I watched some videos from a few online marketers as I'm prone to do from time to time. This one used article marketing for one of their main traffic getters and was crazy about Ezine Articles, so I decided to do a little checking up on it. I went to the SEO category, clicked on an article, scrolled down to the most popular in 90 days section, and clicked on the top article there (
this one).
Any guesses on how many views that article has received in the last month?
1074.
Let's say that article got a 25% click-through-rate to the author's blog (I'll be generous). That's just over 250 clicks. 250 views on their webpage and how many of those convert to whatever it is they're trying to sell or clicked on one of their ads? My guess would be 0, but we'll give them a 2%, which would be 5 people.
The article was 461 words, which, if you type at 50 words a minute, would take just over 9 minutes of typing. Add a 40 minutes of constructing your message, editing your title and content, maybe 5 minutes of keyword research, and 5 minutes of submitting the article itself. That's an hour total. What do you get paid per hour?
$20? So for 5 conversions in a single month, you paid $20. That's assuming that your article gets that many views in a crowded article niche. When the article expires after 30 days, it's basically worthless unless it gets put in one of the most viewed categories and then it's only good for 90 days. It'll disappear from view after that point and fall into the void of millions of poorly-written articles that never surface again.
What could you do with $20 with AdWords and targeted traffic? What if visitors first encountered your message on a page that you controlled 100% - everything from design to links to wording? What could you do if you regularly wrote good content for your blog, developed good standing in the search engines so that it stays at the top rather than disappearing, and won over a large reader base?
Just some thoughts to think about when you consider writing articles for an article directory.