Not Seeing a Good ROI on Article Marketing
Posted on January 27, 2011 by under
This question was submitted to me by a writer. “I tested article marketing for four months, from Sept – Dec 2010. I posted 24 unique articles (keyword optimized and obeying all the rules) in nine top article directories, including your own. Result: some 50,000 listings in Google. Looks good! But to date they’ve drawn just 107 click-throughs to my subscription site leading to one conversion to sale – worth $70 per annum. A dismal ROI!”
“Question: if I continue at all, I’m faced with two options. I can take Steve Shaw’s advice at SubmitYourArticle.com and dribble out just two articles per week. Each will be massively spun, of course, to yield more potential variations than there are atoms in the brain of Bill Gates. At four levels of syntax, each will take two days to spin, even using spinner software.
“Or I can go the Sean Mize route and post 20+ different articles per day, spun quickly and somewhat less ‘unique’ – and hope that Google won’t ignore too many of them. I don’t care about coming top of the search engines. I want click-throughs, quickly. ‘What doth it avail a man if Google loves him – but he maketh no money?’ Which route should I go?”
Answer: It sounds to me that the problem here is conversion — or lack thereof. Before you go either route, you need to get a compelling call to action in your articles that makes it a “must click” for the person to go to your site. Poorly created spinner articles (in any quantity) are never going to help you do that. Well-crafted articles that engage the reader and make them want to go to your site for more are what you need. Work on increasing your conversion rate from article to visit to signup to purchase, and then go from there.
