A case study on the traffic-building power of article writing (update 2).
November 23, 2006
I'll keep this post short and sweet. The bottom line is that my free dog training mini course has made its first sale and has just under 100 people on the mailing list.
I decided to stick with the free mini course after seeing that it made a sale, so I haven't tested sending traffic directly to the site. I am testing that with other sites, though, and as always will let you know how it goes.
Here are the stats:
November 8 (one week in)
| Page Views | Signups | Sales |
| 68 | 25 | 0 |
| In Google? | In Yahoo? | In MSN? |
| Yes | No | No |
| Google Backlinks | Yahoo Backlinks | MSN Backlinks |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
November 15 (two weeks in)
| Page Views | Signups | Sales |
| 224 | 74 | 0 |
| In Google? | In Yahoo? | In MSN? |
| Yes | No | No |
| Google Backlinks | Yahoo Backlinks | MSN Backlinks |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
November 23 (three weeks in)
| Page Views | Signups | Sales |
| 279 | 98 | 1 |
| In Google? | In Yahoo? | In MSN? |
| Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Google Backlinks | Yahoo Backlinks | MSN Backlinks |
| 0 | 2 | 5 |
As you can see, the site has finally been indexed by Yahoo and MSN and has a few backlinks from the article sites and a few other sites that have used one of the articles.
I'll make my final post on this subject next week, which will make this case study's duration be one month. Hopefully more sales will start coming in by then.
Either way though, having a profitable site in 3 weeks without spending a dime on advertising and doing zero SEO is a very good thing! It's easy to write articles (or have them written) and distribute them, and it's clear that doing so brings in traffic fast.
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Should you hire people to write your articles for you?
November 20, 2006
My ongoing article case study has established that writing articles is a great way to get traffic to your web site. If you're not writing articles, you need to be. Or do you?
That's the question I asked myself. Is it really necessary for me to write my own articles, or is it worth paying a ghost writer to write the articles for me?
Up until I asked this question, I had never hired anyone to write any of my content for me. I'd always used tools I've created to help me do that (such as my Instant Article Wizard). But I got to thinking: if I can pay somebody a few bucks to write some great articles for me, then I can focus on creating the sites that those articles will point to. That would save me a lot of time.
So I decided to give it a try and see how it went. I registered at ELance.com and posted a project. I wanted 5 articles written on 5 separate acne topics (teen acne, adult acne, severe acne, cystic acne and acne scars). I wanted each article to be between 650 and 850 words, and I wanted 100% rights to claim those articles as my own.
The Good News
Within 24 hours I had 3 bids on the project. One bid for $140, one for $85 and a third for $50. The first two didn't have any feedback or ratings at all, so I chose to go with the third one, who had a lot of good reviews and a very high satisfaction rating (4.9 out of 5). Besides, for $50, the price was dirt cheap! That's only $10 an article.
So I accepted their bid and paid the 20% up front via PayPal. Within 48 hours all 5 articles were written.
If it sounds like it was a wonderful experience so far, it was! Within 3 days I had a complete set of 5 articles I could use, put my name on (or a pseudonym for tracking purposes) and start distributing to build traffic to my web site.
The Bad News
The downside was clear when I actually read the articles. The articles were well researched and offered professional information on each of the keyword sets I created the project for, yes, but…
The English used to write the article had a lot of little problems.
Now, don't get me wrong, the articles weren't terrible. They were of decent quality, and as I said, the research was great so the information was good. But the articles were clearly written by somebody who did not speak and write English as a first language, and so there were little grammatical issues that I would have to go in and fix.
Having to go in and fix these grammatical errors takes time, and the whole purpose of hiring a ghost writer is to save time, so this extra step took away some of the value of hiring out for the job.
However, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and I hired the cheapest group to write the articles. At only $50, perhaps it was worth the $35 - $90 I saved from not hiring the other bidders. After all, in about an hour all five articles could be polished to make them perfect.
It Costs Money
Of course, the other problem is that hiring out costs money. If I wanted to create a full content site of 100 articles, with the bidders I hired I'm looking at $1,000 up front plus twenty hours of solid editing work to get the articles polished enough to post them to a web site.
So on the one hand I can see the benefit of hiring out: it still saves a lot of time since you don't have to do the research, and if you get a good bidder the articles are pretty good.
On the other hand I see the drawbacks: if you go cheap you will have to edit the articles into "real" English, and if you don't go cheap it can be pretty expensive to get them written.
So Is It Worth It?
The real question is the bottom line, isn't it? If I can make those five acne articles result in $1,000 in product sales over the course of a year, it was certainly worth the $50 and hour of my time to go in and edit the articles.
I'm not sure yet if it's worth it, but believe me that I will be distributing these articles and watching the results. When the results are in I will post them to the blog so you can see for yourself whether or not it paid off to hire other people to write my articles for me.
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A case study on the traffic-building power of article writing (update).
November 15, 2006
Two weeks ago I started a case study to see how much traffic I could get sent to a web site only by writing and distributing articles.
I created a brand new site on dog training that wasn't indexed in the search engines and didn't have any links to it from any other sites anywhere. I created a 5 day mini-course with the home page of the site being an opt-in form. I wrote 5 articles and submitted them to EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and ArticleCity.com.
On November 8th, one week after submitting the first article, the results were:
| Page Views | Signups | Sales |
| 68 | 25 | 0 |
| In Google? | In Yahoo? | In MSN? |
| Yes | No | No |
| Google Backlinks | Yahoo Backlinks | MSN Backlinks |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
Now it's the 15th, and my how the traffic has grown! While the statistics aren't phenominal, keep in mind that it's only been just over two weeks and I haven't done any promotion at all outside of writing those first five articles.
Here are the updated stats as of November 15th:
| Page Views | Signups | Sales |
| 224 | 74 | 0 |
| In Google? | In Yahoo? | In MSN? |
| Yes | No | No |
| Google Backlinks | Yahoo Backlinks | MSN Backlinks |
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
One week later, I have 3 times as many signups and more than 3 times as many page views.
So it certainly seems that article writing can generate some traffic and sign-ups pretty quick. The only thing that I'm a bit disappointed with is that I haven't sold any of the back-end product yet. But honestly the email sales pitch I send the sign-ups after the mini course isn't any good. I just threw it together for the sake of having something to pitch to people in the end.
I'm changing things up a bit to see if I can generate some sales directly through writing articles. So here's what I'm going to do now. Now, instead of sending people to an opt-in form, I'll send them directly to the sales letter for the back-end product and see if I can generate sales without having people sign-up. Who knows, it might be a lousy mini-course that's preventing people from buying!
If I can generate sales from sending people straight to the product sales letter, I might rethink my approach and just write articles that direct people to my affiliate sites.
I'll post the updated numbers next week.
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Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. He is the creator of a suite of popular software tools, including: Jonathan L Leger 
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