Hi Fellow CBers, I have a habit of making long posts. I want to share my story with you all.. I have been submitting articles on ezinearticles for long. I never thought of using other directories or just didn't do it as EZA worked fine for me. Submitting on ezinearticles is a nice way to make quick money and it guarantees you instant traffic as long as there is no one else competing for the same keywords as yours. You do need to build backlinks to your ezinearticles if you want to rank them higher than other EZA submitters and other competing sites. There are various methods of building backlinks and they do require a lot of hard work. I do have lots of articles at EZA & some content sites too. I have always thought to focus on just one thing - either EZA or my own content sites but always ending up doing both of them (mostly EZA) I was just doing some calculations and found that submitting to EZA may not be as profitable as your own content sites. Here's why: (Do let me know what you think about this, so that we all can hope to improve our work in future) Ezinearticles simply sucks big time! They have lots of ads. They have placed the ads so as to get the maximum Adsense CTR. They add about_blank to all outgoing links. That's bad. They don't allow promotional links in the article body, not even a single one (unlike GA & AB). The CTR hardly reaches 25% on an average for all my articles. Just as an example, I have a site that converts 1 for every 200 visitors (Visitors, not hops) I have 25% CTR for EZA articles so I need about 800 EZA views to make a single sale. So, I was thinking that I can get the same sales if i manage to get 1/3rd (Or lesser) of the visitors to my own site. Why my own site? I don't have any adsense there. No Leakage. I own it. No Risks! I can have banners, that result in more CTR. I can even flip the site if I need some urgent cash. =>> You get all the SB traffic to your own site rather than EZA. EZA is banned at any SB sites, but your site isn't!! I am a SEO guy and i have seen clients doing large scale SEO for their affiliate sites. I have done it for them & I can tell you that it generates HUGE profits but does require HUGE investments in the beginning. They use methods that not more than 3% of the affiliates (even lesser) use. Most affiliates including myself simply don't have that much risk appetite to compete with these guys & they are moving beyond affiliate marketing. (I hope you get what i mean) Affiliate marketing is very profitable but it is getting more and more difficult day by day. I'm thinking of another strategy: Use all your articles on your own content site first. Have no leakage, use glowing banners & a big link after the first paragraph so that you get most of the visitors to click to the main sales page (whether its your product or as an affiliate) Use no adsense, nothing like that. Once the articles on your site are all indexed, rehash them a bit & submit on sites other than EZA Submit them everywhere you can. You'll get approved fast & get free referral traffic. You get some easy backlinks too. You can still make a lot of quick money using EZA but a long term strategy must involve your own content sites and not just the greedy EZA! What do ya guys think? Do let me know.
Makes sense to me! And youve continued with your reputation of long posts Of course EZA are going to try to place their adsense in places people are likely to click. THey are more interested in making money for themselves than for us
There's some good points and some bad points you have there.. You will never be able to get as much traffic to your domain as you would to EZA. EZA is an authority site that gets pretty much all its traffic from google/yahoo, thus it's ranking pretty high the the SERPs. I can rank an article within 24-48 hours and start seeing sales, whilst on my newly registered domains that would be just a dream. Try to raise the quality of your articles, write copy not "Poems", improve your CTR rate and you'll get better results. Since you're complaining about EZA then I can figure out that you haven't made that much money all together. Now I would completely disagree with you .. and I feel that you're more likely to ask a question if it would work rather than coming up with something tested. I'll get you the answer below Using your own domains is one of the worst marketing ideas .. I have been failing on an on trying to rank .infos and .coms simply because I always want a fast return on investment/fast cash and your own domain won't help you much, especially if it's an affiliate site. It can take ages to get a newly registered domain on the first page of google and time is money, we're all looking for more lucrative/profitable marketing ideas rather than wasting our time for pennies. Al.
I agree to a point with this, in that you will get higher traffic to an EZA article straight away (unless you have a killer PR site / blog), but I think jacky8 is right about leakage, and perhaps 100 people on your blog, with a focus, no leakage etc is worth the same as 200 people to an EZA article as they can click ads, go to other "related" articles from different authors etc. + what if they subscribe to your rss, join your mailing list, keep coming back to the site etc - you gain a lot more value from them then.. A lot of people would disagree with this. I know what you mean with regards to a brand new site, but in the long term it can be great - if you can build a successful blog / niche site and get it ranking and respect in google within a few months or so then when you post articles there they will rank. I have a very simple blog which I use as well as / instead of EZA. It gets a total of 4-600 visits a day now, is PR2, and if I do my keyword research I can get articles to the google top 10 within a week with just a little work. I agree, it was useless in the beginning, but 4-6 months later, with 100-150+ posts on it, it now does work pretty well - and the traffic does convert.
@offermp - Glad that you looked and hopefully it made sense for you. @Chimpanzee - Yes, I can't simply stop once i start writing. Glad that it made sense for you. There is a lot we miss out on by using just EZA. @precious007 - You are right that EZA can result in some quick sales. But consider the things you are gonna lose. EZAs don't get the first ranking on their own. Many nice keywords are saturated & you have to build backlinks to your articles. Why not build links to your own site instead? Your post was made out of experience. So was mine. I'm not planning to ditch eza at all! It is still a big money maker. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to outrank other guys submitting articles for the same keywords. ==>There is a standard link assault that i have to do for all ezinearticles so as to outrank others. That is what makes me feel like maybe I could do that for myself rather than throwing all my traffic to adsense blocks. I have seen my clients maintaining an authority site on a single niche. I can't simply divulge all the details but here is what they do. Actually I do a major part of it for them. They build an authority site on a single niche with about 50 HQ articles 500 words each. They promote a product on that site (many times their own HQ product). They manage to get a CTR of 65% (or more) to the sales page link. They use highly expensive ways to rank all their articles on the first page. I won't go into the specifics but they buy links and set up their own properties to build links. All the work requires a minimum investment of $15K before it starts showing up HUGE profits. True that most affiliates including myself can't do that, but we must find ways to squeeze the maximum profits out of our investment and hard work.
@submp3s: It all depends on how you think. Some marketers rely entirely on their own sites while some do the opposite. There are others like me that rely more on EZA and have a few of their own sites too. You have reached a nice stage. If you can have a few such sites & keep building links regularly, you may have a more reliable source of money. ==>And you can rest assured that you will have something in your hands at the time when you get a bad surprise shock by EZA
Few good point made there about EZA but at the end of the day it boils down to you having to use them because they are too valuable to cut out. its like not having your website index in google so unfortunately we gotta drag along
Also perhaps after 6, 12 months if I want to walk away from my own built "article site" I could sell it - it is an asset, wheras if it's just all on EZA I walk away and the sales slow to a trickle..