One of the most frustrating things about this business is the lack of solid data supporting various content-based strategies. Some of us have a very good idea of what works, but we don’t always have the numbers to prove it. Even when we do have numbers, the inherently subjective nature of relative content quality complicates even the best efforts to generate good data. Additionally, the variable-rich marketing environment makes it very hard to put that much faith in the stats we have.
Yet even imperfect numbers can help. That’s why I save and review the “studies” I do find, even those that have pronounced limitations. Every scrap of information helps in optimizing content-driven marketing strategies. That’s why I’m writing about Derek Pankanew’s recent effort at tracking article directory performance.
Pankaew, who runs 72 Hour Articles, recently submitted a series of articles to three popular article directories and studied the results. He tested EzineArticles, GoArticles and Searchwarp. He created a site and used the articles to drive traffic, performing no additional SEO to the site. Here’s a brief rundown of of some of what he experienced:
- 63% of traffic came from search engines.
- 18 articles produced 6,692 site visits over the course of 10 months.
- EzineArticles directly produced 1,486 visitors, compared to 314 from Searchwarp and only 4 from GoArticles.
- EzineArticles remains the big boy among article repositories. If you aren’t submitting there, you’re missing out on a significant source of direct traffic.
- Article marketing has SEO value. Derek’s site drew search engine traffic while exclusively using article marketing for backlink development.
- Creating or purchasing unique content should be a good investment. 18 articles generated nearly 6,692 site visits. If you can convert visitors into customers at a 1% rate, that’s makes each article “worth” 3.7 sales ([(6692/18) * .01]). Even if you play with a conservative $/sale number, it’s hard not see significant profit potential in article marketing. How much are three or four sales worth to you? Chances are that their value swamps the cost associated with commissioning new content.
Don’t take these numbers as gospel. They’re just one limited experiment that may or may not have total transferability to other projects. However, there’s nothing in Derek’s research to suggest that you shouldn’t be making article marketing a key component of your business and it does support arguments in favor of using the strategy.
Comments (3)
Very interesting, Carson. I’ve done a heap of article marketing in the past, and only really stopped due to lack of time. I’ve since come to believe, though, that most backlinks gained through syndication aren’t worth much at all, because most syndicating sites are spammers looking for high volume content at no cost. But if you write a good quality article, it’ll still be syndicated on good quality sites.
The duplicate content filter can also be a problem. In Google’s words: “If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.” So let’s say you write an article, publish it on your site, then submit it to EzineAritlces.com. Then someone searches for a phrase that you might expect your article to rank for. Because EzineArticles.com is such a high-ranking site, its version of your article might appear in the SERPs instead of the version on your website. If you’ve used that same content in a blog post, this could be a problem, because you want your blog post to appear in the SERPs (in order to generate more buzz). I know there are ways to try and work around this, but they’re not guaranteed to work.
What’s more, links from syndicated content tend to have cookie cutter anchor text, which isn’t as good, obviously, as the natural sort of anchor text that evolves through social media optimization.
I’m not disagreeing with your figures, I’m just wondering whether all that effort wouldn’t have been better spent on social media optimization?
Glenn Murray´s last blog post..If your design’s wrong, should you really invest in copy?
I think your perspective on backlink value has legs, Glenn. There’s no doubt that the bulk of the links fall far short of powerhouse status and there’s plenty of reason to believe that G is actually downgrading the value of directory links.
That’s one reason why I thought Derek’s experiment was so interesting. Even though the links aren’t very muscular, they still helped him nab nearly 7K visitors. Based on what I read in his original post, the articles where the only way he promoted the test site and 2/3 of this traffic came from the SEs.
Obviously (and as mentioned) much of that could stem from unrelated factors like keyword selection, niche competition, etc. Nonetheless, it’s hard to blow off the SEO value of directory backlinks when you see data like that.
I’m not going to pop the seal on the dup content discussion today. That’s a novel of its own. Derek’s data is interesting, though. He distributed each article to one directory, yet when you check out his stats you’ll see that he snagged a reasonable amount of additional traffic from third-party syndicators. So, even if some filtering may have prevented the appearance of those articles in SERPs, people still found them and still clicked on the link. And, remember, he was able to get 60+% of the traffic from search engines.
That holds true even with unnatural cookie cutter anchor text, etc.
Could the effort be better spent elsewhere? There’s always a way, right? Of course, most of those ways wouldn’t be mutually exclusive with article marketing. Instead of doing one or the other, I’d do both. Especially when guys like us are readily available to produce great articles, right?
Here’s how I see it… Even with some limitations, Derek was able to drive a fair amount of traffic to his test site with a handful of articles. The approximate value of each article (assuming nothing more than 1% conversion) was 3.7 * $/sale. Even with a $10 take on each sale, that makes every article worth $37 (and that’s based on an average that includes the articles distributed to the underperforming directories!).
When you consider that one can easily boost conversion rates over 1% with the right copy and that the $/sale number could easily be in excess of $10, it looks like article marketing offers great ROI.
The big caveat, of course, is that we can’t really generalize from Derek’s small test and assume that the results will hold true in all contexts. It’s anecdotal stuff. But it is a good example of a situation in which article marketing did work–and it worked better than what some might’ve expected.
Great comment, by the way. I’m glad to have you as a reader.
Thanks mate! I think the most important take-away from your post is that article marketing CAN work. Too many people have been saying it can’t (e.g. http://www.copyblogger.com/link-building-strategies-that-work/), despite evidence like this, and despite quite clear indications from Google like this tip from Matt Cutts from Feb 2008:
“…if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank.”
Clearly backlinks in syndicated articles CAN still pass on link juice.
How much link juice is another question. My theory is that Google values backlinks from syndicated content on spammy sites even less than it values a normal link. i.e. It sees you have a link coming from a spammy site = instant link devalue. Then it sees that link comes from syndicated content = even more instant link devalue. (And it’s really not that hard to see that the link’s coming from syndicated content - there’s an author bio and sometimes reprint guidelines).
I don’t, however, think this is happening to links from syndicated content on quality sites. In other words, I think that there’s some selective devaluing going on. In other words, you’re far better of writing top quality.
I agree that article marketing and other forms of link building aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, in my ebook, I say that it can fit quite well as a supplement to a social media optimization (blogging) strategy. It’s a very efficient way to go (single source!), so long as the dup content filter doesn’t cause issues.
Anyway, thanks again for a great post. Make sure you keep tweeting your posts too! I subscribe to your feed but, unfortunately, never get around to reading any of my feeds. Twitter’s just so much more friendly and immediate!
Cheers mate.
Glenn Murray´s last blog post..If your design’s wrong, should you really invest in copy?
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[...] Crunching some article marketing numbers 10 December 2008 1 views No Comment One of the most frustrating things about this business is the lack of solid data supporting various content-based strategies. Some of us have a very good idea of what works, but we don’t always have the numbers to prove it. Even when we do have numbers, the inherently subjective nature of relative content quality complicates even the best efforts to generate good data. Additionally, the variable-rich marketing environment makes it very hard to put that much faith in the stats we have. Yet e The rest is here: Crunching some article marketing numbers [...]
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[...] of the authors from a Big Red Notebook tells us: One of the most frustrating things about this business is the lack of solid data [...]
[...] of the authors from a Big Red Notebook tells us: One of the most frustrating things about this business is the lack of solid data [...]