Here’s a post I just made over at Warrior Forum based on my own experience. What do you think - do you agree or disagree?
Article marketing is great. The traffic is highly targetted. Within a couple of days of posting on a high PR directory such as Ezinearticles, you can get a portion of the highly targetted SEO traffic filtering through to your own site.
However, in my opinion, this strategy is limited because the traffic drops off severely. Because the article hits the sandbox within a few days, the search engine traffic dries up.
And because your article quickly gets buried on the directory, hardly anyone will find it, let along click through.
In my experience, the traffic drops to less than 5% of the peak.
But what about the SEO value of the high PR backlinks, I hear you say?
Come on, do you seriously think that Google looks at 30, 50 or more backlinks all coming from the same 1-4 directories and places anywhere near the same value as even a handful of natural links from many different websites?
In my opinion, you should capture the article traffic in the form of an opt-in page with nowhere else to navigate.
And just put a few articles per site on the directories, maybe 30 tops. Put the rest of them as content on your own site. As long as you are aiming for the long tail then you will get way more traffic in the long term compared to fighting for the crumbs that the directories will give you.
Just my tuppence.
PS maybe I should have posted this on my blog instead 
Comments 2
Chris, interesting topic…I’ll disagree. The majority of traffic coming to my niche sites is directly attributable to article marketing.
While I will agree that there is usually a significant dropoff in traffic after a few days or a week, some well-written articles with titles that target the right keywords will continue to drive relevant traffic for months (if not years) to come. That won’t happen with every article but if you write 30 articles there are bound to be some long-term winners.
As for links, keep in mind that its not just the article directory links you’re after. Your article could get picked up by other sites and blogs too. Most of the time these are low quality links, but when a good blog with a loyal readership reprints your article you’ll get another nice traffic boost.
Finally, I do agree with your statement that article traffic should be directed toward a narrow path leading to the action you want them to take. A opt-in page is a perfect example. Another method I use is a landing page with an affiliate link front and center. You don’t want to confuse them with too many choices.
Thanks again for the thoughtful post.
Posted 28 Mar 2008 at 6:52 pm ¶Hi Mike,
Yes that’s very interesting what you say. I have found that nearly all article traffic drops off except for some strange examples where I get a 3 word phrase that I am ranked highly on google for.
And this despite there being some hefty competition (e.g. a KEI of hundreds or thousands). Clearly this is nearly impossible to recreate without knowing Google’s algorithm and is just pot luck otherwise.
One thing I don’t seem to be very good at is as you correctly mention, getting your articles syndicated elsewhere. I am pretty good at writing mediocre articles but no good at writing excellent ones
Posted 06 Apr 2008 at 12:19 pm ¶Post a Comment