The Awful Truth About Article Marketing

For somebody just starting out with Internet marketing, and for the other folks who have been around awhile and know through trial and error what works best, article marketing is probably the single most cost-effective way to get backlinks to your web site and to build traffic. No matter how you slice it traffic is the lifeblood of Internet marketing. It doesn’t matter what your web site looks like, who designed your template, whether or not it’s a blog or how good your content is, who did your graphics or how stunning they may be, without enough traffic each month to make the typical 1% or 2% conversions profitable you got nothing.

There are other paths to building Internet traffic and I am not suggesting for a moment that article marketing is the only way to do it, and for some people it may not even be the best. I do not care about, at least not for our current purposes.

The awful truth of article marketing is that if you want to build traffic to your web site by using this method then you have to write a lot of articles. How many is a lot? There is no specific answer to that question. It may be one article per day, it may be 10 articles per day or maybe even more. There is an old saying that you hear sometimes at salesmanship seminars, “When you’re done pumping, let go the handle.” What that means is that once you have finished your pitch and asked a closing question like “Will that be the red or the blue model?” then shutup and be quiet.

Article marketing presents the same kind of problem but in reverse. People are not pumping the handle enough. They submit one or two articles to ezine articles or make a submission to other article directories and hope for the best. If a little water trickles out of the pump and they get a couple extra visitors to their website or maybe move the site up in the Google rankings for a keyword or two a little bit they feel like they have accomplished the task.

How do I know that? Because that is exactly the way I had been doing it. It wasn’t until I caught on that promotion was way more important than just building a number of web sites, and I really researched the topic, that I discovered that the successful marketers were writing and submitting as many articles as it took to get their targeted keywords above the fold on the first page of Google.

I think that once you internalize and accept that “as many as it takes” really means that you are going to have to do a lot of work to get your targeted keyword in a top position so that you can actually make money with it, a whole new way of thinking sets in. Number one, if you are going to bust your butt with article marketing to get a keyword ranked then you had better be sure that that keyword is worth it. Keyword research is a whole topic in and of itself and I’m going to leave that for a later time, but whatever method you use to target potentially profitable keywords spend more time with it and be a little more diligent. Check the competition for that keyword more thoroughly. Know what web sites are already above the fold for that keyword. Are they all authority sites, or are the top couple sites amazon or other shopping network sites? You can usually knock off a shopping site but an authority site with hundreds of backlinks to the internal page containing the keyword and thousands of backlinks to the authority site itself is too steep a hill to climb.

The number two thing I learned was that once I had a targeted keyword that I felt I had a good chance to get above the fold with was that it may take 10 or 20 articles to get the results that I wanted. Most people do not like to write articles. Most people do not like to write at all. Unless you have the money to pay somebody to write your articles for you, and most new Internet marketers do not, then you have to be prepared to bite the bullet.

If this were a live seminar than this is where most people would leave the room. Maybe it is the culture, maybe people have always been like this, but nobody wants to be told that they are going to have to work, and work damn hard, to succeed with their Internet business. If you think you are up for it then hang with me. I can show you the approach that I took to systematize article writing and make it go a little faster and a little easier.