In the spirit of transparency, and because it was so well received in Colleen’s article…
Plus because I think there are some interesting points to note here. I thought I’d share a shot from my own Ezinearticles.com account too…
So this is from my account:
I’ve posted 800 articles over the past – I suppose 3 years now – but most of them within the past 18 months.
As marketers we have to be always asking ourselves how effective is the method of traffic generation we’re using; how much is it costing us and how many new leads, or customers are we getting per dollar we spend or per day we work.
If you work 3 hours a day writing articles and submitting them for traffic – is that the MOST visitors you could get from that 3 hours of work?
If you spend $X to submit an article – is that the MOST visitors you could get from that $4?
Here’s some interesting calculations based on the above figures…
Fortunately for me, the majority of the 800 articles weren’t written by me 
But I have a cost in submitting them which is important for me to monitor.
So let’s say I spend on average $4 per article – written and submitted to Ezine articles. (which is true by the way – I usually pay $3 for an article of 300 words, and $1 extra for a submission)
That means 797 articles have cost me $3188
So I’ve spent $3 grand on traffic generation – what has it gotten me?
It’s gotten me 27716 url clicks, or visits to my sites.
So I’ve spent $3188 to get 27716 – let’s for the sake of simplicity say these are all unique visitors.
That means I’ve spent an average of 11c per visitor.
I think that’s not too bad – I mean, to contrast, if you were doing PPC marketing, getting visitors for 11c a click is pretty good – and there aren’t many decent markets left where you can do that.
So these results are ok, but we’re failing to take into consideration a couple of things…
First, these stats don’t count the traffic that’s come from people who have clicked on my article that’s been published on someone elses site.
This doesn’t count articles that I’ve published to multiple directories and the traffic they’ve generated.
So already, the 11c thing is looking a little shaky - that alone probably brings it down to more like 8c.
But there’s also MASSIVELY important factor at play here.
The thing is, that if I stop submitting articles tomorrow, the 800 articles that I’ve submitted will still be getting traffic and they’ll still be sending visitors to my site.
They’ll still be getting found in ezinearticles listings – they’ll still be getting found in the search engines, and they’ll still be getting found on other people’s websites who have republished them.
If you have a logical kind of brain, you’ll see that this means that over time, the cost of each visitor I generate through article marketing is always decreasing.
To give you an example, I refreshed my EZA account half way through this day and I saw that the number of URL Clicks (or visits to my site) had increased by 100!
I didn’t submit any articles during this time – it was just my old ones still getting found.
What this means is, that over a long enough period of time, the cost to me, of generating a visitor through my article submissions becomes negligible! Theoretically, over infinite time, the traffic to my site becomes COMPLETELY free – even though I’ve paid to submit the articles
Ok so that’s starting to feel a bit like a high school math class but the point I’m getting at is…
Article marketing even in it’s most basic form is cool.
It’s cheap, it’s effective and it’s something you definitely SHOULD do.
I hope this post has aroused your interest and inspired you to hit your article marketing hard if you aren’t doing so already.
I might post a litte more information on article marketing in the coming week.
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So you spent $3188 to build someone else’s site. How much money do you think the scammers at ezinearticles earned from adsense placed near,on,above,below your articles. And now you think you are successful, but if fact you are scammed by a made-for-adsense site. Anyone can post anything there – just take a look at finance category. Ezinearticles are disgrace for internet and they are common MFA whores.
Wow Ceasar, strong opinion!
I’m sure they made money from my content but I’d be surprised if they made more money from it than I did
Plus I know that I wouldn’t have made the same returns publishing it all to my own site, at least not in the short term (I’ve discussed this idea before)
But MFA Whores? I mean, at least they do SOME moderation of the content that goes on there. Think about a site like Myspace…
They are also run by user generated content, but they make money off your interactions with your friends…
the content you post there when you comment your friends doesn’t benefit you at ALL monetarily…
and it’s not moderated in the slightest (besides porn, obscenity, etc)
you could argue that they are doing a far worse job at filling the internet with trash than EZA…
What do you think?
Andrew
I might just add…
I’m not sure it’s even productive to think about “how much is XYZ third party making off my marketing efforts?”
How much does Google make when you run an Adwords campaign?
Because they make a LOT – does that mean marketing with PPC is not profitable?
Andrew
You bring up an interesting perspective on article marketing. I am feeling much more motivated to write and submit more articles!
I don’t think we can should waste our time thinking about the “underbelly” of the internet. It is there, there is nothing we can do about it. As long as article marketing is productive for us and pays off financially. That is what we are trying to achieve.
Carmen
Andrew, this is a post that I made at the Warrior Forum, right before they changed over to the new format, which I feel is very relevant, especially in light of their new $97 month faster review service. It was titled The Death of Ezinearticles:
You’ll have to forgive the title, but I’ve always wanted to write a “The Death of” post. It was on my bucket list. Now that I’ve done it, my soul can rest at peace.
I’m going to point out some facts why I believe ezinearticles just may be in serious trouble.
First of all, video sites are getting way more traffic than ezine articles. Many marketers are now either doing video promotion or video articles. If you’re not using video sites, you really need to get on board now!
There is no 24 hour to 7 day waiting period to have your video approved. In fact, I have video articles that are on the first and second page of Google search engine results. Not only that, I’m getting more visitors to my pages from my video articles than I ever did from an article submitted to ezinearticles.
If I want to put a link directly to a clickbank product in the description of the video; no problem. Ezinearticles, good luck with that. I don’t have to jump through hoops. Makes my life a lot more stress free.
Second of all, the only reason why ezinearticles is so appealing to marketers is because they have much Google love. Well, as we have learned with Squidoo; Google giveth and Google taketh.
How much longer do you think Google is going to give them love when Google is basically launching a direct competitor? Google Knols. If you don’t know what they are, just do a quick search, there’s quite a few threads about them.
Do you really think Google is going to give priority search engine rankings to ezinearticles over its own Google Knol? Considering Google Knols will probably have a PR of 10 and ezinearticles PR is 6. You do the math on that one.
In a time when you’d think ezinearticles would be doing everything they could to justify their existence, they’re doing the exact opposite.
They reduced the amount of active links allowed in each article. Their review times have been extremely slow. Some of their reviewers are, to put it nicely, are not very competent.
The greed, to me, is the biggest sticking point. You would have thought they would have implemented some sort of revenue sharing program with the authors by now. How hard is it to ask for a adsense publishing id and split the revenue 50/50 on any clicks the article brings?
Which, by the way, Google Knols are offering adsense revenue sharing….There are also multiple video sites who will share adsense revenue with you if someone clicks on an adsense ad after watching your video….
So, let the gnashing of teeth, the thunderous groans from the herd, the hurling of phrases such as “chicken little” be thrown my way.
Quite frankly, I don’t care. For me, the writing is on the wall. They may not become insignificant in 1 week, or 1 month. However, I assure you, unless they get their act together; and provide a real legitimate reason to use them, they will be just another quaint chapter in the history of internet marketing. Holding a prestigious place next to FFA sites, pixel sites, and other antiquated IM oddities.
…and here we are more than 2 years later and EZA is still going strong.
Andrew,
your article makes me want to start posting good EZA posts, and to the first poster, you don’t get it do you? Sure EA make money, but they also send traffic, cheap, targeted traffic, so you, the content provider can make money too. Otherwise you would never have made that money in the first place, plus you get good content to the searcher (if youre smart and know that good content means repeat visits)
So it is Win-Win-Win
I agree Andrew. To only look at what others get from your efforts may be a bit short-sighted. I find that the better my content, the more visitors I get. I therefore find myself going back to EZA to make changes to articles and even the bio box from time to time. The most money I’ve made online so far, came through EZA traffic.
Until I learn a better system that benefits only me, I don’t think I’ll complain about EZA and their business model.
I sure hope that EZine articles doesn’t die off. I think right now it is probably the crowning champ for content distribution. I’ve spent a lot of time with hubpages and squidoo and EZA still gets 10x more traffic per article (same keywords, same timeframes).
I think for the time being, it’s still worth while to submit articles to Ezine Articles, but no one should count on them as their only way to get traffic. There are other directories and Video sites that are bringing alot of traffic for a lot of websites that are lot less hassle then Ezine Articles now is.
Hey Andrew,
Nice post! Nice to see you revealing your stats, I think you are bang on, I will definitely be still submitting articles for months to come to generate further traffic to products and my Internet Marketing Blog.
Also, a very valid point about the cost of your visitors slowly decreasing overtime, proving articles are worth submitting and re-useable.
Thanks,
Ray Johnson
Hi Andrew! Were the 27716 clicks able to produce enough sales to recover your $3,188?
The main point to keep in mind is to measure what you are doing as Andrew has done. Always put a tracking link in your articles so you can see how much the clicks you are getting are worth. Then you can see if the cost to write the articles is worth it. Since articles keep getting clicked on over time it seems like a no brainer that they are better than adwords because adwords clicks stop as soon as I stop paying.
Ezinearticles.com since they ahve made their premium membership avaliable has started giving me problems with my articles. I mean I submitted 25 articles just like I do every two days, and there were 7 problem articles, and another bunch of BS. I Use article marketer and I get loads more traffic from them.
Hey Andrew,
I did article marketing alot in the past with pretty good results, but due to time constraints and my newly acquired expertise at PPC, I stopped article marketing almost entirely.
Now that I’m outsourcing and making more money than in the past, I can afford more time and extra money to outsource, so Article Marketing is definitely becoming an option again.
The strategy I plan to use from now on is whenever I start a new site, I would drive content clicks via PPC to get immediate traffic, and then submit articles in the meantime.
And when the metrics are established, I’ll go ahead and setup a proper PPC campaign to make the most out of the site.
Makes money from the get-go
P.S. Outsource!
thats a very interesting post, it definitely makes me want to write up a few more articles and chuck it on EZA. i put up one and got 10 visitors to my site in the first hour after it was approved. but i never thought about doing at the volume that you do..
Andrew, how do you get others to post to your account? Do you just give them access?
To answer some questions:
Manuel,
I purposely left out a discussion on the profitability for a number of reasons that I’ll look at in future posts but the answer is yes, in fact, many times over.
Ben,
Sure, I just give them access to my account. I only do it with writers I’ve been working with for a while, have a good relationship with, and can trust.
Jason,
Yes, I saw this post on the WF before it changed over and had planned to respond because I have some opinions on the subject too – I’d like to discuss them in another post also
Andrew
Marketers use EZA because it’s an ‘easy’ and cheap source of traffic compared to the advertising alternatives. But is it effective? Could the same amount of effort (and outsourcing expense) be better used elsewhere?
Andrew, you’re getting something over 30 clicks per article, but what if you put that same effort into your own sites with those same articles and automated the deep inbound links? I know you’d certainly get more than 30 views each AND you’d have visitors to YOUR site rather than EZA, who insist that the articles submitted to them must be first use i.e. not used on your site before.
In other words, as rather vigorously put by Caesar at the start of this thread, it’s EZA that wins all the way AND they make it hard for us to get them that money through their erratic editorial process.
Marketers really must stop accepting the easy and familiar all the time and start to look at their hard work with more respect. In other words, we should stop being article whores and start to cherish and properly develop our own output.
Hey Review,
Mate, I totally agree with you.
I’ve said all along that submitting articles ONLY to EZA is not a good strategy. In fact my first report NMOC was solely in reaction to the dumbness of the “bum marketing” ideal of submitting content only to EZA.
I write lots for EZA sure, but mostly it’s a rewritten version of something that’s already up on one of my sites
And the sites where I write the articles to – sure the traffic doesn’t come as quickly to them – but over the long term, grows to be larger than the traffic from EZA volume wise.
These are ideas I’ve talked about on the blog before but seem to be worth rehashing. I’ll post more about this soon.
Andrew
Great post Andrew, interesting to see your stats.
As has been mentioned, when working out the profitability of your article marketing – it doesn’t matter if EA is making 100 billion dollars off your articles, if it’s profitable for you then keep doing it!
And of course EA isn’t the be all and end all, there’s a ton of great sites out there and more all the time displaying and syndicating your content.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the post! I’ve been using article marketing for a little over a year now and indeed it is a good source for traffic. Not to be relied on solely, but as one of my methods utilized.
I’m not so sure I agree with the comment about video making EZA obsolete! I for one don’t like watching videos all the time. Plus, when I’m at work, the video content on sites has been disabled by our IT folks – so I can’t watch them at work even if I wanted to! That aside, videos just take so long and create noise on my computer. I get so much noise all day long I don’t need any more!
But to say that videos will obsolete articles can be compared to TV obsoleting books – it just aint happening! We humans are an odd lot! For instance – why do people text messages so much on their cell phones!?!? Isn’t it easier to just call the person and talk to them – I mean it IS a phone after all!
Anyway – your point is very good and I encourage others to use article marketing as a source of traffic too. If it works – just use it!
-Mark
Breaking News!
Ezinearticles admits they accept
“thin & crappy article vomit” !
http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2008/10/pen-names.html
Geez, there goes someone who’s bitter about others making money! Actually, Chris McKnight never said that they ‘accept’ thin & crappy article vomit – he only said that they receive such articles (in which case they’re probably not accepted). From what I’ve seen they’re pretty strict about submissions.
Nice post. I`ve been submitting around 50 articles for the past month and received around 300 clicks on my bio-links..
However traffic seems to be decreasing over the past week, I`m sure it`s the holidays and all that.
Article marketing is cheap and the great things is. articles are one of the greatest ways to build back links and rank higher in the search engines.
Well,
You surely got me very interested. I think I’ll write more for now.