I am not a new affiliate by any means, I have been making a living off of Clickbank for quite a while but I never really used article marketing. I have many websites that rank number one for my keywords/niches and I have achieved that through other methods of SEO. My question is about Article Marketing for traffic, not for long term rankings. I have recently found a product that I want to promote and I am not seeing a lot of possibility for getting to the top of the SERPs anytime soon as this is a "make money online" product. All that I want to do is bring some fast targeted traffic to my site which promotes my product. I have spent the past 3-4 days writing about 75 articles that will link to my site. I followed the ideas laid out in another thread for a strong call to action, the link in the beginning of the sentence, etc. and I think I have a really strong chance of getting a high CTR. Will submitting these articles to a bunch of directories bring me targeted traffic or is article marketing basically just for search engine results these days? Will anyone actually repost my articles on their sites and blogs bringing me even more traffic or is that not how it works? What are the best article directories to submit these articles to? These are short 300 word articles so iSnare.com is out and anything else that requires longer articles. I have a platinum account with ezinearticles.com so I am obviously going to submit them there but what are some others? Obviously, I can find a list of high PR article directories so that isn't my question. I am asking for help knowing which directories will bring me actual traffic. It's going to be pretty time consuming submitting 75 articles to each directory so I don't want to waste time with a site that will bring me no traffic as traffic is my only goal. I would really appreciate tips from anyone that knows about article marketing for TRAFFIC not SERPs. Thanks!
If you're doing article marketing for traffic (not backlinks) you really need a plan for which keywords you're targetting, and they should be keywords that can realistically get your article ranked quickly in the search engines. You can't depend on your articles being picked up and republished, particularly in a niche like IM. For a fast traffic boost, posting in forums or on blogs to get people over to yourself would be a lot quicker. Just be careful about how you go about this, if you do it.
Best article directories - Ezine Articles should be your priority, but they are stricter - don't allow in article links, only in resource box, also can be strict with grammar and various other little things. Apart from EZA I would recommend article dashboard, articles base, go articles are the main ones I use, but you will get more traffic from EZA than the other 3 together (usually). Article marketing is not just for SEO. Imo is more a source of instant traffic than a good use of your time SEO / backlink wise - there are better ways to do SEO than manually submitting articles as it looks like you know. However, exact traffic is hard to judge, depends on which articles get popular, get found in the search engines, the call to action, and other things. Your articles will get picked up and published on other blogs too, but this again is hit and miss, it will only happen a bit, and only 1 in 10 of them will bring you any noticable traffic, and only 1 in 100 any really good traffic. With 75 articles you should get some "decent" traffic.. well, I don't know what you consider decent actually, but hats off to you for banging out 75 of em - youre a worker bro
search your article titles in Google. Do you see other articles from article directories showing up? If you don't then you are probably wasting your time.
Thanks for the replies so far, I do appreciate it. @karlg01 & internetmarketing I'm not trying to get my keywords from my articles ranked in search engines, that's my point. I don't usually waste my time or effort with "make money online" products because there are so many websites and articles out there that are very well ranked. It just seems to take too much effort when I can pick up another niche and rank #1 within a day or two. @submp3 I think you fully understood what I was asking and I appreciate your response. I think that ezinearticles is obviously going to bring me some decent traffic and the others you mentioned look decent too. Anyone else have any experience with getting quick traffic directly from an article directory, not from the article ranking in Search Engines?
I don't get why people always look at EZA as a negative because they are strict and don't allow piss poor articles to be approved. If you're taking article marketing or anything that has to do with internet marketing seriously, you NEED to write with good grammar. I know EZA changed their policy recently to be even stricter but that's a good thing. I've seen more articles online that have extremely bad grammar and spelling mistakes than I have seen articles that actually make sense. It looks bad on you and nobody is going to buy from you if you write like a 4th grader. My only gripe with EZA is their approval time but that is because they want to make sure they are putting out quality. I've submitted probably over 50 articles now and I have never gotten one rejected for a stupid reason. I know 50 isn't as much as some people have out there but it goes to show if you follow their guidelines you won't get rejected.
I agree with your points about EZA. I have never really gotten into article marketing as a main source of advertising my sites but I have submitted an article or fifty to EZA and I have never had one rejected. I don't mind not having a bunch of links in the article itself, I only need them in the resource box. My articles are short and to the point and all have decent grammar, not "English major decent" but decent. I have never gotten more than 50 views to an article on EZA in a week unless I got them ranked in search engines. I would like to get each article viewed a couple hundred times within a week. I am counting on 50+ from EZA so I am wondering which other article directories will bring me decent views/traffic so that I can meet my goal of a couple hundred views per article. I will submit them to 10 or 20 directories if I have to but I don't want to waste my time on sites that only get me a view or two! Goarticles.com brings about 25 views, which is good. Articlebase.com doesn't seem to bring more than 5 views per article. Anyone have any knowledge or experience getting views to your articles on a certain directory?
The thing about that is this: Almost nobody is going to go browsing through the article directories in search of information unless they are a marketer themselves OR stumble across your article because it was in the "related" category to another article they found online. Think about it this way, when's the last time you went to Ezine articles to do a search for anything that was not marketing or research related? Probably never. Everyone uses the search engines to find what they are looking for and that is where all of your traffic will come from. So if you have an article on how to pick up chicks at a bar, nobody is going to go to Ezine Articles and type in "how to pick up chicks at a bar" they will go to Google and search for it and at that point you want your article to be ranked preferably #1 or 2 so that they find your article on Google and that is where you will get your views from. That's why keyword research is so important when doing article marketing. I hope that answers your question.
I guess it sort of answers one of my original questions which was about using articles for some quick traffic from the directory itself. I just don't see a point in spending too much time trying to get a "make money online" website and product ranked in search engines when I can make much more money from other niches in much less time. I was hoping that it would be possible to put up my 75 articles into ten different directories and get a bunch of traffic quickly for this niche. I think that I agree with you now and it seems unlikely. Thanks for your help.
Yeah the make money online niche is too saturated to get articles ranked I imagine. You're right that you could go for other niches and make more money with less time spent. You would probably get a surge of traffic once you submit those 75 articles but that's only because your article will be put on the Ezine homepage when it first gets published. After that your traffic will be much slower and the time spent writing/submitting those articles would have been wasted.
yes of course it will be targeted traffic...as a first rule, provide a solution in your article and target people who have a problem. VERY targeted traffic.
So then, in your experience, can I get traffic from the article directories themselves with my 75 articles or is the whole point of article marketing to get ranked in the search engines? I just want quick traffic from my articles, I'm not really trying to worry about the SERPs right now because I don't care to promote MMO products long term. I just picked a product, made a website, wrote some articles and I want a quick traffic surge. Is that silly? Is there no point in taking the time to submit all of the articles to different directories for traffic only?
Traffic from articles is traffic from the SERP's. The only people browsing article directories without getting to them from Google (or wherever else they've followed a link from) are your competitors and people looking for website/ezine/newsletter content. Then don't get involved with them in the first place. It's the worst possible niche for a "quick fix" because it's the most competitive. If you want traffic to your website, in this niche, you need to do an enormous amount of off-page SEO. For backlinks to your site. For traffic also, as long as you appreciate that the traffic is coming to you only via the article directory from the SERP's. If you write articles of such high quality and originality that other webmasters re-publish them widely, after finding your content listed in an article directory (that's what article directories are there for, don't forget!), then that's a whole different ball-game and can lead to well-targeted traffic and sales, because other people are effectively doing some of your off-page SEO for you. But you're very unlikely indeed to achieve that with 300-word articles.
Love the way alexa explains in details Well no the MMO niche is only for the experienced affiliate/ The ones that already have quite some lists. Al.
Can I ask what are better ways for backlinks than articles? I have been article marketing for a while and know it works to a degree for backlinks but knowing better strategies for SERPs ranks is something that eludes me (sorry to be off topic). However for traffic generation I would definitely go for Ezine articles. However ... Check the ezine articles that already show for the phrase first and see what you need to beat and how many other competing articles in ezine are there first. You might get the first position for a few days but often the higher ranked articles will quickly take their place back unless you promote your article again and again. If the articles are a decent length and decent quality you might consider squidoo also and even hubpages for traffic though hubpages is really picky. I have had some decent traffic from scribd too but it is quite variable.
And if you promote your articles on EZA rather than promoting your own site, in the long run you're simply ensuring that EZA will always continue to outrank you for your own keywords, and all the time you do that you're making it increasingly difficult for yourself ever to own an authority site, which is of course where the real money is. Those are intrinsically advertising farms just like EZA is. It's simply another way to feed a proportion of the income from your traffic into someone else's pocket. As part of a backlinking strategy, of course, they can be super-useful, but as primary sites for traffic purposes they're really counter-productive to your own long-term interests.
I have long dropped Hubpages and Squidoo out of the scheme simply because, just as Alexa said they're making the big bucks while the affiliate is struggling to drive a little traffic to their landing pages. Squidoo and hubpages both have totally different purposes, from my point of view, there's completely different things to be marketed in these type of communities, but not Clickbank. Ezinearticles.com is slightly different. With a solid, call to action in your resource box you can have a rather interesting click through rate. A normal click through rate ranges between 10% and 25%. However some articles get a click through rate of 40% and even higher depending on your resource box, still ezinearticles.com is a great article directory to use. Al.
Post comments on relevant blog post pages, make a nice post in a relevant forum and put your link at the bottom, look for 3 way link exchanges, post articles on sites like ehow, helium, etc. (there are tons of them) You should submit to the sites that rank well, no customer ever goes to ezinearticles, AB, GA, squidoo or elsewhere to search for real information. EZA is good because it ranks well on its own. Republication won't bring you much traffic (zero in most cases) but it'll be good for your own sites if you have used appropriate anchor links in the ezinearticle. The best ones are ezinearticles, articlesbase, goarticles, easyarticles, sooperarticles, articlerich (needs bigger articles), articlefeeder, articlesnatch, articlealley, articledashboard, ideamarketers, amazines, a1articles, artipot, articles4reprint, article-content-king, bharatbhasha, freebie-articles, etc. There are other sites that aren't article directories but you can still submit there. For example ehow, helium, docstoc, scribd, zimbio, etc. What more you wanna know
The only problem I see is that nearly all blogs have nofollow tags in their comments. So you might get a little bit of traffic from them but they do not count for backlinking. Again Ehow i believe is nofollow, i dont know about helium .... but basically we are back to articles marketing as a form of backlinking to gain SERPS. Link exchanges I guess are the thing but I have no idea where to find people willing to do that!
Find out the dofollow blogs and comment on them. Don't use the nofollow ones. You can easily find out how to find dofollow blogs. Just do a simple search here or on Google. Ehow is great for traffic. So is helium to some extent. For surviving in the online space, you need traffic more than backlinks. So these sites are all good for you! You can find people willing to do that in the Link Exchange Forum right here. Also checkout 3 way link exchange methods and tips by doing a simple search on Google. Hope that helps ~~