Article Marketing - Why It Is STILL the Most Effective Way to Get Traffic

Article marketing may not be sexy and exciting but anyone who takes the common view that it's old fashioned and "out of date" is making a huge mistake. There is no better way to drive a constant, free stream of highly qualified traffic to your website.

Why it's fallen out of favour, I think, comes down to two things:

First, there's no denying it's harder work than it used to be to get substantial traffic with article marketing. Even as recently as 5 years ago, if you had a couple of dozen good-quality articles driving traffic from a popular article marketing site to your own site, you were getting a lot of hits. Nowadays, though, it's a very different story and you need perhaps ten times that number to get the same results. Ahhh... instant panic at the thought of your having to write a few hundred articles... but it's nowhere near as hard as you think, and the results you get are very quickly going to become a real rocket up your tailpipe. More on that in a moment.

And secondly, it's perceived as being somewhat old-fashioned. If you've been in the Internet marketing business for a while, or even if you've just been looking at it, you'll probably have seen how rapidly new whizzbang gizmos and funky technology comes along and everyone's suddenly doing the cool new dance. First it was audio, then video, then blogging, then social media... on and on, and round and round. Now, I'm not saying these other strategies don't work... but I am saying they're not really anything new, not in substance: driving traffic to your website, and then converting visitors to buying customers (and there's always someone willing to take your money to divulge these new "hidden secrets" to you).

In fact, even this isn't anything new in itself: the only really modern thing about it is the fact it involves a "website". Entrepreneurs have been doing this for over 100 years. I won't pretend article marketing is sexy and exciting; nor will I pretend it's all new and shiny and, for most people, that talking into a camera or microphone isn't easier than writing.

In short, article marketing is old fashioned, dull, boring, and, so some will tell you, ineffective.

And how wrong they are. I confess: I once thought all this myself a long time ago. I was arrogant enough to assume because I don't read online articles, no one else does, either; what's more, I assumed because the sites were often pig-ugly and clunky, they'd be a waste of time.

And how wrong I was.

But you don't have to take my word on this - let's look at the numbers and dig out the unarguable proof of this particular pudding.

The numbers we're going to look at come from a blog I'm involved with and have been since day 1. It's my wife's blog, and while she writes the content, I do all the marketing traffic generation and whatnot for it. At the moment, she banks roughly $3,000 a month with a very modest amount of work. She put in a lot of work in the beginning, and she has dominated her niche, but now she focuses on writing articles to drive even more traffic. Her articles get an average of 0.66 clicks per day apiece, with a click-through rate averaging 17.3%. Not every article is equal, though, and her most effective article averages 5.24 click-throughs every day, with a CTR of 27.6%. That's phenomenal.

Here's the really cool stuff: her list converts at 11.34%... and article traffic is over three times more likely to join her list than general SE traffic... which means article traffic is her most valuable traffic and is a hell of a lot easier to get.

Why?

Well, because of the immense kudos a good article marketing site has with Google et al, she can get a first-page and often first-position ranking for a competitive keyword from an article, whereas the same content on her site, even though she practically owns her niche, would be way down the list.

If we take my own site as an example, an article I wrote on a subject ranks #7 with more than 5 million competing pages; my site, on the other hand can be found at about page 13.

But wait! There's even more cool stuff about articles to come!

At present, the clicks she gets from her articles are worth around $500 a month to her. If she doubles the number of articles she has, then that $500 becomes $1,000. And, by and large, this is a cumulative process, rather like saving money in an account and earning interest on it.

Now, up top we mentioned motivation, and shuddered at the thought of having to write a gazillion articles.

Yet, given the numbers, it's really a no-brainer. With some practice almost anyone can write acceptable quality articles in 20 minutes or under. That's three every hour. But let's say you can manage only two. If you put in just three hours a day, that's six articles. Put in five hours and you could make it 10 articles.

If you do that every day for 100 days, you'll have a thousand articles driving 660 highly qualified and motivated visitors (and with my wife's blog that's the same as 52 new optins a day or 5.89 sales, which average about $40).

The only thing stopping most website owners doing this is their own unwillingness to put in the time and effort. No, the articles won't write themselves and you are not going to make a million overnight, no matter who does it.

But those three months are going to pass by anyway, regardless of whether you knuckle down to writing those articles or not - the only question is, will you have done it or won't you?

Your bank account and the Google analytics data will give you the answer, that I can guarantee.


------

Jon McCulloch is an article marketing expert who helps business owners, Entrepreneurs and bloggers drive highly qualified traffic to their websites. To uncover his simple and easily copied strategies, get your free cheat sheet here: http://jonmcculloch.com/article-marketing-and-why-i-love-it/