Article Marketing – The Traffic Generating Machine
by Mike on October 12, 2008
in Article Marketing
The other day I was chatting with Danny Cooper over on his blog and I mentioned that I’ve had a lot of success generating traffic to my niche web sites via article marketing. Danny asked me if I’d be willing to share some specific numbers so I figured I’d post it here so you can get an idea of just how powerful article marketing is.
Now there’s no way to cover every aspect of article marketing in just one blog post…so this will be the first in an ongoing series. Make sure you subscribe to my free RSS feed so you can continue receiving each new post because once completed you’ll have a comprehensive guide to making money using article marketing.
If you’ve never heard the term article marketing you must be living in a cave. Its simply the process of writing articles to generate traffic to your web site. Blogging is itself a form of article marketing, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about here.
For our purposes here article marketing is writing articles and submitting them for publication to third party directories. I know what you’re thinking…why should I give my best articles away to some directory for free? I’ll give you a few reasons…
1. You get free links from the directories themselves and from any other site or blog that reprints them.
2. If done right you can top search engine rankings and boatloads of traffic through directories like EzineArticles.
image source: http://www.carrieunderwoodofficial.com |
3. You’ll win fame and fortune and Carrie Underwood will want to date you!
Ok, ok maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch. But let’s take a quick look at a real life example so you can see the kind of traffic article marketing can generate.
For this example, I’m not going to give you the actual niche or domain that I’m sending traffic to. Its a tight little niche that I’ve done well with and I’d rather not give it away. Let’s just say it promotes a product I found on the Clickbank marketplace and its earned me several thousand dollars in affiliate commissions since I started promoting it.
Besides the niche doesn’t really mean much…you can use article marketing to promote everything from natural remedies to treadmills to internet marketing seminars.
The numbers I’m going to share with you below are from 29 articles that I wrote and submitted to EzineArticles. They all link back to the same domain. Almost all point directly to the homepage, a couple to secondary pages.
What this says is that the 29 articles I wrote were viewed 24,396 times on EZA and 8,882 readers clicked on the link to my site at the end of the article. And that’s not all. The articles were republished by other sites or blogs 82 times and seen by who knows how many more people.
That means that on average each article I wrote was read about 841 times and generated 306 click-throughs to my site. Not bad!
And those are just averages…some articles don’t do so well, but my best one for this niche has generated an amazing 7,169 views and 4115 click-throughs!
So far.
You see these articles are still sending me new visitors day in and day out even after I published them over a year ago. They send me traffic while I’m sleeping, on vacation, or sitting on my couch watching the game. They’re a traffic powerhouse that should continue to send new traffic for years to come. And the more articles I write the more traffic I get!
And this is just one niche. I’ve written hundreds of articles under various pen names promoting many different products. Some don’t pan out quite so well, but some pay big dividends! If you’re not tapping into the power of article marketing to promote your site you’re missing out on some serious traffic.
Now don’t forget to subscribe to my feed because there’s a lot more to learn about article marketing. Most people do it completely wrong and never see any results. Stick with me and I’ll show you how to write articles that will bring you more traffic than you can handle!
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Carrie Fisher baby! I am so kidding
Glad I’m subscribed; lookin’ forward to the series!
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Anything that will help me with a date is good for me. As always, thanks. I’ve looked at http://ezinearticles.com/ but was never sure if it was worth the time. Thanks!
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I personally would like to see some more indepth data on the visitors, such as bounce rate, average time on site, average pages per visit, ect.
Danny Coopers last blog post..Is Your Design Link-Worthy?
@Christopher: In my experience EZA is by far the best article directory out there.
@Danny: Well that’s actually kind of hard to figure because this mini-site’s whole purpose is to get click-throughs to an affiliate program. Each landing page is specifically designed to get visitors to click-through to the affiliate program. So in reality a high bounce rate and short time on site is exactly what I want. It would be a little different if I were driving traffic to this blog where my goal would be to keep them reading and engaged.
Maybe you could tell me about the conversion rates then..?
Danny Coopers last blog post..Top 10 Link Building Blogs of 2008!
Well to date the site has generated 272 sales which is about a 3% conversion rate. Not outstanding, but its doing ok.
3% Conversion rate is exceptionally good for free traffic in my mind, thanks for the info!
Danny Coopers last blog post..Top 10 Link Building Blogs of 2008!
No problem Danny, glad I could be of help!
Awesome man!
I’m a hooker when it comes to article marketing, I absolutely swear by it! I did a three part series on my blog a month or so back trying to cover everything I know – and it is pretty hard!
Great numbers man, good stuff.
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@Elijah: Thanks man, glad you enjoyed the post. I hope you get as much out of Chris’s report as I did.
Great stats on your articles. Is this over a couple months or a couple years? My articles might make that in a few years!
@John: That’s spread out over about a 9 month period. Some of the articles are getting older and some are only a couple of weeks old.
Yes I have heard of article marketing but didn’t think much about it. Seeing the results in real numbers is impressive. It’s on my to do list now.
Ned from Baltimores last blog post..The Power of Positive Thinking
Wow, thanks for sharing those numbers. I’m definitely going to invest some time in article marketing this weekend; seems like it’s really effective.
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@Diana, go for it! In reading your blog I can see you have excellent writing skills so you could be a natural. Just remember results aren’t immediate. One or two articles just isn’t enough. You usually have to pump out more than that before you see any serious impact.
The more articles you write, the more traffic you are going to receive. Some people use article marketing as their only form of advertising and they are full time internet marketers. EzineArticles is by far the best…
Matt Helphreys last blog post..Develop a Link Building Strategy
With article marketting is it bad to submit the same article to several sites? Will Google see it as duplicate content and hence devalue it~?
Congrats Man, great job Mike.
I have always known that articles generate traffic but havent gotten down to doing it.
I guess i have to get started then.
Rob
As I am on the uphill side of my blog learning curve, this was enlightening. I will sign up for the series.
Thanks for sharing.
Great results with your article marketing looking forward to read more.
Jerzy´s last blog ..Network Marketing From Home updated Mon Aug 17 2009 2:42 pm CDT
Now, I have a couple of questions for you. One is, this is just submitting to Ezinearticles right? Ezinearticles give me a hard time with accepting my articles, so I use other article directories such as Goarticles, thefreelibrary, etc. In other words, I do bum marketing. I will write about 10 articles and submit them to about 4-5 article directories in the hope of gaining traffic. Unfortunately, I only receive about 60 visitors per day to my sites, which means two things: Google de-indexes my articles (for duplicate content; posting the same article to one article directory), and many of these article directories have now converted to ‘nofollow’ meaning you can’t get any linkjuice
My only conclustion is to write way more articles. 20-30 a day and submit them to about 6-7 of the top article directories with no lower than a page rank of 4. BUT, when you are on a low budget and don’t have the resources or money to outsource your article writing, this can be VERY tedious, writing 20 articles per day and submitting them to multiple article directories! YIKES!
I guess my question to you is this;
1)Do you ONLY use Ezinearticles for your article marketing efforts?
2)DO you write the articles yourself or outsource; surely you can’t right over 29 articles per day without getting fatigued!
3)if you outsource, can you recommend a good place to find article writers that work for low or decent wages?
4)Did you incoporate SEO into your articles?
THanks in advance. And I will subscribe to your blog. Thanks
Hey Sara, thanks for commenting. I’ll do my best to answer all of your questions.
1. About 98% of my article marketing is through EzineArticles. That’s probably not the best idea because if something happens to EZA I’ll lose a lot of traffic. But I’ve tried a lot of other directories and EZA just blows them all away.
2. I’ve tried outsourcing but I mostly write my own articles. I do buy some PLR content to rewrite which saves some time, but I agree I couldn’t come close to 30 articles a day. I’d burn out very quickly at that right. I just concentrate on staying consistent and the number of articles slowly builds to an impressive level. Be the tortoise, not the hare.
3. You should check out the Warrior Forum. There are always writers looking for work there. Try a few out on small jobs, have them write 3 or 4 articles for you so you can get an idea of their style. Some will be crap but you may be able to find a gem in there. But be aware that you usually get what you pay for.
4. I don’t kill myself trying to optimize the articles too much, I just write for humans and try to sprinkle in my main keyword phrase naturally. The only place I really emphasize SEO is the title. But KEYWORD RESEARCH is vital. It’s all about finding high search volume/low competition keyword phrases that you can rank for.
Good luck!
Mike
Article Marketing is really a good way in promoting your products and also your website. i used to write health articles on a big pharmaceutical company for the purpose of article marketing.
Article Marketing is one of the best ways you can promote your website and the products that you sell. The articles that you publish online or offline also helps to establish the credibility of your website or product. `
Great blog. Thanks! Article Marketing is a great, and free, way to get traffic to promote your product or niche. Done right and it can get amazing results. Done badly and it can lead to so much frustration. We all start off somewhere and wuickly learn to get better. However, article marketing does require a lot of work to be effective.