Johnson.

Article marketing is a popular way to get visitors to your site for one main reason: it’s easy to do. It’s not hard to sit down and type up a 500 word article.  However, a lot of people exploit this fact and abuse article marketing. They call article marketing a numbers game; there is more focus on quantity vs quantity. Could it be made more effective?

Noob article marketers write a heap of articles to just help them understand the niche better. Value they bring to the table might be little, but it’s helping them improve. I myself have done this on occasion, heck, I still do it. I wish I did it from the very beginning since I started affiliate marketing because then I’d be helping other people understand it along the way.

Ideally, the articles you write (or get written for you) should be so good that you don’t have to rely on people finding them, they should be spread around by people who’s emotional centres you hit. The reason why people see it as a numbers game is because, more often than not, they tend to write “generically”, listing facts, “top 3 reasons” blah blah blah, instead of writing things that people want to know.

That’s the ultimate problem with article marketing. I’d say it’s a safe bet that 99% of the content that people bring to the table is pretty redundant and will disappear not only from the search engines but from people’s minds pretty quickly.

Having said all this, I think the problem is actually the way that article marketing first came about. If everyone could write out an article that would get 100 publishers, then no one would need to outsource article marketing. People only outsource it because it’s boring and they want someone else to do their dirty work. But if they really enjoyed the topic and that was communicated across in the articles they wrote, then their results would be reflected by how viral the actual article is.

Now that I think about it, if there weren’t so many crappy articles out there, there probably wouldn’t be so many article directories. Maybe EzineArticles.com wouldn’t even exist (gasp!). Think about it. People submit hundreds of articles to these directories every day. People join Ezinearticles like every minute. Not everyone keeps writing articles. Some people just join up then forget about it. A lot of people write crappy articles and submit them. EzineArticles.com exploits this by putting ads in each article.

I guess one aspect that makes Article Marketing truly a numbers game is the fact that if you write a heap of articles, like over 100, you might be lucky with a few because they’ll end up on the first page of Google and stay there. I’ve got a couple articles like that.

My deal with that however is that it feels hit and miss. Like, you need to spend all that effort writing 100 articles only to have 2 or 3 really good ones. It’s not really marketing at all. It’s luck, grit and patience. You know what I’m saying?

No one’s expecting you to write superb articles each and every single time. That’s crazy. Instead, aim to always hit a certain threshold on the response graph. It will slowly but surely create credibility with your prospects and, at the same time, you’ll naturally get better at writing in general.

As long as you write articles because you are genuinely interested in the topic (or interested in something that relates to it), then that interest will be communicated across to readers. There aren’t enough article writers who write articles that get published like crazy.

In conclusion, I think that Article Marketing, in its current state, is a numbers game, though ideally, it should focus more the quality of the content and try providing excellent value with a marketing focus.

Today I checked the Google Analytics for one of the other websites I own in the fitness niche. I worked really hardcore on it for I think about a month, just churning out article after article until I hit a relapse and had to take a break from Affiliate Marketing altogether.

It’s going well. I mean, the blog isn’t that lovely (I am not a web designer), but despite haven’t not touched it for a couple months, it’s still averaging around 10 visitors a day. I plan to do something with this traffic in July. Hey, it might only be a trickle, but trickle’s are consistent and if you tap away at the right place, you might just crack behind the place where the trickle’s coming from and BAM you got yourself a gush. =p

I checked my traffic sources. I was pleasantly surprised to see that individual pages of mine had been ranked here and there in Google, with a few first pages without even trying. Mind you, they were pages that got like 1 hit a month, but even then, visitors are visitors, no?

This is what got me. When I was doing my crazy article marketing thing for this blog, I’m pretty sure I submitted articles to EzineArticles.com of course, but the smaller article directories like GoArticles.com, ArticleDashboard.com and AssociatedContent.com. However, on the traffic page of Analytics, The only referal websites I could see visitors coming from were Yahoo! Answers and EzineArticles.com.

Hmm…

This is indisputably proof about something. EzineArticles.com is THE place where your articles have the greatest stickage; I hadn’t written an article and pointed it to my blog in like 2 months. The fact that people are still going to my blog is amazing.

So, this increases my understanding about Article Marketing and probably changes my strategy towards it:

1. The articles that go to EzineArticles.com are there  for the long run. It is important that I have links in the bio box; they will give me link juice to my blog.
2. I don’t think I’ve ever seen articles in the organic entries from GoArticles.com. ArticleDashboard.com, a few.
3. My PURPOSE of Article Marketing is dual pronged:

• Unique content on my blog so that more pages can get indexed by the search engines, and also so my blog is not just purely promotional.
• NOT SEO. The articles should be aimed to evoke emotions that help drive sales. I’m relying on the internal searching from the EzineArticles.com directory itself to bring targeted visitors to my website/blog, NOT FROM THE SEARCH ENGINES. For SEO, I’m going to rely on Video Marketing and the 10000 Backlinks Method.

It should be OK if I submit my articles to my blog and just EzineArticles.com. It’s like I’m a “fan” and just publishing something which I find is informative. Hopefully the article itself is good enough for other publishers to do the same and publish it on their own websites.

I’m happy that I’ve realised this. This further strengthens my resolve to be an ethical Affiliate Marketer, someone who doesn’t contaminate the World Wide Web, yet who is able to produce more sales than the “hardcore marketers” who would indulge in this sort of “marketing”.

=)

So tonight I was just scrolling through my mail. I’ve really got to disable that Twitter thing which sends me new adds from people. They’re usually spammers or people who want you to look at their site anyway. And they mysteriously disappear after a while.

I receive an email from Andrew Hansen, a Queensland-based Niche Marketer, just a bit older than me. He’d be 21, 22 now? Anyway, he made one of the first, if not his first video with Camtasia and made it available to his subscribers. Having purchased his e-book, Niche Marketing On Crack, I’ve learnt more about the simple process he undergoes to build niche websites that give me a little but consistent income. Actually, here’s the link to the video here. Helping out a fellow Aussie, you know?

http://highenergyvideos.com/am2/am2.html

He goes through some pretty important things in this video, especially if you’ve been wondering things like whether submitting the same article is duplicate content or not and the purpose of article marketing.

My faith in article marketing has dropped somewhat. I mean, it’s good, it requires sooo much work… I think I’m getting around 10 hits a day to one of my other blogs on fitness, but for all work, it hasn’t been worth much. Not many sales of the e-book that I was promoting. But then I guess I’m sort of losing them on the front page.

Anyway, to get back to Andrew Hansen’s video, he says a couple of things that don’t really sound that convincing. Like he says that submitting the same article to 100 article directories is OK. His logic revolves around the fact that if 100 people publish your article, then it’s obviously quality content. So, submitting your article manually to 100 directories is obviously the same thing.

My problem with that is that I’m sure the Google algorithm has something in it to differentiate a site that is an article directory and a site that puts out quality information. I just thought of something. OK look at it this way. Everyone knows that blogs are awesome ways to get your first marketing ventures up and running quickly, because of their ease of creating many pages quickly and Google’s tendency to index blog pages and respider the site quickly once it knows that that site is an authoritative site.

If you know your blogs well, you know that you can’t just simply keep taking information from other people’s websites, especially authoritative sites. Google will get suspicious and eventually and bomb your site all the way to the bottom (proof needed).

People have thought of doing this already, hence the existence of article submitters like JetSubmitter and ArticleMarketer.com. But another question comes into the balance. Is it worth the time (or money) getting the same article submitted to these lower article directories? There’s a reason that these articles directories are at the bottom and I for one think it’s because they are the dregs of the article marketing tea cup, the last resort that article marketer’s submit their articles to. I for one believe that having your article bought by a publisher and having that backlink displayed on the site would be more “valuable” than having your article submitted by you (or someone you paid) at a lower article directory. So it seems like page rank comes back into the equation.

I guess in the end, a few things do come to mind. Andrew Hansen is a respected and successful Niche Marketer. Far more so than I am. He pays (not much) to have his articles written and submitted for him, so they are all unique. He condones submitting one article to many article directories, so we can presume he does it himself. I’m sure there is a direct correlation between his success and his endorsement of his choice to submit one article to many article directories. There was also a case on EzineArticles.com I think I read, where a guy manually submitted his article(s) to like 100 article directories consistently and got some awesome rankings as a result.

I mean, in the end, results matter. In an ideal world, you’d want to be able to write an article, or have an article written for you, just 1. The article would have to be virtually perfect: naturally SEOed, emotive, visual, funny etc. It would have to be picked up by publishers and be on page 1 of Google, needless of Digg or social bookmarking sites to get it up.

Does such an article writer exist?

In conclusion, this video, for me, has caused more questions to arise that should be answered:

1. Is there any value in submitting one article to many article directories, ranging from good to bad vs submitting one article to only a handful (or one) article directory only?
2. Is there indisputable proof to back this up?
3. Does the existence of article submitters prove that there is value in doing this?
4. Is there anyone who has had great(er) success simply submitting one article to 3-5 article directories per day, say?
5. Is this an effective way to achieve automation of a marketing campaign?