Article Marketing: Truly A Numbers Game?
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Article 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.