easy that it would be a bit silly not to bother with it at all.

The SEO I have paid attention to is always at niche-selection time. (I write all my article for niches, of course, not for products: nobody worthwhile is going to publish an article that mentions a specific product - that's not "traffic-attracting": that's just "salesy".) I do that job only once and generally come away from it armed with a list of "mediumly competitive keywords". I'll quite often use one of those keywords as the first word(s) in an article's title. (Never "5 Things You Need To Know About Keyword" - always "Keyword - 5 Things You Need To Know About It"). If you get articles like that syndicated to relevant sites (and irrelevant ones won't want to publish them anyway, of course), you gradually accumulate brilliant rankings for all the keywords. For what they're worth, which, in the long run - by comparison with the direct, non-SEO article marketing traffic - is almost nothing at all because that traffic's so poor anyway!

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DoubleOhDave

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

(Actually, it's not even really a "fancy" way: the skepchick perspective is that it's just an "SEO service seller's way" - it's one of those concepts like "link diversity" that they like to use, to try to sound like they know what they're talking about, know something you don't, and encourage people to buy their services

).

LOL

No comment! but:

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Maybe so ... I don't really know, or care, to be honest: with the very little bit of SEO I pay attention to,...The little bit of SEO I do look at, I do only because it's so quick and easy that it would be a bit silly not to bother with it at all.

Does the book you recommend "SEO for Dummies" cover this? I have a copy of that knocking around somewhere along with "The Art of SEO" but never got to the Dummies one cos of my habit of attempting to read to much coupled with some ADD.

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

(I write all my article for niches, of course, not for products: nobody worthwhile is going to publish an article that mentions a specific product - that's not "traffic-attracting": that's just "salesy".) I do that job only once and generally come away from it armed with a list of "mediumly competitive keywords". I'll quite often use one of those keywords as the first word(s) in an article's title. (Never "5 Things You Need To Know About Keyword" - always "Keyword - 5 Things You Need To Know About It").

Great advice and a partial "Ah-ha" moment for me.. thanks

Thanks
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Alexa Smith Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by DoubleOhDave

Does the book you recommend "SEO for Dummies" cover this?

Sorry, I can't remember, and am not at home and don't have my books here at the moment. But "you'd think so"? :confused:

Originally Posted by DoubleOhDave

Great advice and a partial "Ah-ha" moment for me.. thanks

I learned that trick from Chris Knight (owner of Ezine Articles) and am most grateful to him for it because it really is of benefit: the people who write articles called things like "5 Mistakes To Avoid With Keyword" really are missing a trick, there.
- Thanks
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TheEye 11 years ago

The important thing is not the keywords.

When the person puts the keyword into a search engine, they are looking for the answer to a question.

The important thing is to quickly show the reader that you have the answer to their question. If you don't they will go to another website to find the answer.

Keywords and LSI are relevant if you have the answer to their question.

Without having this answer you are relying on the person getting side tracked and forgetting why they came to the site in the first place.
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arthking

11 years ago

Try spending your time as being a guest author as opposed to writing articles for back linking purposes. If you are writing for a blog that gets a solid amount of traffic and you write an article with good content you will probably get better traffic initially and in the long run.

Thanks

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AlexGeorge

11 years ago

Article marketing definitely still works if done right. I post articles on Hubpages and Squidoo and get decent converting traffic from it. You need to make sure the articles are well written and don't look like they have just been written to promote a product or site. You need to provide value to the reader, and if you can't do this then you should consider outsourcing it to an experienced article writer.

Thanks

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Writing articles still worth the time? Best Traffic Advice?

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