Article Marketing – Is It a Numbers Game?

Let’s continue our exploration on article writing and marketing with a fascinating question. Is article marketing a numbers game? Meaning the more articles you post, the more visitors you’ll get. Or, is it more dependent upon your keyword research and search engine optimization effort? Meaning, you write only a couple of high quality articles then build tons of back links for them. Rinse and repeat. To tackle this question, I’ll ask you another question (Whoa, enough with questions, Andi!).

What’s Your Purpose?

No, not your purpose in life. But the purpose of you writing and marketing articles.

If your purpose is to build back links to your main blog or site so that it can rank better in search engine result pages (SERPs), then you’ll need to post a lot of articles and submit them to the top article directories. You’ve to write and submit at least 10 articles per day. Those articles must contain links back to your site with your chosen keywords as the anchor text. They don’t have to be good articles, but they have to be unique and legible. Because the main function of your articles here is just as back links sources.

But, if your purpose is to drive tons of traffic to your site, you’ll only need a couple of informative and user-friendly articles that are optimized to your chosen keywords. Write and submit those articles to top article directories, then build tons of back links to them. Statistics have shown that most clicks only occur among the top 3 results on Google. Think about it….most of the time when you search on Google, which results do you tend to click on first? So, in short, it’s not enough to get into Google SERPs. You need to be in the top 3.

So, how do you grab one of the top three spots in Google? Simple. First, research your competition. Check the strength of your competition, then if you think it’s possible, choose the same keywords and outrank them. You can outrank them by building back links to those articles using forum signatures, social bookmarking, etc. Learn more about effective link building tactics.

Also remember to use web 2.0 properties or article directories that are not currently in the top 10. So, if you see Squidoo and Ezine Articles in the top 10 result for that keywords, use Go Articles. The point is that Google leans towards diverse domains. Therefore, use whatever domain that has a high enough Google PageRank (PR) but not currently in the top 10 for that keyword phrase.

So, Which One is Better?

Andi, I still can’t decide. Just tell me, which one is better already and be done with it!

As, I said above it’s really depending on you. But if you asked me, I’ll personally choose the latter. I used to believe using articles to build back links to my main site is the way to do article marketing. But, now, I don’t think it’s nearly as effective as writing good quality articles; those that are truly unique, informative, and optimized and submitting them to article directories. These type of articles, at least for me, seem to stay in the search engines much longer and at a higher position. Also, in many cases, my site may not even be ranked for a keyword and yet I get a lot of traffic because the article is ranking so high in Ezine Articles.

So, I believe in the long run it does pay to have good, informative and unique articles even if it may cost a little more in terms of time and money. Traffic, not back links, is the bloodlines of an online business after all. Feel free to comment or tweet it if you like it.

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