Does article marketing still work?

Dead, however, you can drive traffic using article marketing, but for gaining links it's dead.

Depends on what your intentions are regarding marketing via article directories?

Alex

Driving traffic by writing articles does still work - it's not about using it for back links its about getting yourself visible all over the internet. Content marketing is more and more popular because it works. Writing articles is one part of it - don't forget videos, form posts, blog commenting, slides, etc - its all content marketing.

Here's how it WORKS in 2014:

1. You submit high-quality articles to article directories like EZA.
2. Webmasters with popular blogs and/or e-magazines syndicate the article (with your resource box and link) on their blog/e-magazine.
3. You get traffic via that link. The webmasters get free content. Win-win.

I don't think it works very well any more. Idea Marketers went out of business and ezinearticles has become almost impossible to get accepted for free any more.

Article marketing still works if done right.
However it won't drive Big traffic.
As far as one of the several traffic techniques, article marketing is fine
BUT
one shouldn't just be depending on article writing.
It's not as charm as it was in the older days.

You said it.

You are LATE.

Leave the idea. Go on to something else.

Posting articles to ezine articles still works it just requires a consistent plan of action and patience. Personally, I would only spend time writing articles and uploading to ezine articles if I didn't have any money to invest into other types of marketing methods and I was unaware of the potential of video marketing.

Yes, but it doesn't drive as much traffic as it used to.

If you need a lot of free traffic here's what you can do:

- write 2 articles a day, one for your blog, one for eza.
- point both towards your review page.
- Post the article to your blog and share it on G+ to related communities
- Send the other article to EZA.
- Do this daily.
- You should be getting a few thousand visitors every month follow this.

If you have any problems following this strategy feel free to contact me. It's not too hard and it works.

Marketing with articles and submitting them to directories are two different things, though some people still equate submitting to directories as "article marketing", which it isn't.

I'm surprised EZA is still in business. They stopped working for me a long time ago, including any kind of syndication. Article directories are worthless in terms of Return Of Investment, it isn't worth the effort anymore.

Instead you need to find out where your target audience hangs out and find ways to get to them.

There's paid advertising, mobile advertising, pay-per-click advertising, you can use social media, create your own blog networks, create viral marketing compaigns using your content (words, video, podcasts, etc), etc.

Anyone who is advising you to write 1, 2, or more articles per day and submitting them to article directories is giving you bad advice. I've tested this with a staff of 8 writers for over 2 years and tested it across several niches; the time invested versus the return just wasn't worth it.

RoD

Hi,

You could always bundle up your articles and create FULL BLOWN
products out of them and begin to build your own buyers list.

Of course you'll have to edit them slightly and make sure that they make
sense and flow well enough together so that you have a product worthy
of selling.

Just one idea you could consider thinking about.

I'm pretty sure that there's a ton more uses you could use from your articles
of course.

Have a great day
Gavin

Sadie, article marketing is very much alive and well -- as long as you do it the right way. The web is still littered with countless marketers who think "article marketing" is dead because they can't get a bunch of quick and dirty backlinks by submitting crap to Ezine Articles anymore.

If you want to succeed at article marketing, you have to find authoritative websites in your niche that you can publish on. Not only will you be associated with a go-to source in your niche, but you'll also benefit from people who syndicate your articles on their own sites. In the end, you'll wind up with more targeted traffic AND you'll build the quality links that Google is looking for.

I know this method works, because I use it all the time. In fact, my most recent article was published late yesterday afternoon, and a quick Google search shows me that a number of sites have already syndicated it.

Do the marketing with social marketing sites and guest blogging sites. It will work better with all possible means.

Social media marketing using Web 2.0 'slugs' filled with QUALITY CONTENT still works. I know, I get BULK ORDERS from clients that do this all day. Articles are never going to go away. Now, badly-written text and DUPLICATE content, those are going away. But quality text that engages real people positioned using social media? Those will stick around forever.

Yes article marketing does still work. I still get traffic from articles on ezinearticles.com that I wrote back in 2008. The only problem with EZA is the fact that they are getting way to picky for me to be submitting my quality articles to them.

EZA is still in business because the ton of keyworded articles it archives still earns it profit from all the Adsense click-throughs, regardless of what it does or doesn't do for the article marketers. But for the rest of us, the major directories were wrongly shouldered with a SEO role they were never designed to bear, and too many people break the syndication 'deal' or understanding by ripping the content for their own sites, without including the resource box.

So nowadays, article directories (which are still the main thing people think of when the phrase 'article marketing' is mentioned) are good for non-traditional, and non-ranking traffic purposes. They can contribute to an online branding campaign for your writing, or add miscellaneous traffic via human click throughs. For forum marketing, putting an article pointing to your affiliate link (through a redirect url) on a directory can circumvent posting the affiliate link on the forum, without you having to bother to put up a full blog or site.

Or, knowing the directories are not good for long-term SEO, use them for short term churn-and-burn SEO if black hat inclined. Post an article on directories that will accept affiliate links or redirects to same, then blast that article directory with backlinks, bookmarks, blog comments, etc. Since the link isn't going to a blog site you care about not getting penalized, this is a way to test out what short term blitz campaigns can work.

Seems 'article marketing' has peaked and faded. Unfortunately, it really came about because people wanted a way to quickly and aggressively monetize the act of content creation.
Getting back to its roots, 'article marketing' wasn't about submitting articles to directories, but it was about writing quality content to engage an audience. That origin kind of got lost in the shuffle.
But hey, quality content that engages an audience (be it the form of an article, video, forum post...) is never going out of style.

Yes, it is working but not for SEO purposes anymore. It can generate you many visitors though...

Sadiecopywriter,

Depends on the results that you want to get from your definition of an "article marketing" campaign...

If you want to improve your site's Google SERPs by submitting articles to article directories so as to build backlinks, then many SEOers claim that this method doesn't work anymore. Based on the post Panda / Penguin results of our many tests for our clients who wanted us to do this since 2005, there is almost 0 positive Google SERP improvements generated from this, which doesn't justify resource investments, though if things have changed so far, then you could test it out and see for yourself...

If you want to funnel organic search traffic by submitting articles to article directories so as to have your articles rank in Google for your target keywords via the domain authority of those article directories, then many SEOers claim that this method doesn't work anymore. Based on the post Panda / Penguin results of our many tests for our clients who wanted us to do this since 2005, articles in many article directories are no longer ranking well in Google for many keywords, though if this has changed so far, then you could test this and see for yourself...

If you want to funnel traffic from niche-related sites by submitting articles to article directories so as to have your articles picked up and syndicated by niche-related sites, then many claim that this method has never work for them, while a few Warriors here, like someone who claimed in an old thread here to have a $500M projected revenue in 2012 mostly due to offline and online article syndication, claim that article syndication is giving them good results. Based on the pre and post Panda / Penguin results of our many tests for our clients who wanted us to submit articles to article directories for this purpose along with the two other methods above since 2005, many webmasters who sometimes pick up and syndicate articles from article directories have low traffic, low niche authority sites, while a few webmasters who have sites with decent traffic and decent niche authority rarely do this. If this has changed so far, then you could test out and see for yourself, but keep in mind that there are other methods to generate traffic, improve conversions and increase sales, and some of these don't take as much time and other resource investments as implementing campaigns for generating positive Google SERPs for your sites, such as using your annual marketing and advertising budget to pay for advertorial placements, PR and niche syndication, PPC/PPM/PPV and monthly banner ad spaces in local online and offline news media outlets and high traffic, high niche authority sites, blogs, social networks, online communities, content repositories and so on after you properly learn the fundamentals and other relevant niche-specific things involved in formulating and implementing custom online and offline marketing and advertising campaigns for your business...

The thing that I find is that it is not about whether the subject of article marketing is dead, but how your intended use of the theories behind the article marketing. Everyone is looking for content on the internet and wants to know answers to questions that they come up with on a daily basis.

Now if your intentions are to go out and purchase these PLR articles and the only thing that you are going to do with it is just put your link to your site on there, then no article marketing is not going to work. The reason being is because these types of articles are in saturation all over the internet.

Now if your intentions are to actually take those articles and relate it to something that you put into your own words and add a little bit of SEO into that article, then it is possible to get good results with your efforts.

The thing to remember is that article marketing is NOT just throwing up an article all over the place and then hope for results if you just rewrote an article through one of those little article spinners.

replace 'article marketing' with 'content marketing' and you have the way forward in my view.
Good quality relevant content will always bring traffic, in the heyday of 'article marketing' people could put up stuff which was poor to say the least, and it could bring traffic. The goalposts have moved a lot since then, but good content will always work, and if that's in the form of articles, it'll still work!
cheers, Gordon

instead of articles, i use web 2.o sites nlike squidoo etc...they are like articles but can be used as backlinks too

Article marketing does still work, BUT you have to adopt a multi channel approach, Blog commenting, posting video's, article writing and guest posting as well as some PPC should all be in your SEO tool kit

If you do article marketing according to Google so yes it is still work well and we can get good back links from it.

And discussion topic.:p

For direct traffic purpose, you need to scale the article submission up to hundreds of articles monthly. Then submit to few top article directories only which based on the traffic measure by Alexa.com.

In some niches, the article avenue is saturated and you would be better off with paid ads.

In the make money online niche, there is a lot of competition and to be honest, I would not recommend you go with article marketing if I had to teach you how to market online.

The sad part is that most "gurus" out there still recommend this to their teams/customers and don't do this themselves.

Content marketing is always the best way to drive traffic to your site. If you can provide quality content, more and more people would come to your site for more. But it entirely depends on the information you provide through the articles and how you present it to your visitors.

If you are doing it for gaining attention from the world, it really works and will always work. But if you are doing it for getting backlinks, then it is dead now. You can't go far with this kind of strategies.

You all just answered my question if article marketing still works? Guess it does! Thanks everyone!

I have a couple hundred articles on Eza and I've seen a massive decrease in traffic with the older articles. My article with the most views (20,169) used to generate around 130 views every month. Now it's like two or three views. Now I submitted an article a few weeks ago without even using a keyword in the title and it has over 30 views which is on track with numbers I used to see back in the day.

In my experience, absolutely! I always start with some good PLR articles on my topic or niche, then customize them exactly too my liking and add in some affiliate links. After that it is all about the traffic.

Work to get your articles ranked in the search engines and they will drive targeted traffic right to your site and then all you have to do is sit back and watch the conversions come in. This has been a very effective method for me. If you can get a few hundred or even thousands of great articles then you will be well on your way!

In my suggestion i would say to you that write genuine articles intended for people to read and post them on your own blog. then use the bookmarking sites and bookmark your own articles.

Try syndicating your content leading to your article page instead of spreading duplicate content all across the net. And also keep in mind that Google has heavily penalized all article marketing sites mostly for duplicate content, they don't work like before anymore. The search engines a have become smarter and evolving. They can differentiate duplicate content and also content written specifically for search engines. But they love good useful content written keeping the readers in mind.

if the article is solving a problem of a question posted by yahoo answers post the link there.

Now a search engines also looks for how many likes and retweets and social sharing has been done on your page also to rank value. The more people liking your page slowly the ranking will increase. Having a Facebook page dedicated to the subject is also a good way to help in rankings.

Finally id say, your article will have more value if you publish it on your own blog and syndicate your content than wasting your time with article Directories.

If you're creating unique value-add content that is going to be published on a well known and hard-to-publish-on website: YES!

If you intent to use a spun auto-post service like UAW then a resounding: NO!


I used to use UAW on some of my micro-sites 2 years ago and I have since had to use the Google Disavow tool to remove them from my link profile.

article writing no, article syndication on high traffic high targeted sites nowadays.....yes.

Simple as that.

I still get some traffic from article marketing but it's not something that I will spend more time on anymore.

It never really worked for me and then it was like pulling teeth to get the articles/links removed to please the Google gods.

My view is that the article directories are no longer viable. Maybe if they put nofollow tags on the links...Are there any that do? But my experience was that only low- or no-quality sites picked up the articles and some that did left off the resource box.

OTOH, unique articles written for various high-quality blogs or sites can work well. That's what I'm doing now for one of my niches.

"Does Article Marketing Still Work?"

Tip: Check some article directories against Semrush.com and see the (average) traffic that they are getting from Google. Some are dead, and a couple are solid for some niches (semrush allows you to see different keywords where those sites are ranking to get an idea).

Folks, we're not moving ahead if there still are lots of people who believe article marketing means submitting articles to directories and hoping for the best.

Also, 'ezines' are quite different from webites like EzineArticles.com, but hey, maybe that's just me.

And did I mention it should be clearly specified that article marketing has nothing to do with SEO? Well, that's a tough nut to crack since many seem to cling to it like religion fundamentalists to their teachings and dismiss everything else, but hey, we might give it a shot anyway.

:rolleyes:

Hi Lucian,

I'm with you with some things but not with this...


"And did I mention it should be clearly specified that article marketing has nothing to do with SEO?"

Things can be used (or not) the way you want. There's no rule. At least i made lot of money (long time ago) through article marketing and seo, and i didn't ask Google not to index those articles, so ive used them for SEO.

That said, i believe that article marketing for SEO it's (in general - you can check particular cases / niches using semrush.com) a waste of time.

Best Regards,

Diego.

Why wouldn't someone just do some guest blogging instead?

I still get traffic from the old articles I had submitted to EZA, but the new ones drive traffic only while they are fresh. This method is not as efficient as it used to be in the past, but still works for me.

I SEMrushed a number of article directories a while ago and noticed they're all still steadily declining to this day. A small fraction of their former glory, I can't see these being good links or good places to syndicate out to anymore.

This is pretty dead now, it's very unlikely to work but a blind squirrel finds a nut every so often lol

Traffic driving from Article Marketing is showing a diminishing outcome in recent days. If you intend to publish well written articles for knowledge sharing, I would recommend Ezine Articles for the same.

Yeah article marketing still working. Post your article on articlebase and remember post one article on one blog or article site.

Depends on your motive, If you want to do content marketing and wanna traffic through well researched and well written articles content its good but not for back linking.
And do not submit it on many article directories, it is best if you post it on only one.

I don't believe in article marketing again, though might still be working but i guess not as effective as before. i think i like solo ads or email marketing in place of article. this gives you targeted traffic and leads.

So long as your main purpose in article marketing is to inform and drive traffic to a third party site, rather than SEO or getting backlinks, then this could be a good strategy. If you take time to craft a thorough and indepth article which answers relevant questions your readers might have, you are likely to get more direct traffic than if you simply put out a spun article. You could get your articles published on related blogs which are looking for guest authors. Though guest blogging has taken a hit with SEO and is often considered a bad thing, you could negate any negative impact of a backlink from a guest blog by simply asking that your backlink be no follow. That way, the only traffic you receive will be direct and there will be no fear of Google slap for spammy backlinking.

Yes, is still working fine till now. Internet Article Marketing is very useful to promote the authors expertise of their products, services or market through online article directories.

I'm still using article marketing tied to a product. My product is something created to address a problem. So my articles are on how to fix said problem, and at the end I mention using the product. So if someone has the problem and does a Google search "How to fix x_problem" my articles come up.
So tied to a product I can say article marketing is very effective.