Does Article Marketing Work?

Does Article Marketing work?  This is a valid question for anyone who has been submitting articles to the major article directories for any length of time.  In the last couple of years, we have seen major changes in Google’s search results ranking algorithm, and these changes have deeply affected the content farms such as EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, GoArticles, and all of the other popular article directories.

Furthermore, these changes have deeply affected my personal Article Marketing efforts, forcing myself to ask the questions:  Does Article Marketing work for the long-term?  How much time should I devote to submitting articles?  Or should I stop altogether and accept my losses?

My experiences with Article Marketing…

Does Article Marketing work for me?  Let me first share my personal experiences with Article Marketing.

I submitted my very first article to EzineArticles in May of 2010.  Since then, I have submitted hundreds of articles; the majority to my EzineArticles account and a good number to ArticlesBase.  These were my two preferred article directories.  I might add that I have not submitted a single article since February 2011, but mainly because I have focused my time on building this blog.

From May 2010 through Feb. 2011, I submitted a total of 275 articles to EzineArticles.

I submitted another 107 articles to ArticlesBase.

I might mention that I did submit a handful of articles to two more article directories, but for the sake of this post, I will leave those out.

Until Google came out with changes to their algorithms which deeply affected EzineArticles and ArticlesBase, traffic was very good.  My articles were averaging 300-400 views per day with a click-through-rate (CTR) of about 5%.  Meaning 5% of those visitors were clicking my article resource box links to visit my website.  Does Article Marketing work for me?  At the beginning, it was driving good traffic.

But once Google made changes to their algorithms, and especially when they released Google Panda in February 2011 , my article statistics dropped, and dropped dramatically.

Does it work? You are about to see my devastating results…

Today, my articles average approximately 20 views per day, sometimes less, sometimes more.  That is 382 unique articles that I personally wrote averaging 20 views per day.  Makes me want to cry!

Every article that I have submitted includes links back to this very blog.

My 275 articles in my EzineArticles account currently sends this blog about 25 visitors per month.

My 107 articles in my ArticlesBase account sends even less.

Does Article Marketing work for me?  Doing the math between these two article directories, this blog receives maybe 50 visitors per month out of 382 articles that I have personally written and published to these two directories.  Does Article Marketing work?  Well, if you look at my personal statistics, Article Marketing is no longer working for driving traffic.  I am hoping that this is just temporary.  But it does add another benefit, so keep reading.

Articles do provide other benefits:

Even though my articles are not sending me the traffic that I would like, they are providing backlinks.  As you know, backlinks are a marketer’s best friend that provide search engine juice to your website or blog.  The more backlinks that you have, the more relevant your site appears to the search engines, and the more likely they will rank your site for keywords that you are competing for.

Also, webmasters and site owners are constantly looking for free content to post on their website and blogs.  To find this free content, they head over to sites like EzineArticles and Articlesbase to publish free articles on their site.  This furthermore increases your backlink potential.  The more backlinks that you have on more sites across the web, the better off you will be.  However, this is where writing QUALITY articles comes in.  If all you are doing is submitting junk to the directories, no one is going to want to publish that article on their site.  Quality is the key.  With quality in mind, Article Marketing does work for creating backlinks.

I do have faith that my article traffic will increase again over time.  Sites like EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, and others are working extremely hard to increase their standards in accepting only high-quality content, and as they continue to do this, I believe that they will once again become favorable in the search engines.  If I am right, this will benefit all of us.

But regardless, even though I have seen a huge decrease in the traffic that my articles send to this blog, I still believe that Article Marketing continues to provide many SEO benefits.

To make Article Marketing work for you, my only word of advice is this:  I made the mistake of only using a total of 4 article directories with the majority of my articles going to EzineArticles and ArticlesBase.  If I could go back, I would have diversified my choice of directories and submitted articles to many more of them.  Even though I have 382 backlinks split up between these two directories, for SEO purposes, it is better to have 382 backlinks from 20, 40, or 50 sites.  The more the better!

What are your thoughts?  Does Article Marketing work for you?

Category: Article Marketing Tips