Or…EzineArticles.com Review
Regular readers of my blogs know I’ve been testing article marketing using the article distribution and repository service from Ezine Articles.
Ezine Articles allows writers to publish articles that include a
special area at the end called a resource box. In the resource box the
author leaves a link or two along with a couple of sentences. Other
webmasters and publishers are allowed to reprint the article on their
own websites, newsletters or blogs, as long as they keep the resource
box intact.
You can see an example of one of my articles with the resource box here – http://ezinearticles.com – note the photo isn’t usually part of the resource box, you only see it when you view the article at Ezine Articles.
The idea from the writer’s point of view is that you can increase
your exposure by having your content reproduced around the Internet.
Your are rewarded with one-way incoming links from the resource box, you
don’t have to reciprocate as you would with link exchanges, which in
theory should reward you with better search engine rankings.
From a publisher’s point of view it’s free content. If you are
struggling to keep a regular email newsletter going reprinting articles
can be a fantastic way to reduce your workload. You can also use the
content to populate a blog, website or any publication as long as you
follow the reproduction rules.
My Article Marketing Test
I started article marketing by reprinting a small selection of the articles I published to Entrepreneur’s Journey
from about July 2005 onwards. I didn’t put too much energy into it,
spending a few minutes before I went to bed submitting an article every
few weeks or so. I usually had to modify the articles slightly to make
sure they follow the guidelines (for example you can’t include too many
outgoing links) and it would take about 10-15 minutes to submit each
article.
I devoted the majority of my energy to submitting at
EzineArticles.com because it’s the market leader. Applying an 80/20
approach I figured if I was going to submit articles manually, as
opposed to using automated software, then I should work with the service
with the most traffic. I briefly tested with two other article
directories, both of which had an inferior interface and less traffic
than Ezine Articles. After receiving next to no results from the other
sites I decided to stick to only Ezine Articles.
Last month I submitted my 20th article to Ezine Articles and feel
that I am now in a good position to assess my results. By submitting
more than ten articles to the site I was given “Platinum Status” which
grants me unlimited article submissions, (before that you are limited to
ten). While this sounds great it’s not really that big a deal, as long
as you contribute reasonably coherent articles you will be promoted to
platinum once you clear the threshold (it does make you feel cool though
when it happens).
Incidentally the number of authors at Ezine Articles that have
platinum status follows an 80/20 ratio as well. The greater majority of
authors never make it beyond single figure article counts, with the
prolific writers enjoying the most significant traffic rewards because
they publish many articles, but only a handful of authors are like this.
I am part of the minority in this case, having reached 20 article
submissions, which I hear from “word on the street” is around the mark
when you start to get good results (it’s not a “hard” rule).
Looking At The Numbers
To assess the success of my campaign I looked for two specific results –
- Incoming links from websites
- The number of times the article was reprinted in non-website publications.
The first was easier to track – incoming links from websites – because I could use services like technorati
backlink lookups and my blog statistics so see whether any backlinks
where coming from my republished articles. The other statistic was
harder to track but thanks to a recently introduced feature at Ezine
Articles you can get a fairly good idea how many people are republishing
your articles in newsletters or other non-website sources.
On each article at Ezine Articles there is a quick publish button
that spits out a html-formatted version of the article allowing
publishers to copy and paste the content into a website or email. As an
author I’m provided with statistics on how many times that button is
clicked as well as how many times my article has been viewed, forwarded
by email and a few other neat statistics.
Besides republication it’s important to note that Ezine Articles
itself is becoming quite a good repository of knowledge. While not every
article is written by an expert, and no doubt there are a good chunk of
pretty “light” articles published, there is a broad range of quite
useful articles on many topics. Because of this Ezine Articles gets a
lot of traffic and your articles can be pulled up in internal search
many times.
Total views (pageviews) is included in statistics and I can report at
the time of writing this article my 20 submitted articles are about to
reach 5000 views total. Top authors report figures in the hundreds of
thousands, however they are publishing over 100 articles. You get back
multiples of what you put in and depending on keywords, titles and
subject matter you can expect varying results (more on this below).
Lessons Learnt
Testing Article Titles
Besides the direct traffic results there are some other important
benefits from using article marketing. The one thing I’m really noticing
is how important the article title is.
Those of you who are copywriters or regular bloggers will be well aware
that the title of your articles has the most impact on how often your
article is read. The same of course applies in article marketing but it
also impacts whether your article is republished. Given that most
publishers first search article directories for content, your article
title has to have the right keywords and has to be interesting enough to
be clicked and finally, if you are lucky, republished. That’s a lot of
steps to go through and a lot riding on how good your title is.
Thankfully you can go back and change the title of any article (in
fact you can change any element of your articles at any time but it has
to be re-approved each time), however you should aim to get it right
straight out the door. This is because your article is featured in the
Ezine Articles main highly-trafficked category page when it is first
published and will very quickly drop off as newer articles are published
by other authors. You don’t get this benefit when you go back and alter
an existing article.
Short And Sweet
It’s well known in the article marketing industry that the short,
400-600 word articles, generally get the most traffic. People have short
attention spans and they want quick, easily absorbed tidbits, not long
in depth quality articles (like I write!). Yes okay, I had trouble
adhering to this rule and I still have trouble getting a point across in
so few words. The statistics don’t lie though and the short articles
will get you more exposure and more traffic, so I spent some time
cutting down some of my blog articles to give them a better chance of
syndication.
The Vital Few
Every now and then one article will do much better than all the other
articles. When you get the right combination of a solid title, a brief
word count and a popular topic your article can go viral and be picked
up many times. I can’t really say that any of my articles went viral but
a few did standout while others really struggled.
Quantity Over Quality
Speaking from my experience, most of the backlinks I generated from
article marketing where not from quality sites. I can think back to
maybe one or two instances where I was pleased to see my article
republished in what appeared to be a reputable website, with high
PageRank and a real audience. Most of the time I spotted my article
reproduced at splogs (spam blogs) – websites and blogs that republish
content, slap a bunch of AdSense ads around it and hope to get into the
search engines and make money from it. These still count as backlinks
and help your traffic cause, but it’s really a case of quantity over
quality, which is not sound strategy when it comes to search engine
marketing.
What About The Duplicate Content Penalty?
The duplicate content penalty is a major concern when republishing
content. Remember Google (and other search engines) may penalize
websites that produce duplicate content by removing the page from it’s
index or reducing it’s search ranking. Now my understanding is that the
original source of the article, as in the first place that Google finds
the content or the version it deems as the oldest, won’t be penalized.
This is not a verified claim, I’ve heard counter arguments against it
and in some circumstances if your source content is found after it’s
republished somewhere else (which can often be the case if your site is
not regularly indexed in search engines and the site that republishes
your work is), then it’s your site that risks the penalty.
The answer of course it to modify your article before submitting it
to Ezine Articles or similar directories so it’s not a direct
reproduction of the article on your website. In my case I reduced the
size of most of the articles I submitted so they were not exactly the
same as the originals, although they certainly would have shared
paragraphs so I probably didn’t do enough. I’ve yet to notice any
penalization but there are a lot of forces in play here so if you are
really worried, take the time to modify your articles or only submit
original content.
Automated Article Distribution
Automating article submissions is a very efficient (80/20) thing to
do and as such I don’t recommend manual submission unless you are a
cheap-n-silly control freak like me. At the basic level you can employ a
virtual secretary or administrative assistant to do article submissions
for you. Depending on your results this can be a cost effective means
to market your website, but do a cost/benefit analysis (time vs results)
before hiring someone to do it for you.
There are article submission services that will submit your article
to X number of article directories for $Y dollars, for example – ArticleMarketer.com.
There are also professional software packages that will do the
submission for you, so all you need to do is put your article into the
software and sit back and let it role. Two examples of this software are
ArticleSubmittPro and Jason Potash’s Article Announcer (which I believe takes the cake for longest sales letter ever!).
Article Announcer by Jason Potash
I’m really very keen to try this software because it comes from Jason
Potash and he has a fantastic reputation (along with all the other
marketing gurus in his inner circle like John Reese, Armand Morin and
Jeff Walker – a big shout out to Mike Long as well!). At the moment the
sales copy on Article Announcer didn’t convince me to spend the nearly
$400 to buy the full package although I may yet give it a go. Apparently
the software is really only half of the value and the education
provided from the articles and audio are equally important.
I did email Jason (or his support staff anyway) to ask for a review
copy for this blog but unfortunately I was turned down. All I have got
to go on is what I have read in forums and reviews of Article Announcer.
The software, while being certainly more efficient than manual
submission, isn’t completely automated and you apparently still need to
do some grunt work to submit your articles to all the different
directories. Anyway, until I get a copy of Article Announcer all I can
do is speculate.
Is Article Marketing Worth The Time?
Yes and no. I don’t feel at this point with only 20 articles
published, my on-again, off-again efforts and no testing of an automated
system that I can make a conclusive judgement. I like the concept, I
think it’s better than link exchanges in some ways because you get
one-way links but bad in others because many of the links come from poor
quality websites. The potential for a viral explosion makes it very
tempting and certainly if you work in mainstream niche industries (is
that an oxymoron?) then your results may be fabulous (I’d love to hear
about it if you have stories to tell – leave a comment please!).
Something else worth noting is the benefit of appearing as an “expert
author” at EzineArticles.com. This is a powerful credibility tool and
handy search engine optimization trick. Thanks to Ezine Article’s
significant presence in search engines (high PageRank and lots of
backlinks) web searches for your name will often pull up your author
homepage. If your name is reasonably common and faces a lot of
competition in the search engines, your Ezine Articles expert author
page may have enough of an edge to make certain that any searches for
your name result in you as the first result. Your author homepage
includes details that you can change anytime and you may include web
links back to your own website or blog.
For an example of an author homepage at Ezine Article you can see mine here – Yaro Starak – EzineArticles.com Expert Author.
The other thing I like about Article Marketing, which is one of the
main reasons I like blogging as well, is that it contributes to your
overall exposure one little bit at a time. Personal branding
is about lots of little things adding up to a tipping point where
amazing things can happen (think mainstream media coverage and even
penetration into the public consciousness).
Your traffic keeps coming because you have lots of little streams
pouring in from many different sources. Article marketing is another
stream. Unless you do some major publicity work, pull off a media stunt,
or are already famous, using many techniques over time is one of the
best marketing methodologies available to you. You may not reach that
tipping point quickly, but it will happen, and your traffic foundations
will be like a diversified investment portfolio – solid.
