Nice, tidy proof that articles = more traffic

Hi Art,

I think this is good news for me for but I have a semi-related question maybe you can provide some insight into.

I'm working on my first affiliate campaign and trying to drive traffic primarily via article and a blog.

So I've now got 8 article live on EZA and I've been working on distributing re-writes to a bunch of other directories. Also, I've been trying to work a few a the bigger social networks for bookmarking.

My question is this. How many articles does a person typically have to write for a given niche to get the traffic really moving? What has been your experience?

Sorry if this seems like a simple question, but I'm just trying to figure out how much time & effort to invest in a product before it's time to ditch it. So far I've had about 50 hops since starting about 2-1/2 weeks ago. Not sure if this is good or not. I've been doing some significant work on my blog and landing page so I'm hoping that number will go up more. Bummer is, no sales yet.

Anyways, thanks for the encouraging news. I read conflicting comments about article marketing so I keep wondering if this the right blueprint or not. I guess time will eventually tell.

Cheers,
Tom

Wow. I'm impressed that you got that much traffic out of only three articles. My niche site requires double that number of articles to get twenty or so visitors.

The Villa:

I almost hate to ask but... do you mean 20 visitors to your site or 20 clicks within your site of a product link (ie hops)? Visitors and hops are 2 very different things.

Cheers

There are just so many factors that affect the amount of traffic you will get from articles. The keywords you target is important and also the amount of competition for that keyword.

If your article gets ranked well by the search engines then obviously you will get significant amounts of traffic.

I feel that the article strategy is a bit overrated for the most part, simply because most marketers "abuse" it by submitting hundreds of "cheap" articles every day - hoping that quality over quantity will get them traffic.

I think that the best strategy is to go for quality over quantity. Quality articles tends to get hand picked by good sites and when you get published on good sites it can get you as much if not more traffic than a search engine might send you.

Good point...

These days the best way to win in article marketing is to produce good quality content, and with time you'll find that your results are better.

As an affiliate, you should also focus on building an authority website with you articles too, so that when you refer people to your website from your resource box, you are referring people to a sticky content website, with useful content and relevant recommendations.

You can then just have people sign up for your alert list to get updates on future posts, as well as limited coupons or discounts etc.. This will help build subscriber base.. that's just one way to look at it

cheers

Thanks everybody for the replies. This is very helpful information to me and hopefully others that are persuing this course.

I'm a believer in providing useful information in my articles and blog. I think really trying to solve peoples problems is the correct mindset for this business.

I'll keep working my plan and see what happens. If I can just get even one sale, I'll feel a lot better about what I've been doing.

Thanks again. This place is great!

Tom

what site is the picture taken from?

Hey Art Turner,
good job man.

The thing is about article marketing is
that SEO is needed to be done properly aswell,
if you want it to generate legitimate traffic back
to your website.

Igor

This is one of my soapbox issues! The vast (and I mean VAST) majority of article marketers fail to do one essential thing that can make all the difference: keyword research. Get yourself a good tool (I recommend one in the Long Tail SEO link in my sig) or learn how to properly use free options like the Google Adwords tool, and build a list of keywords for your niche that you can realistically conquer. You can write articles all day long without any keyword targeting and - depending on the niche - the only traffic you'll ever see will be that first wave from the day or two your article shows up on EZA's main page.

But if you learn how to find good keywords (decent # of search engine searches + not much competition), the sky's the limit. I currently have an article at EZA that is #1 in their search results and #1 in number of views over the last 90 days for its category. And it's not even 2 months old yet. It has gotten over 1300 views and it's in a niche that is one of the worst for article marketing. That sounds like bragging, and I seriously do not mean it that way. I'm just very passionate about this issue! DO KEYWORD RESEARCH BEFORE YOU WRITE! It will make a HUGE difference.

The other piece of advice all newbies should take to heart is to get backlinks pointing to your articles... and be sure to use the keyword you targeted as the anchor text in those backlinks. If you've chosen keywords that don't have a lot of competition, just a few good backlinks is often enough to vault it to the first page of Google rankings.

Rinse, repeat, and in a short while you'll have all kinds of nice little traffic magnets floating around out there and your site will be awash in highly targeted visitors.

John