Is Article Marketing Worth Your Time?
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Or…EzineArticles.com Review
Regular readers of my blogs know I’ve been testing article marketing using the article distribution and repository service from Ezine Articles. Ezine Articles allows writers to publish articles that include a special area at the end called a resource box. In the resource box the author leaves a link or two along with a couple of sentences. Other webmasters and publishers are allowed to reprint the article on their own websites, newsletters or blogs, as long as they keep the resource box intact.
You can see an example of one of my articles with the resource box here – http://ezinearticles.com/?id=141082 – note the photo isn’t usually part of the resource box, you only see it when you view the article at Ezine Articles.
The idea from the writer’s point of view is that you can increase your exposure by having your content reproduced around the Internet. Your are rewarded with one-way incoming links from the resource box, you don’t have to reciprocate as you would with link exchanges, which in theory should reward you with better search engine rankings.
From a publisher’s point of view it’s free content. If you are struggling to keep a regular email newsletter going reprinting articles can be a fantastic way to reduce your workload. You can also use the content to populate a blog, website or any publication as long as you follow the reproduction rules.
My Article Marketing Test
I started article marketing by reprinting a small selection of the articles I published to Entrepreneur’s Journey from about July 2005 onwards. I didn’t put too much energy into it, spending a few minutes before I went to bed submitting an article every few weeks or so. I usually had to modify the articles slightly to make sure they follow the guidelines (for example you can’t include too many outgoing links) and it would take about 10-15 minutes to submit each article.
I devoted the majority of my energy to submitting at EzineArticles.com because it’s the market leader. Applying an 80/20 approach I figured if I was going to submit articles manually, as opposed to using automated software, then I should work with the service with the most traffic. I briefly tested with two other article directories, both of which had an inferior interface and less traffic than Ezine Articles. After receiving next to no results from the other sites I decided to stick to only Ezine Articles.
Last month I submitted my 20th article to Ezine Articles and feel that I am now in a good position to assess my results. By submitting more than ten articles to the site I was given “Platinum Status” which grants me unlimited article submissions, (before that you are limited to ten). While this sounds great it’s not really that big a deal, as long as you contribute reasonably coherent articles you will be promoted to platinum once you clear the threshold (it does make you feel cool though when it happens).
Incidentally the number of authors at Ezine Articles that have platinum status follows an 80/20 ratio as well. The greater majority of authors never make it beyond single figure article counts, with the prolific writers enjoying the most significant traffic rewards because they publish many articles, but only a handful of authors are like this. I am part of the minority in this case, having reached 20 article submissions, which I hear from “word on the street” is around the mark when you start to get good results (it’s not a “hard” rule).
Looking At The Numbers
To assess the success of my campaign I looked for two specific results -
- Incoming links from websites
- The number of times the article was reprinted in non-website publications.
The first was easier to track – incoming links from websites – because I could use services like technorati backlink lookups and my blog statistics so see whether any backlinks where coming from my republished articles. The other statistic was harder to track but thanks to a recently introduced feature at Ezine Articles you can get a fairly good idea how many people are republishing your articles in newsletters or other non-website sources.
On each article at Ezine Articles there is a quick publish button that spits out a html-formatted version of the article allowing publishers to copy and paste the content into a website or email. As an author I’m provided with statistics on how many times that button is clicked as well as how many times my article has been viewed, forwarded by email and a few other neat statistics.
Besides republication it’s important to note that Ezine Articles itself is becoming quite a good repository of knowledge. While not every article is written by an expert, and no doubt there are a good chunk of pretty “light” articles published, there is a broad range of quite useful articles on many topics. Because of this Ezine Articles gets a lot of traffic and your articles can be pulled up in internal search many times.
Total views (pageviews) is included in statistics and I can report at the time of writing this article my 20 submitted articles are about to reach 5000 views total. Top authors report figures in the hundreds of thousands, however they are publishing over 100 articles. You get back multiples of what you put in and depending on keywords, titles and subject matter you can expect varying results (more on this below).
Lessons Learnt
Testing Article Titles
Besides the direct traffic results there are some other important benefits from using article marketing. The one thing I’m really noticing is how important the article title is. Those of you who are copywriters or regular bloggers will be well aware that the title of your articles has the most impact on how often your article is read. The same of course applies in article marketing but it also impacts whether your article is republished. Given that most publishers first search article directories for content, your article title has to have the right keywords and has to be interesting enough to be clicked and finally, if you are lucky, republished. That’s a lot of steps to go through and a lot riding on how good your title is.
Thankfully you can go back and change the title of any article (in fact you can change any element of your articles at any time but it has to be re-approved each time), however you should aim to get it right straight out the door. This is because your article is featured in the Ezine Articles main highly-trafficked category page when it is first published and will very quickly drop off as newer articles are published by other authors. You don’t get this benefit when you go back and alter an existing article.
Short And Sweet
It’s well known in the article marketing industry that the short, 400-600 word articles, generally get the most traffic. People have short attention spans and they want quick, easily absorbed tidbits, not long in depth quality articles (like I write!). Yes okay, I had trouble adhering to this rule and I still have trouble getting a point across in so few words. The statistics don’t lie though and the short articles will get you more exposure and more traffic, so I spent some time cutting down some of my blog articles to give them a better chance of syndication.
The Vital Few
Every now and then one article will do much better than all the other articles. When you get the right combination of a solid title, a brief word count and a popular topic your article can go viral and be picked up many times. I can’t really say that any of my articles went viral but a few did standout while others really struggled.
Quantity Over Quality
Speaking from my experience, most of the backlinks I generated from article marketing where not from quality sites. I can think back to maybe one or two instances where I was pleased to see my article republished in what appeared to be a reputable website, with high PageRank and a real audience. Most of the time I spotted my article reproduced at splogs (spam blogs) – websites and blogs that republish content, slap a bunch of AdSense ads around it and hope to get into the search engines and make money from it. These still count as backlinks and help your traffic cause, but it’s really a case of quantity over quality, which is not sound strategy when it comes to search engine marketing.
What About The Duplicate Content Penalty?
The duplicate content penalty is a major concern when republishing content. Remember Google (and other search engines) may penalize websites that produce duplicate content by removing the page from it’s index or reducing it’s search ranking. Now my understanding is that the original source of the article, as in the first place that Google finds the content or the version it deems as the oldest, won’t be penalized. This is not a verified claim, I’ve heard counter arguments against it and in some circumstances if your source content is found after it’s republished somewhere else (which can often be the case if your site is not regularly indexed in search engines and the site that republishes your work is), then it’s your site that risks the penalty.
The answer of course it to modify your article before submitting it to Ezine Articles or similar directories so it’s not a direct reproduction of the article on your website. In my case I reduced the size of most of the articles I submitted so they were not exactly the same as the originals, although they certainly would have shared paragraphs so I probably didn’t do enough. I’ve yet to notice any penalization but there are a lot of forces in play here so if you are really worried, take the time to modify your articles or only submit original content.
Automated Article Distribution
Automating article submissions is a very efficient (80/20) thing to do and as such I don’t recommend manual submission unless you are a cheap-n-silly control freak like me. At the basic level you can employ a virtual secretary or administrative assistant to do article submissions for you. Depending on your results this can be a cost effective means to market your website, but do a cost/benefit analysis (time vs results) before hiring someone to do it for you.
There are article submission services that will submit your article to X number of article directories for $Y dollars, for example – ArticleMarketer.com. There are also professional software packages that will do the submission for you, so all you need to do is put your article into the software and sit back and let it role. Two examples of this software are ArticleSubmittPro and Jason Potash’s Article Announcer (which I believe takes the cake for longest sales letter ever!).
Article Announcer by Jason Potash
I’m really very keen to try this software because it comes from Jason Potash and he has a fantastic reputation (along with all the other marketing gurus in his inner circle like John Reese, Armand Morin and Jeff Walker – a big shout out to Mike Long as well!). At the moment the sales copy on Article Announcer didn’t convince me to spend the nearly $400 to buy the full package although I may yet give it a go. Apparently the software is really only half of the value and the education provided from the articles and audio are equally important.
I did email Jason (or his support staff anyway) to ask for a review copy for this blog but unfortunately I was turned down. All I have got to go on is what I have read in forums and reviews of Article Announcer. The software, while being certainly more efficient than manual submission, isn’t completely automated and you apparently still need to do some grunt work to submit your articles to all the different directories. Anyway, until I get a copy of Article Announcer all I can do is speculate.
Is Article Marketing Worth The Time?
Yes and no. I don’t feel at this point with only 20 articles published, my on-again, off-again efforts and no testing of an automated system that I can make a conclusive judgement. I like the concept, I think it’s better than link exchanges in some ways because you get one-way links but bad in others because many of the links come from poor quality websites. The potential for a viral explosion makes it very tempting and certainly if you work in mainstream niche industries (is that an oxymoron?) then your results may be fabulous (I’d love to hear about it if you have stories to tell – leave a comment please!).
Something else worth noting is the benefit of appearing as an “expert author” at EzineArticles.com. This is a powerful credibility tool and handy search engine optimization trick. Thanks to Ezine Article’s significant presence in search engines (high PageRank and lots of backlinks) web searches for your name will often pull up your author homepage. If your name is reasonably common and faces a lot of competition in the search engines, your Ezine Articles expert author page may have enough of an edge to make certain that any searches for your name result in you as the first result. Your author homepage includes details that you can change anytime and you may include web links back to your own website or blog.
For an example of an author homepage at Ezine Article you can see mine here – Yaro Starak – EzineArticles.com Expert Author.
The other thing I like about Article Marketing, which is one of the main reasons I like blogging as well, is that it contributes to your overall exposure one little bit at a time. Personal branding is about lots of little things adding up to a tipping point where amazing things can happen (think mainstream media coverage and even penetration into the public consciousness).
Your traffic keeps coming because you have lots of little streams pouring in from many different sources. Article marketing is another stream. Unless you do some major publicity work, pull off a media stunt, or are already famous, using many techniques over time is one of the best marketing methodologies available to you. You may not reach that tipping point quickly, but it will happen, and your traffic foundations will be like a diversified investment portfolio – solid.
Yaro Starak
Article Marketer
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Another great article Yaro. I tried an article submission site before but I decided not to go that route as I had a bad experience with google and duplicate content.
I had speed problems with my blog and set up a copy on a different OS server, I found that the linux version was much faster but because I had forgot to delete the mirror version, it got spidered by all 3 search engines and combine that with some nice fan (I’m awfully polite!) who copied my site, 95% of my title and almost 100% of my content (albeit the links were changed to protect their referral biz) I suddenly lost my top 3 listing in google search results
luckily, as you mentioned above about being listed on other high rank directories or submission sites, I still get good results for my keywords but not for my site directly but for the directory sites that have me listed.
Still not as nice as having a higher link than the company I am an affiliate with (even using the company’s name!) as used to happen. But all it takes is one more click to get to my site so all is not lost. besides, there’s MSN which is surprisingly good for traffic and yahoo which is just starting to hold hands with me
you’re not the only one that finds it hard to be brief!
andy
Hi Andy – hey you are the lottery blogger from the BlogTopSite listings right? I always found your niche quite, umm, confusing but clearly it’s doing something useful for people. Gambling is always a good niche.
Thanks for your comment – it’s interesting to hear from someone that actually got hit by the duplicate content penalty. In your case though it sounds as if the duplication was quite obvious.
Sorry Yaro, but article publishing seems like the kind of thing every marketer does. “Think different”, remember? but if you guys want to go that way…
Oh Javier, you are quite right, but there is no harm in testing it out. It also appears that only a very small selection of people use it to good effect (I’m not there yet myself), so I would definitely recommend testing it to see how well it performs in your niche. My niche, Internet marketing, is probably too saturated to get great results but I’m sure some not so crowded niches would get spectacular results because of lack of the lack of content out there. You might get some fantastic syndication.
Hi Yaro. Nice post! I’m a big fan of article marketing for a few reasons. In my opinion, (nearly) anytime your name appears on another person’s website it’s great for credibility and branding. Those 5000 visitors could have visited your site numerous times and may be regular, loyal visitors.
I also like the fact that your articles can be compiled into a book to be sold evenyually. By the way, any idea what percentage of the 5000 visitors opted in to your newsletter? Again, a really great post.
Gaston – unfortunately no, I don’t have any conversion stats. I can ask the question though -
Did anyone reading this article first come to Entrepreneur’s Journey via EzineArticles.com?
Your other comments are quite valid Gaston although in my case it wasn’t because of article marketing that I had written so many articles, it was because of blogging (a form of article marketing I suppose).
The one commenter above is correct when implying “everyone” is doing it (submitting articles) so its effect will lessen over time.
Like all great promotion methods, everyone and their grandmother is jumping on the bandwagon to submit articles, however not all of them are very good… And now some of the major article directories are separating the wheat from the chaff; discarding obvious spammy and low quality articles that’re submitted to them.
Another consideration when submitting articles is to ensure you have a really good ‘authors resource box’ at the end. Offer a free report or free membership or otherwise lure them into clicking on the link there with something tantalizing.
Ezinearticles, as you mention, is one of the best article directories to submit to – and its Google PR rank is a good indicator of that. I’ve got a free article directory resource that indicates (among other things) each site’s Google Rank, and there are a couple more within that same PR range.
Just go to Google and my resource is #1 when you type in: article directories
Great post as usual!
I’ve submitted a few articles to ArticleCity.com, and got OK results. Nothing spectacular, but a steady trickle of incoming traffic from the handful of sites that published them. Certainly better than nothing, considering they took very little effort to write and submit.
Where I have had more success is in writing articles and emailing them to specific blogs and websites for publishing consideration. For example, I had a couple of articles published on Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography Blog that brought in several hundred visitors each in the first month, and are still bringing in a hundred or so a month several months later.
Targetting specific sites is more effective in a few ways:
1. You won’t suffer duplicate content problems, since only one site will carry your article.
2. You can go after better-known sites, and get higher-PR, more authoritative backlinks, and get read by a massive number of visitors.
3. You look more like an expert, since a highly-regarded blogger/webmaster ’selected’ your article for publication.
4. You can name-drop and tell people you’re a ‘guest writer’ or ‘guest blogger’ on several high-profile sites.
5. It helps you establish a good reputation and solid relationships with the main sites and personalities within your niche.
6. You might even get an offer from one of the other publishers to print one of their articles or participate in some other form of joint venture.
A few tips, though:
1. Make sure your article is very well-written, pretty original, and laser-targetted to the blog/website you’re submitting to.
2. Only submit to one site at a time, and give them time to make a decision (at least a couple of weeks) before trying the next one.
3. Only let each article get published once or twice – you don’t want duplicate content problems, and you want to make the publisher feel special. They much prefer good unique content over mass-reprinted drivel.
4. Be nice, be humble, and don’t take it personally if you get knocked back. Keep writing, keep submitting, and keep trying different sites. Any articles that don’t get picked up by others can still be published on your own site.
Let me know what you think, Yaro! This sounds like an interesting topic for a future podcast.
One thing to mention that I’ve been reminded of in an email this morning from Bill Nixon, is that often your articles are republished without the resource box. This means you don’t get an incoming link but you still risk the duplicate content penalty. Not to mention that you have to get out there and find the culprits who do it, ask them to fix the issue and most of the time it’s on some reproduction blog with no original content.
One Stop Under has a great point. Approaching a prominent blogger and asking if they would publish an article is a much more effective article marketing strategy. The only *issue* is you should submit original content since no blogger is going to want to reproduce something you have already published on your own blog or website or somewhere else.
I know if someone approached me, handed me a really solid article I’d be more than happy to publish it. It makes my job easier for one day because I have some fresh content and it sends some traffic to another blogger. It’s win-win.
Great point One Stop Under!
Article marketing is a good way to bring in new traffic; I plan on sending a few articles to Ezine from my blog that is focused on entrepreneurs (Students) at http://www.cashcampus.com/ftt .
The way I see it is that it wont hurt to get some articles around on different sites, it can only help, right?
David Askaripour
http://www.cashcampus.com
I came to read this article becuase of a refernce Darren made to it. Thinking back, at the same time he recommended it he did warm it was a bit inconclusive.
I don’t mean this to sound unkind and I do appreciate the work I seeing you put in, but really, as you yourself mention, you’ve got to say more with less words.
This post is too long by about twice, and it draws no concusions. You did provide many usefulfacts, but I could find all those facts on my own … I read your posts or Darren’s, or Freedy’s or Jane’s becuase I want to know their opinion.
Anyway, I did learn a lot looking over your results and ther article site themselves I doubt it’s anything I want to spend my time with .. but that was my opinion before I read your post … I was looking for abit more of ‘you’ in the article.
Best regards
Dave
Hi Dave, sorry you were slightly disappointed. I’ll refund the price of admission.
In other news, I’ve decided to invest some cash in a couple of article distribution services to see how well they work, however it won’t be for a while as I want to use some content I’m working on for BlogTrafficKing.com.
It seems people want more of a conclusion from this article so here goes -
Based on just using manual submission to Ezine Articles I would not recommend doing an article marketing campaign. The results are not significant enough to warrant the time to do it manually.
I’ll let you know the results of phase two of my experiment once I have completed my tests.
It would be worthwhile to see some clear and conclusive results.
Yeah that’s me! I’ve had a couple of people saying they’re confused at the sites purpose but I think that’s just because I haven’t made the blog to make money directly, I maintain it to give advice to my affiliate team and to anyone that knows about the affiliate site. Signups and referrals come as a (welcome) side effect.
It seems my google searches are suddenly back working, my PR went up to 5 a little while ago and I think it may be something to do with that.
Now for vwd lottery I am very high in google.co.uk searches (number 2 and 3 and a directory listing of me is 4) and today I notice a much much higher google referral count so looks like duplicate content penalties can be overcome.
I did a search for the name of the company’s top recruiter and my site turned up as number 1 for it. LOL
I’ll donate a fiver towards your journey and if I win the big one this week, I might even pay for it all! (here’s hoping)
When you say “the results are not significant enough to warrant the time to do it manually”, what exactly do you mean?
Wouldn’t the time-consuming bit be actually writing, editing and preparing the articles? Submitting to EzineArticles.com is more or less just a copy-n-paste operation, isn’t it?
Or do you mean that you think you’d get better results by submitting the same article to dozens of directories? I can see how a submission service could save time there.
So, are you really saying that submitting to just one service will limit your results, and that you think it’d be more effective to submit to many services?
One Stop Under – Exactly, you answered your own question. One article directory is not worth the effort. To post to many manually is not worth the effort.
The one thing left to test is posting to mutiple locations using an automated service or software. That’s the question I will attempt to answer in part two of this series.
Cool, thanks for clearing that up! I thought that’s what you meant, but it wasn’t explicitly stated that way.
Bingo, now ya got it:
“Based on just using manual submission to Ezine Articles I would not recommend doing an article marketing campaign. The results are not significant enough to warrant the time to do it manually.”
Now instead of you owing me, I owe you twice the cost of admission. \\Thanks\\
Touché Dave – glad I could be of at least a little bit of assistance.
Dang was that interesting! But, so true about my short attention span, because after reading all of this .. I couldn’t really determine if you are For or Against free article marketing! I will have to remember to read your articles in the mornings, instead of late at night
btw – I am a “user” of these free articles. I really do use Ezine a lot in my PetLvr blog. I try to get many different authors, and keep the resource section and links intact. I hope the authors get traffic from my use of their articles and, I imagine clicking on the authors links would be the same for my readers, as it is for me. If the article is interesting – I definately want to see what the author’s page is all about. I don’t pick any article because of their ‘expert’ status though. I just don’t trust anybody who calls themselves an expert and want to offer my readers 20 different other viewpoints or suggestions. (as in relation to a pet site that is)
By the way .. in my RSS reader, I’ve seen your name pop up once in my bloglines .. i believed you used “pet” and “training” in one article! But, I didn’t post it in my pet blog
so there should be no penalties!
Thanks for the info. I probably won’t get into article submission – I already have enough trouble writing consistently for my blog. It’s good to know that I’m not missing out on too much!
Terrific post. Submitting articles was the most aggravating experience. Different publishers have different seemingly arbitrary rules. Ezinearticles, for example, has a limit of 6 URLs in each article.
I had 7. I asked them why 6 and if they would consider letting them all stay in (none were self-serving). They said no.
Other sites accepted the article as-is, and others had other arbitrary rules to apply.
While I did get a slight traffic bump from each article (they were mostly blog entries from affiliateblog.com), the whole process was annoying.
I use Article Post Robot. They even take payments for there software. My articles are showing up everywhere. And they submit to Ezine Articles. Just type in the name
Christine Bettridge
If you want to help a fellow submitter out you can order it through my website. It is located on the right hand side of the site. it looks like a blue box and it says articlepostrobot
The website is http://aboveallcontent.com
HI!
Discovered this blog when searching in Google for 1. entrepreneurs
2. (search within results) submit articles.
My friend and book coach, Judy Cullins, uses article submissions to great results.
Her suggestions are to submit more than on e at a time (5++) to a site. You can also train an $8.00 person to do same and submit weekly.
All your insights, ie, artilce title and keywords are valid.
Check out her site at:
http://www.BookCoaching.com
for more linspiration.
I think for mini-internet saturation, this works.
Also, try a google alert with the title, or just your name, to see where your articles are coming up, esp from the warehouses that provide these articles to non-writers.
I have more of my articles on the internet than I do on my site. Cheaper.So far.
May thx,
Joanne Victoria
A handy guide to those who have no idea about marketing their sites over the net
Articlemuse.com is an article directory just like ezinearticles.com!
EzineArticles and ArticleMarketer have worked really well in raising my profile, though some of my early articles were scraped and appeared on splogs. That aside, it’s been a very effective tool. Great, balanced article.
Hi Sharon,
Please pardon my newness to these terms. What does this mean: “scraped and appeared on splogs”?
Your Message: Hi Juliet. Scraped means stolen content. Spam blogs (splogs) on the Web. They steal content, links and create sites to try to make money from ads or affiliate links that appear on the site. It might be a page with nothing but ads minus the article you thought you’d find. You can look up splogs and scraped content on Google or Wikipedia.
There is also a free article submitter for article directories based on article dashboard.
I write a lot for http://www.oocuz.com the revenue sharing article directory
The owner is some german guy that let you place your own advertisement in the membersarea and it shows up 100% of the time in your own articles so you get the full revenue that is generated trough clicks.
But ezinearticles.com is 100% an articles directory where one must submit, because its really well known.
Seems like I am a little late responding….
I just wanted to give you my thoughts on article marketing. I have used this method for a variety of clients from the wedding industry to VoIP and I have had great results. However, I am sure that we all know that this should not be the only tactic employed in a marketing strategy. The number one rule of course is to write a good article that has value and educates the target consumer. Most of the articles I see are a few paragraphs of gibberish that just link to an adsense sites; and that irritates the crap out of me.
Article directories come a dime a dozen and I don’t submit them to each one. I have a select few that I have had outstanding results from.
- Ezinearticles.com
- Goarticles.com
- Aricledashboard.com
- Articlesfactory.com
- Arrivenet.com
- ArticleAlley.com
- And a few others.
I also submit my articles to Findarticles.com, Marketingprofs.com and Webpronews.com; although these are harder to get into.
If you are writing articles to promote your own business, I would refrain from posting the entire article in your blog. Instead, post a quick summary of why you wrote the article and then link to it somewhere it has been posted online. My blog isn’t like that yet but I am not thinking very strategic at the moment.
Regards,
Michael Brito
http://www.britopian.com
Hi Yaro,
Ive also had great results using article marketing. Please feel free to check out my recent project at articlemessenger.com We will soon have our Article Distribution Service up and running.
Regards
Helen
Article submission is perhaps one of the best ways to leverage your products and services on the Internet.
Link Exchange is dead like a dodo.
One should dwell more on “quality” than on “quantity.” One well written article will do you a lot more good than numerous short and less captivating ones.
Write articles that people will “want” to post on their blogs and websites – That’s where the traffic is. Just filling up an article directory will do you no good.
Here is my two cents on article submission – perhaps the best SEO Tool.
James. I agree with you 100%. I just posted something similar in my blog.
http://www.britopian.com/blog/2006/09/12/article-marketing-blogging-or-both/
Yaro,
I read your post with great interest because I am one week into doing this very same test. I have been a freelance writer since 1993 and have been have a niche site online since 1999.
I’ve been a part of the Google Adsense program for about a year and a half. I’ve made decent pocket money with this program, without putting any effort into it. All I did was slap the ads on the pages and forgot them.
I’ve also been marketing with articles for about 3 years now — submitting to a few major directories a couple of times a month (mainly ezinearticles.com and ideamarketers.com).
Upon deciding that I wanted to create more passive income, I decided to give article marketing a REAL try. I decided to submit one article to 25 top-rated directories for 30 days straight.
Only a week into it, my Google Adsense income has quintupled (increased 5 times) and my subscriber rate has increased 3 fold. And this is after ONE WEEK.
Now, my site has been around a while, but my Alexa rank sucks (although my site does have a PR rank of 6).
Anyway, given these very early results, I’d say that article marketing does work. BUT, you only get out of it what you put into it. I’ve been submitting articles manually and it does take up a chunk of time — about 2 hours a day.
I’m always skeptical of “easy” money-making techniques, but I’d read so much about article marketing and had experienced newsletter growth from limited efforts with it in the past, so I wanted to see what it would be like if I really pushed it.
Now, if I could just get some feedback from users on which article submission software to use — that would be great.
Sorry to be so long-winded, but I wanted your readers to have a complete picture so they could understand my conclusion about article marketing.
Continued success to you, and thanks for the post.
Sincerely,
Yuwanda Black, Publiser
InkwellEditorial.com
InkwellEditorial.blogspot.com
Hi Yuwanda,
Thanks for your report and congratulations that’s some awesome work.
This article is still part one for me, and later, probably next year when I have my blog traffic products to promote, I will start a serious article marketing campaign again.
I believe article marketing can certainly be effective but it really does depend on what you write about.
What topic area are you using for your article marketing campaign?
When I did it I was promoting in the very popular “Internet Marketing” area where, to be honest, the market is very skeptical and loaded with bad information, which made my campaign that much harder I believe.
Yaro
Yaro:
Regarding your question:
I write about the business of creative freelancing. Offically, my site is THE business portal for and about freelancing in the editorial and creative communities.
I owned an editorial staffing agency in NYC for 8 years and have been in publishing since 1987, so it’s a topic I have a lot of experience with.
And, you’re absolutely right, most info out there on internet marketing is not honest, so it was refreshing to read your very detailed and honest post.
I’ll keep you abreast of my little experiment.
Continued success!
Yuwanda Black, Publiser
InkwellEditorial.com
InkwellEditorial.blogspot.com
Yaro,
FYI, I updated my blog about how my article marketing experiment is going.
Many people have written me to be sure to keep them informed. I don’t know if some of them came from your blog, so I’m sending you this little note so that you can let your readers know how it’s going.
All this week (10/30/06 thru 11/3/06) I will be updating the blog with details of my article marketing experiment. It ends on 11/18/06.
My blog is at http://www.InkwellEditorial.blogspot.com.
Thanks,
Yuwanda Black, Publisher
InkwellEditorial.com
InkwellEditorial.blogspot.com
Yaro,
After reading your article, I had submited 10 articles to Ezine. It took some effort due to the fact that English is not my frist language.
Now I try to submit and article weekly. Although I do not see great results yet. Some of my sebsite are begining to show on the first pages of Google for some keywords.
You wrote that in order to see results one needs to submit 20 articles or more. Just wondering if you still stand by that statement.
I noticed though that whenever I work hard on an article and provide some good content it gets republished more often.
I really like your website. I have become a regular reader. Great Job!
Hi Yaro,
This blog is really fantastic. I have spent money on PPC marketing without success. I would try all the ideas suggested in this blog. I would let you know my result.
Is it good to link readers of my article to my landing page or an opting mail page? Whats your suggestion?
Hi Ochuko – I don’t quite understand your question?
Perhaps you could elaborate more by leaving your question in my forums:
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/forums/
Yaro,
I think Ochuko is asking if it is better to drive visitors to a newsletter / email registration page.
That way the visitor converts to a reader, builds relationship and trust with the publisher before seeing a landing / sales page.
Or is it better to drive the visitor to a landing / sales page and attempt to close on the visitor with some world class copywriting.
Thanks
I have been writing quite a bit of articles to ezine following this report for my site http://www.dry-skin-care-guide.com. So far, it rocks!
Ahh, so you mean the difference between a namesqueeze before the sales page or direct to the sales page.
That depends on the type of product being sold. In almost all cases a nice series of follow up emails after a namesqueeze produces better sales and opt-in rates for free things are always higher than trying to sell.
If you can write a good email sequence after the namesqueeze that educates the prospect about the product then you will make more sales.
Yaro
I’ve recently started experimenting with putting a few articles up on ezinearticles. I understand the potential volume of backlinks, particularly in contributing to my main site’s google pagerank.
But what I’m particularly curious about, since you mentioned 5000 article views, is what % of those views actually turn into actual visitors to your own site? That’s really where the value would start, since until they come to your site you have no chance of a conversion. Do you have any numbers, or at least gut feel on what kind of actual traffic your articles produce on your primary site?
Hi Joe – It’s been a while since I checked on my ezinearticles.com account, but as far as I remember I wasn’t tracking clicks from my syndicated articles.
In my opinion the biggest factor that determines how effective article marketing will be for you, including the clicks back to your site, is the industry you operate in. The quality of your content really counts too of course, but it’s a lot easier if there isn’t an over-abundance of competition.
I think article marketing can really help to get quality traffic. Especially ezinearticles.com listings show up pretty near to the top in google if You choose Your keywords wisely.
Don`t post YOur articles to too many directories to avoid having them recognized as duplicate content though!
One of my main Internet marketing tactic is article marketing.
I get my sites on Google first page with article marketing + blogging.
For example if you type “affiliate marketing” (without the quotes) in Google, you will find my affiliate marketing site (http://www.mynetmarketingland.com) right on the first page.
It is a highly competitive term, and it’s not easy to get there since affiliate marketers know what they are doing.
Article marketing is one of the reasons why I am on the first page for this term.
Franck.
Yaro:
In your blog (which is great) you mentioned the company Article Markerter. Have you have a good experience with this company? I’ve been using them for 1 week now and my first article went to 12 article hubs and I’ve had almost 100 “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender”. Plus their customer service is a 1 on a scale of 1 – 10.
Thank you,
Lance
Thanks for this very informative article.
Re your point about what industry you are in: From my experience blogging, and seeing how I can get search engine traffic from less popular keywords, I suspect that article could be doubly effective for the nichier, less searched-for site genres.
Hi Lance,
I haven’t been using that company lately so I really can’t comment sorry.
Judging by your claims it hasn’t been so good for you, but you really shouldn’t judge just based on one week, you need to at least do it for several months and then make an assessment.
Hi,
Just thought I’d leave a note. With more than 200 articles posted on ezinearticles.com and other articles sites, I gotta tell ya, it works. If you google my name it not only shows up, but it’s at the top of the list. I get there for two reason. I’ve optimized my pages, and I write articles. Not only do my articles make links, they are wonderful ebooks when I group them and create a bank of articles to post in an ebook. I sell those on my sites or a friend auctions them on ebay and we make a mint every month. I love article marketing! It does work.
Jan Verhoeff
Great topic. I am new here but I personally have to agree that article marketing is the way for myself. I have published less than 10 articles but to many directories manually and I definitely could see some results. The results are not so great to shout about, but an extra 150 unique visitor a day to my site is better than nothing.
I have to agree, site with good content will definately create loyal visitors.
Cheers.
Great read.
Really worth it. Your article answered some questions i have in mind.
Thanks again.
I think article marketing is great for lead capturing. I learnt this technique from one of the top copywriter. He directs all traffic to a single page selling the benefit of his newsletter, and in exchange for visitor’s email address they will get a free report. After filling in contact details, visitor is redirected to the main sales page.
This technique works very well. Before I had the sign up box on the side and I didn’t collect a single email address. Then I designed a landing page just for collecting contact details and I was able to get 5 or 6 contacts per week.
So from the experience here are 3 things you can try to improve your conversion:
1. in the author bio, offer a free report and clearly explain the benefit of the report
2. direct traffic to a newsletter landing page selling the benefits of signing up
3. on your website, you needs to have strong “call to action”. If you are providing a service, it’s better to sell a FREE phone consultation or a FREE market appraisal; you will see much better result than trying to strike a deal right away.
You will see what I mean at the following address:
**************************************************
http://www.submit.novusdecor.com.au/ezinearticles_1.html
**************************************************
I can honestly attest to the power of article marketing.
As a baby internet marketer, I absolutely refused to spend 1 dime on Pay Per Click or any other form of advertising until I started making money online by working.
Article Marketing has served as a vehicle for me to have a pretty steady stream of Clickbank Income. After over 209 articles on various directories including ezine articles, go articles, article wrap and Squidoo I now have a steady income of just about $1,000 a month.
Performing Keyword Research is without a doubt the way to get that article indexed and listed in the top twenty. Because of the free overture and google keyword tools available that part has never been easier.
I must admit to being a little confused. On the one hand we are told that duplicate content harms your rankings, and then next, suggestions of using an automated sumbitter, which by default is going to submit duplicate content.
If the ‘top’ marketers are selling and supposedly using these automatic submitters this to my mind means one of two things. 1) Duplicate content is not harmful, or 2) The more that new marketers submit duplicate content, the more the field is left open to the top marketers who sell the submitters but don’t use them.
Or am I just a conspiracy theorist?
Yaro,
Thank you for this very important post.
I am feeling that most people employing article marketig do not make a living on the web. Well, I guess we could say that about most people in general!
For me, it is too time consuming for the results generated (I am a Platinum author too!)
Not sure if this came through, however just to say this is the best post I have read so far on Article writing.
I have always had great success with article marketing. For my link, I have linked to an article I wrote that gives explicit details on how well article marketing actually does work for my website. Of course, some people have less than stellar results with article marketing, but those with poor performing articles can generally blame the article for the lackluster performance, rather than the method itself.
Wow! Lots of great comments here!
Regarding andy, the first commenter, creating a mirror of your site is a bit different than syndicating articles, and actually is a good illustration
of the REAL, and ONLY risk of a duplicate content penalty; tons of
duplicate content on one domain.
Article marketing does not do that.
Btw, not everyone is “doing it”, but I would agree that lots of people are
talking about doing it.
Lastly, I have seen URLs from ezinearticles rank very well for some
competitive terms, so it’s not just to get links/traffic for your site. You
could promote your article’s URL and use ezinearticle’s trust for
ranking.
have a good day,
Bompa
Thanks for your article marketing report. People who get a good result from article marketing is that they submit an article more than 10 articles a day, and at least a month to get the result. I think that you are just started compare with those advanced article marketers. That’s what I heard from a marketing specialist.
I write ezinearticles (24 so far), and, like you have no real idea if I am reaching any big time goal. This drew me to reading your article. One of my articles, I kind of think, made it onto a back page of the USA Today. I was kind of gassed, the way you said, when one of my little ramblings made it past the “spam” sites.
I get onto little food critic sites, etc. here and there and feel the same way, like I am building a 10% a year portfolio and am using the process to learn how to compare which titles grabbed attention and which ones sunk like stones.
Andy
Thank you for this article. Article marketing is new for me, and I can use all of the information I can get. Actually, blogging, SEO, and everything that goes with it is new to me. I started a blog this year and jumped stated my writing career at the same time. I am very blessed for the writing opportunities that came across my path.
I signed up with Ezine Articles today, and I’ll see how it goes. I will check out other sites such as Squidoo, Go Articles, and Article Wrap.
I have been doing article marketing for the past few months both by submitting to individual sites and with a subscription to Article Marketer. I am a professional in my field, but am continually told by Article Marketer that I am posting to the wrong category or that the content of my article is other than it should be. I have not had any of these problems with individual submissions to other sites. Mail about this issue to Article Marketer go unanswered. I guess they figure that once they have your money they can do what they want. I have not had any visitors to my site from the listings done by Article Marketer although I have from the individual sites that I am submitting to. The most important one appears to be ezinearticles.com.
Overall, thumbs up for article marketing, but thumbs down for Article Marketer.
So is sending articles to ezine the only place I should be sending articles?
Or should I be sending them to other places?
Has anyone heard of uniqueariticlewizard?
Thanks,
Mark
EzineArticles is number one, that is for sure. If you have time to do the other directories like AffSphere.com, you may as well.
It is clear that writing articles is a fabulous form of viral marketing. It is free, and the potential for traffic explosion is phenomenal.
Great info, I’m glad I clicked on this link in Google when looking for info on Article marketing. All the input here from everybody is great!
I’ve been looking into article marketing to promote some of my sites and build back-links and general consensus here seems to say that it can be beneficial to different degrees based on the target market. I’m also going to probably focus on writing unique content to put on the article marketing sites that complements content on the sites I want to promote. Based on what I’ve read here that sounds like a good way to avoid any duplicate content issues. Now it just comes down to writing discipline!
Yaro – This is a fantastic exploration of article writing and article marketing for Internet business results. You offer a fair and balanced perspective on the pros and cons of this approach to web marketing.
As we have found with our article marketing clients at http://www.SeoArticleWritingPros.com – a lot of article marketing is about steady and consistent efforts.
Thanks for the great post!
-Jason Clegg
SEO Article Writing Pro
Hi Yaro,
I’m very curious and I think I write for many new visitors when I ask…what are your preferred traffic generation tactics and which ones have produced the most significant result for you?
Btw, has part 2 been created, or did I miss something?
Warmest Regards,
Anton
I have been using article marketing for about a six months now with great results.
There’s no question about it- article marketing has been one of the best things I’ve done to improve my back links and traffic.
Honestly…
I’ve seen it bring me fairly consistent traffic for awhile now.
Yaro I agree with you on certain points. I like that you submit your article to top article directory i.e Ezinearticles. However I have been doing some different things. Instead of submitting 1 article to 1 Article Directory. I am submitting the same article to say around 30 top article directories.
Found you through Google. Straight to the point article. Your post answered my query exactly.
Hey Yaro,
Surprised you didnt mention SubmitYourArticle.com – Im not promoting it here just a user but was interested to hear your views on their service. Maybe you’ve just not come across them before?
All the best from Sam Deane (currently on your BlogMastermind course and loving it!)
Yaro, as a rookie to internet marketing overall, and article marketing as a technique, I feel much better about my efforts after having read this. I have only 3 active articles on E-Zine now, but I did use my “as seen on E-Zine articles” logo at the top of one of my websites. It seemed like a good idea, giving some credibility to the content of the site, and I was pleased to read that you recommend it. I can see that this is a gradual process that will require constant feeding and grooming. But I also see the potential, and I intend to see my labors bear fruit. Thanks for the encouragment.
I haven’t heard of that one before Sam, but there seem to be many who tend to do the same thing. If it’s easy to do then the rewards are rarely significant, unless you do it for a long time, which isn’t easy to do.
The more time I spend on this blog, the more great things I find. This is a great article Yaro. : )
Yaro,
Your website is my favorite Internet marketing site. It is definitely the highest quality content out there in my opinion.
Regarding EZinearticles.com, recently you discussed the topic with Adam Short in the Niche for profit podcasts. Adam described an article marketing campaign that he does for his niche websites by posting an article to EZinearticles every day for several days. He mentions that the article should be material that was created specifically for EZinearticles and is not duplicated on the blog or sales website that you are promoting. Can you expand on this a little bit?
Thanks much,
Ted
Hi Yaro, can i just share. I’ve also tried article marketing before though the results were not SUPER SPECTACULAR, I can say that it’s still a nice way to gain one way backlinks. One advantage of article submission in terms of backlinks I believe, is that of being able to control the text around your link. If theories are right, then search engines actually give a lot of importance to the words around your link (aside from your anchor text of course).
just sharing!
Yaro, I published a bunch of duplicate articles from my site onto ezinearticles.com, due to inexperience, and now I think it’s hurting my google results for the keywords due to duplicate filtering. What do you suggest I do? Rewrite the ezinearticles, which would take a heck of a lot of time, or just delete them entirely?
If anyone has any suggestions, I would really appreciate your help. Thanks.
Try PAR..Power Article Rewriter…an article ’spinner. Once you write your article, import it into PAR…go word for word through it, and PAR offers alternatives to the word you have. Of course, you could just write it in PAR.
By the end of the article, you should have hundreds of variations of the words in the article. Click ‘Re-write, select how many different articles you want, and click. About 5 seconds later, PAR says..’DONE’.
You now have 50-75 different variations of the same article.
I then go to different directories, click on one of the variations, and do a ‘Copy/Paste’.
Hi Yaro,
Thanks for this informative article. I came across it when I researched how I can publish some articles on Polish pottery that I make and sell. My main concern was that by submitting it to the wrong place, the article would get duplicated multiple times on sites out of my control and I could get punished by Google for duplicate content and maybe for being on sites that are disliked by Google. I was hoping to find some information on reputable sites. Also you mentioned technorati for backlink lookups, but I could not find this tool on their website. You must have wrote this article about 3 years ago. Do you have any new information on article submission software? Thanks.
Great article Yaro. Very informative to someone who didn’t know much about article marketing. I read one comment that “everyone” is doing it. I think there are some tried and true methods that generate results. To me, if no one is using a technique its most likely for a reason.
Yaro,
You are definitely my go to source for internet marketing topics. This article marketing test definitely help me have a success campaign on EzineArticles.com. I stumble a bit at first but I’m starting to understand how to be more productive. I just posted a cool YouTube video sharing some of the tricks that I learned. It’s my way of giving back to the community. Check it Out!
This was a really great article and so much of what I was looking for. One thing I’m still unsure of though, let’s say you’re hyperlinking from the ezinearticle back to your site using one of your targeted keywords. Will doing that and having that article just sitting in ezinearticles help boost the page rank of your website? Or do you only benefit when someone actually publishes the article on their site? I have over 400 articles right now on ezinearticles.com (so far it’s been my primary method of trying to generate traffic), but I’m starting to rethink this strategy.
Any advice would be great! Keep up the great work with this site – so much to learn!
In my experiences the publishers always remove the author info and links. I have caught many and Ezine and A.D. do nothing about it so I quit.
An interesting and informative article and subsequent discussion; thanks, folks.
If I have an article (or maybe part of a book I’ve written), I ask my daughter or other student with good English skills to paraphrase it a bit/a lot, and then use the new versions on article sites and blogs. She benefits from a bit of pocket money and some more content for her portfolio. People I know use Elance for their writers, but I find using local students works very well.
I’ve always been slightly sceptical of the value of article submissions.. but maybe I should give it a shot and see how it works out.. 10 -15 minutes here and there isn’t a major investment of time, so I guess it can’t hurt to at least give it a try
Hi Yaro,
I do believe article marketing works especially if when starting out you have more time than money. I have submitted hundreds of articles to EzineArticles and I am now starting to see the fruits of my labor. It does not happen overnight, but once you start to lay the foundation it only gets better.
Thanks.
Ezine articles are good for backlinks because most article sites have good trust rank. In other words, they are trusted by Google and lend Google’s trust to you.
Ezine articles can also be a way to get traffic. If your article gets to the top 10 in Google then many people might come to your site. It’s easy for an article to get to the top 10 because of the high trust rank. However, I think it’s always better to put your own page in the top 10. Why? Because I think people are more likely to click on your site listing then on an article that leads to your site.
I wouldn’t use them for content because Google does not like duplicate content. However, that’s just my opinion. Google’s duplicate penalty might not be that serious. Does anyone one know?
I haven’t really noticed any duplicate penalties for any articles that I put on Ezine that are similar to articles on my site – but to work around the issues of duplicate content I’ve just been writing new articles that I submit to Ezine, rather than submitting ones that are already on my site.
Yaro,
Thanks for the informative information about article submission. I actually just submitted two article at Ezine but waiting approval.
As far as read, it’s okay to use duplicate article but just has less potency to it. I use free syndicated text all the time instead of writing things down. It does help to bolster you blog content.
It’s too bad that your results are not so great. I was hoping to write more to get some one way links. I guess I’ll keep trying. I think that having genuine, fresh topics will help you get those links. My wife is in school and writes bunch of papers, I think that I will use hers to submit to ezine and similar websites. I just have to get her permission.
Thank you for the great inforamtion!
I have a website which is quite tiny. I have a german and an english part. For my german part I get pressreleases and for my english part I try to get articles of all walks of life. I receive my articles through e-mail but since a few weeks I have rather difficulties receiving any article.
But what I had so far of about a 50 articles a day when I was lucky I could use just about 20 most of the time actually less. I read every article and check the links.
I had an article directory by Article friendly where I used an automated service “I snare and others (at the moment I like to try Article Marketeer but somehow I have difficulties signing on) I could not believe what a lot of crap I received and If people which write these articles realy believe It would advertise their products in anyway.
Quite frankly If an article doesn´t keep me reading after the 5th sentence I´can´t even be bothered clicking the link and some sites these links lead to ….. Nevertheless, I also had a few very good articles which I was happy to publish on my site the only shame is I´m only a small site.
Oh yes I forgot, If you guy´s realy have to use Articlesoftware please take the time to read that article over, some of those articles are horrendous. My toes curl up reading them and my native tounge is not even english (you most likley guessed).
And by the way if you ever have time to write a nice article for me please not plain advertisment or any other crappy book on how to make money on the net ,something real people would be interesting in reading, hey would be nice to see you on my site
Article marketing is absolutely worth the time and I think that this was a great effort to prove this via EzineArticles, which is the market leader and probably the best one for new marketers to test and share their content. While 20 articles is not probably enough to establish significant success, those 20 articles will send the writer free and pre-qualified traffic to their site(s) that they would not have received, while also establishing credibility in their marketplace. It’s a win-win situation.
Hi,
The best way to write articles (and blog posts) is using good templates. Its possible to automate these so that the results are good quality unique articles or blog posts.
This has worked well for me. (see Article Boxer)
cheers
Tony
Great post – I’ve recently tried article marketing myself and it’s been a great source of new traffic for my site.
The most important points for me in getting better url click-throughs from my articles were keeping the articles short and trying different author resource boxes until I found one that worked. When I was able to delineate a tangible benefit to the reader and a utilize a specific call to action, my click-through results improved drastically.
Some articles produced unexpectedly good results, while others that I thought would do well unexpectedly underperformed. What I discovered is that a short and catchy title and strategic keyword targeting are also invaluable. I found that when I didn’t target the right keywords, my articles were buried under hundreds of other articles and couldn’t rise to the top of the search results.
Also one quick correction to this post, since it was written in 2006. EzineArticles no longer allows you to change the article title after submitting, so make sure to choose your article titles carefully!
Great information. I am just starting out, but I learned so much from reading all the comments. Thanks, guys.