All Entries Tagged With: "traffic"

How Important Is Article Analytics?

Is analytics for articles a necessity? I think it can be important, but we don’t want to blow it out of proportion. It’s nice to know how many people read your article, how many clicked the link to visit your website from the article directory, and how many publishers have used your article in their e-zines and on their websites, but the real metric to keep a handle on is how much traffic an article is generating. And I don’t just mean from the article directory itself.

Some article directories provide stats on how many people read your article, clicked your links, etc. but that information is only marginally helpful. It’s much more important to know how many publishers have used your articles. If you can then identify which publishers they are, you can usually check your inbound links to find them, then you can analyze your referrer logs to see how much traffic you are getting from those sources. That’s the best kind of article analytics. Don’t be fooled by article directories that hype up their bells and whistles.

Is Article Marketing A Form Of Advertising?

Many people new to article marketing want to know if it’s like advertising. No, actually, it isn’t. With advertising you spend money to reach a particular market and the advertising tends to be an interruption into their lives. They weren’t looking for it. It just happens to be there. Article marketing isn’t anything like that.

Article marketing is the practice of writing articles to achieve greater publicity, but unlike press releases the articles don’t directly request publicity. With article marketing you are attempting to give away your knowledge. The articles should be heavy on giving and light on taking.

Once you write an article that gives more than it takes you submit it to article directories, or publishers directly, and people who are interested in your niche will seek articles just like yours for publishing. They will publish your article for free.

So what do you get out of it? For starters, you get a short bio at the end of your article. It doesn’t have to be long. In fact, shorter is best. One to two sentences at most. But you do want to include a link back to your website. When publishers publish your article they agree to publish it with your links intact. That link acts as a traffic conduit from the publisher’s website to yours and it also gives you additional search engine mojo due to the inbound link to your website.

Is article marketing like advertising? No, it’s not even close.

How A Microsite Can Make You Money (With Articles)

A microsite is a great tool for any business. You don’t have to sell an e-book or offer a free download to profit from using a microsite. You can build a microsite for a small business, drive traffic to it with articles and profit handsomely. Here’s how:

• Build a site consisting of 3-6 pages, including an About page, Contact page, Privacy Policy, and 1-3 pages of good sales material
• Write an article a day and send it out to at least 10 article directories every day
• Do this for a full year and watch your traffic grow along with your links
• Make sure your microsite is well optimized and closes the sale
• Install analytics code on your microsite so you can track the traffic.

It’s really simple. And it’s also magical the way you can build a good list of prospects using a microsite that is targeted to a specific niche within your niche. Build a microsite for every aspect of your niche and dominate your business industry.

Article Marketing: Should You Promote Your Blog Or Website?

You might be wondering whether you should spend your article marketing efforts promoting your website or your blog. It’s a good question to ask. My philosophy is to always send people to your landing page, if possible, or as close to it as possible. The further away from the actual Buy button that you send potential visitors, the less likely you will see the money. You have to think about visitor attrition.

Visitor attrition is the natural drop off of traffic that you can expect based on how many links they’ll have to go through to get to the final destination. If you have 100 visitors on a page and they are two steps away from your Buy button, you can expect that only 20% of your visitors will click through to the next page. That’s 20 visitors to the page that is one step away from the Buy button then 4 visitors to click through the actual page where the Buy button exists and possibly one sale. Is that what you want?

On the other hand, if you send your visitors directly to your landing page then you can expect to receive 20 sales conversions based on the 20% attrition rate.

This is not a guarantee. It’s an estimate. But it illustrates a very important principle where article marketing is concerned. Send people to your landing page. You’ll get more traffic and more sales.

Article Directories: What Makes A Good One?

How do you know which article directories to submit your website to? Believe me, it’s not easy. I’d be real careful about submitting to every directory out there. Some are better than others. But there is one criteria that is often cited about article directories that I would caution you against in using as a selection criteria. That criteria is PageRank. Don’t use it.

PageRank can be deceiving. Just because a web domain has a high PageRank doesn’t mean it’s a good article directory. Maybe it has a high PageRank because it was another type of website for 10 years and just recently converted into an article directory. If that’s the case then it needs to prove itself as an article directory.

A better thing to look at is traffic. How much traffic does that article directory get? You can find out by going to Alexa.com and checking the traffic stats. This isn’t a perfect tool, but Alexa can give you an idea about traffic. Look at the upward and downward trend over the last 3 months. Then look at the raw traffic numbers. If the traffic is low and the downward trend is going down then it’s not a good site. If the traffic number is high and the trend is upward then that’s a good sign.

Another thing you can do is go to Google and type in site:http://www.nameofarticledirectory.com. Google will tell you how many pages of that article directory have been indexed. If the number is low then the directory probably has website crawl issues. If the number is high then it’s a good directory.

Also take a look at the cache option in your Google toolbar (you do have the Google toolbar, don’t you?). How long ago was the site cached? If it’s been too long then it isn’t getting updated very often.

Keep in mind that Google no longer passes link juice from article directories. That’s not to say that it couldn’t. Google often overlooks its own policies. But don’t count on links from article directories. You are submitting articles for traffic. It’s nice if that traffic comes from the article directory, but it doesn’t to. You want other publishers to use your articles. The traffic and links from those publisher websites are what you really want the article directory to do for you. If you find your articles getting published then you’ve found a good article directory.