Internet Marketing is all about trial and error. I would seriously consider what others have said here and if you aren't recieving results then go onto spending time in other areas. In fact, be ready to do that in everything you invest in. I've advertised at several places and while some sent some traffic, many did not earn up to the ROI I was seeking. Therefore, I didn't renew my subscription. You will have to bite the bullet on many things until you find a good combination that works for you.
Currently, I'm doing a case study on how much traffic I can drive to my site via posting in forums. I haven't be a member or posted enough to have a tag but on my site www.onemansgoal.com you can see the results of my case study. That being sad I would be interested in seeing your numbers and progress with article marketing. Thanks Marc
All right, I wimped out of the case study - because it takes a fair amount of time and effort for me to rewrite articles, and frankly, I just was not seeing enough from the other article directory sites to make it worth my time. I will give American Chronicle a try, though, because when I do searches on Google I see a lot of entries coming up pretty high in the rankings that are from American Chronicle.
Do you seriously think anyone who needs cosmetic surgery is going to be found on ezinearticles or any other article site when it suddenly dawns on them they need cosmetic surgery????? You might want to try and find where your target market is....then devise a plan to market to them effectively. Article sites are not where many marketers target consumers are found. As a matter of fact I try to exclude any article directories from my PPC campaigns as they are a waste of my money...
Scarlett, If your looking for the best traffic generator in article marketing, EA is definitely the way to go. I have found that for backlinks though, ISnare is a pretty good method of getting yourself out there. For about $2 an article they will shoot it off to a pretty good number of article sites. Whether the sites pick it up or not is the question.
As someone mentioned before, even if you are submitting to other sites that don't send much traffic your way, it's possible that you can gain a good backlink as the article directory matures in time. I've seen it where someone writes a good article, people link to it, and several months later the article page is sitting at a PR3. Obviously that takes time and is not instantaneous, but in the long run, it's worth it.
Have all the other sites accepted the articles? I would suggest that you submit to other article sites also. Heres a list for you to start with: http://www.wilsonweb.com/linking/wilson-article-marketing-1.htm
If you don't mind paying for traffic, what you can do is approach webmasters with popular blogs on surgery. Then you pay them so that your article will be put up on their blog along with your link. This way you get more traffic directly.
Sem-Advance, it's not so much that I think that anyone considering cosmetic surgery is going to go to ezinearticles. It's the effect that ezinearticles and other article marketing sites has...I write an article on it using keyword phrases that have a decent number of searchings and not a lot of competing sites, and then someone who goes on google types in the phrase (just as an example) "how do I find a good plastic surgeon" and comes across my article. Then they click through to my site. One hopes, anyway. It worked well for my site on getting into nursing school, anyway. But I certainly agree that article directories are not the be-all and end-all of generating traffic. They're just what has worked for me so far.
The problem with that is the article won't stay up top on the blog plus blog owners are typically looking to promote their own affiliate offers. However you are on the right path ....as if one has the money the best place to advertise would be where the target market is found to be doing searches daily for the things they need.....aka Adwords Glad to see the articles are working for you Scarlett
I would recommend you keep submitting to the ones you are doing as well as add one or 2 more. Then, submit a hubpage and a squidoo. I would not totally rework each article but submit as is. Are you also posting to your blog? Darrell
Thanks Scarlett and everyone for your insight to EzineArticle publishing. I was wondering, being that anyone can republish your article from ezine, besides the benefit of driving traffic / backlinks, does anyone know if the republished / duplicate content hurt your site's rankings in the long run with the search engines?
Ezine Articles are pretty efficient in driving traffic to your website. Submitting to other directories is a good practice too as it helps in giving good backlinks.