You answered your own question. The poker niche is one of the most competitive niches, so it's only common sense that you will have more competitors fighting for the same keywords.
Even though I don't waste my time publishing articles at ezine I have 21 articles published with 457 views. The best part about publishing articles there is because some people will publish your articles in their websites and you will get a free backlink.
I also noticed that but usually those sites are autoblogs so I don't know if that free backlink is of any benefit
I also agree that articles are a good way to get some targeted backlinks to your site... but it isnt much of a source to generate traffic to your website.... sometimes you do get lucky when you do get a short influx in traffic from an article but just keep on trying it will only do more good than bad.... Good Luck... If you are really looking to fast quality traffic use ads such as adwords....
If a market is very competitive then go to the areas of that market that are less so. Don't compete with the big sites for big time keywords. Focus on smaller ones that are much easier to achieve. A marketing goal of getting to the top of the first page on ten much lesser popular keywords is far more likely to be successful, an still net you great traffic, and maintain that success than an attempt to get the "holy grail" of poker keywords.
I hate the phrase "content is king" It makes me physically ill reading and writing it, but it's true. On my off time I'll write articles for the fun of it, then go back and do some keyword altering/adding; reread it to make sure it still flows well, then submit it. Keep writing, learn to write better, learn to write in a way that guides and interests readers into going to other parts of your site (no duh, right, but it's seldom done well by amateurs).
I have written (mainly rewrite) over 10,000 articles and submit to ezinearticles for the past 12 months, and I am making $200/day by promoting clickbank products.
I dont think thats bad... all he does now is just sit there and watch $200 come in every day.. Im sure it goes up and down but thats not a bad number.
Make sure you are targeting terms with decent search volume and low competition. Get links to the articles also.
That's $73,000 in gross income every year. In this economy that's nothing to sneeze at. I'm sure there are people who have much better numbers with that volume and people who do worse. Point is, it's money in their pocket each and every day.
I've just started submitting to article directories, and I have seen small results even after a couple articles.
But the matter is there may be thousands of such or related articles. That could be the reason of distribution of traffic.
There are only 2 guys on ezine with over 10k articles. What are the chances that this guy is one of them?
Article writing and article submission helps you in getting backlink. Especially when your article is published in top article sites such as ezine, you get high boost in search engine ranking. It happened two times with me. However, for getting traffic through article sites, it depends on how interesting you can write an article. For this, you really need a creative hand for writing which unfortunately most people do not have. Always remember, article writing and article reading are two different scenarios. I suggests you to go for press Release distribution, that will be more helpful to you.