Why Article Marketing does not work
If you visit just about any Internet Marketing type forum, you will find people advising you to submit articles to directories such as Ezinearticles to build backlinks and traffic your website or blog. I will admit I followed that advice when I first started out, but I quit. Article Marketing is an okay practice if you are doing Bum Marketing and don’t have a website, but why would you just give out your valuable content? The links you get back are usually not worth anything and in my experience they rarely return your investment. Search Engine Journal has a great post on how to market your articles without using the distribution directories and their advice makes a lot of sense. Its your content and you should get the benefits of that content. If you are passing it out freely then you are just passing those potential profits off to a third party. i.e. You won’t see any money, and the backlinks and traffic you may gain from submitting the articles can be accomplished in other more creative ways for generating traffic.
Lets face it Internet Marketing is hard no matter what method you choose to pursue. If anyone tells you that if you just buy this eBook and follow the directions and you will be making thousands a day in two weeks, then they are lying to you. Now while I don’t dispute the fact that you can learn some methods from some eBooks that will work, but I don’t subscribe to the fact that you can implement one method and have it earning you thousands of dollars of self sustaining income. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Internet Marketing is a numbers game and your content is the building block for winning the game.
- Content + Traffic + Proper Monetization = Revenue
It is very possible to earn a lot of money with just a little content, but its a lot harder to get a lot traffic to just a little content than it is to get a little traffic to each bit content. Multiply this by more content and anyone can see that the revenue will follow. Of course creating all this content is either really expensive if you pay others to create it or very time consuming if you develop it all yourself. The only other way to get a lot of content is to get your users to create it for you. If you can develop an application that provides methods for your visitors to create content and in a method that compels them to create it then you will be successful, but even with this you still need the content. I would like to hear of just one site that is considered a mega earning site that does not have an enormous amount of content. One does not exist. I’m not talking about a sales page that is selling some make you rich overnight eBook, but a site that has a self sustaining audience that keeps coming back. The bottom line without content you can’t make a decent living in Internet Marketing, so don’t give your content away unless you are guaranteed of a decent return on your investment.
Technorati tags: article marketing, seo, generating traffic, making money
Tagged with: article marketing • generating traffic • revenue • SEO
Filed under: Internet Marketing
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Having run an article directory for 2 years with over 240,000 articles – I can say that you partly correct and partly in correct.
If you have a ton of great content for one topic and you want to put it only on your site – that is a great idea. However – it is also a great idea to give away some content and have it distributed to the masses. Remember if someone reads an article on another site (or newsletter) and they go wow – this guy is smart and knows what he is talking about – they are likely to click on the link.
However – if you never had your stuff out there – then you are removing the chances for all these people to see your content.
Another factor that most people forget is that successful article marketers do not submit one article a year and hope for the best… they submit tons of them…
Matt, thanks for the comment. In one sense you make a valid argument for someone who already has a lot of content and to post it on their site may be redundant. In that case then it make make sense to put some of it out on the article distribution sites, but for someone just starting out it does not make sense. It would be a better use of their time to use that content on their own sites. You assume that most people who grab articles from an article directory keep the bio links in tact, when in fact the opposite happens. While there are a few people who keep the links in tact, many either make the link inactive or remove it all together. I’ve seen this happen on countless sites.
Most people start in internet marketing to earn some money and most of these people do not have a large reserve of cash lying around. If these people would keep their content and post it on their own sites then they would receive more benefit from their efforts than posting hundreds or thousands of articles on someone else’s domain.
Bruce
Submitting to sites like EZine is just too much work and for too little the reward. I rather just put it on my blog and get some SEO benefit and more content in my blog instead.