A case study on the traffic-building power of article writing (final update).
Okay guys. Here are the final numbers for the article traffic building case study, from start to finish.
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 |
December 1 (four weeks in)
| Page Views | Signups | Sales |
| 341 | 126 | 1 |
| In Google? | In Yahoo? | In MSN? |
| Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Google Backlinks | Yahoo Backlinks | MSN Backlinks |
| 0 | 3 | 6 |
So from zero to 31 days, I managed 341 visitors to the site and 126 opt-ins to the free mini-course. Plus I made a sale on the course with a very cheesy sales pitch (I must admit). I made about $25 off this deal, and I have reason to believe that dog training courses are a tough sell since people are searching for free info when looking for dog training, and aren't really "geared" to buy anything.
All this from submitting only 5 articles to 3 article distribution sites: EzineArticles.com, ArticleCity.com and GoArticles.com. No search engine optimization, no link building efforts, nothing but writing and distributing 5 articles.
Let's compare this to AdSense. If I could manage a 10% click through rate on the page, that's about 34 clicks. I would have to earn about 75 cents per click to earn the $25 I made from that one sale. The average bids on the term "dog training" are between $2 and $3 at AdWords, so it's possible--but it's a toss up.
Of course you don't have to try and sell anybody on anything with AdSense, so it could be potentially easier money.
I hope this case study has enlightened you to the power of writing articles to gain traffic to your sites. It certainly has enlightened me! I will be writing a lot more articles in the future.
Enjoy this article?
March 17th, 2007 - 13:12
hi…good site.
February 6th, 2007 - 07:04
So it seems that a summary of these blog posts would go something like this.
Submit lots of articles
Submit regularly
Submit fresh original content
Best area to submit is ezinearticles and submityourarticle.com
It all seems to make sense insofar as you are feeding the search engines what they crave. Great advice and case study Jonathon.It’s fascinating that you are basically planting all these little seeds around that may exist and provide traffic for years.
On another note I just wanted to say hello to Jinger Jarrett ( post up above ) and I am also dying to know what sort of deal nets you $9,000 in Mexico of all places, TJ Short ?
December 26th, 2006 - 21:22
I have to agree with this case study… I submitted simply one article to Ezine and through my stat tracker, I’m always seeing visitors that came from that very article. It’s a great technique!
December 25th, 2006 - 22:19
Great place for traffic study!
December 22nd, 2006 - 08:14
Hi Jonathan
How about trying this,
When I was at Secret Yellow Seminar in London where Ewen Chia, Patric Chan and Jo Han Mok were the speakers Ewen went into details about article submitting.
He said to submit a minimum of 10 articles every 2 weeks in order to get major traffic to your site.
I haven’t had time to do this myself yet but I intend to.
The articles have to be fresh and he recommended ezinearticles.com and submityourarticle.com to send them to.
Graham Burt
Millionaire Secrets Revealed
http://www.Roadmap-To-Millions.com
December 11th, 2006 - 09:42
What a helpful Article Jonathan !
Thank’s so much for the tip !
Roger B
December 8th, 2006 - 03:31
Great article by the way. I just have one question. If you have private label articles, can you submit them to article sites with your name on them for the same effec, or is it neccesary for your backlink from the article to get indexed as unique content first? I appreciate the help you are giving us all.
thanks
Sean
December 7th, 2006 - 04:53
Very interesting article Jonathan. Thanks for sharing this with us. I have had a number of articles written for my site and have distributed them to many article directories, but only the top 3 seem to provide any benefit.
Anyway, maybe the others will also help, even if they take longer.
Keep up the great work. Your posts are interesting.
December 5th, 2006 - 01:32
Hi Johnathan
Thanks for helping me with Adsense and Tanslation Gold. I have been making articles since last century we to put an appoximate on it 10 years. For about 8 years I have been collecting articles through 1 form or another such as above and from willing people who submit them at my various sites.
I followed your test also put up some articles which were grabbed up by GOOGLE MSN LIVE & any other spider listed under 10 days in searches and got 52 views out of them & a waiting a $9000 sale closure from Mexico.
Thanks Again JOHNATHAN Mate
Best Regards
TJ Short
A True Blue Aussie
December 4th, 2006 - 12:40
Dear Johnathan,
I am one of your Article Wizard customers. I bought it to give me better ideas for my articles.
When I received your offer for the Article Wizard Pro, I was confused because I thought I had already bought it!
Anyway, I got your special customer gift this morning, and I just wanted to thank you. You are incredible! In a era when too many marketers are overcharging and underdelivering, you are undercharging and overdelivering for sure. I love your stuff.
You have reinforced my opinion that article writing is the most powerful way to market your business online, and I will continue to use it for years to come.
Keep doing what you are doing. You have my attention and I look forward to reading more.
Thank you so much. You really care about your customers. Again, can’t wait to see more from you.
Jinger Jarrett
December 2nd, 2006 - 20:08
Great blog story Jon,
Articles are certainly the flavor at the moment.
Did you vary the anchor text and landing pages with different articles?
James
December 2nd, 2006 - 18:20
Great article Jonathan.
Can you give me a better idea of your out of pocket and running cost… domain cost, monthly hosting cost, your opt-in/email/newsletter service cost, sites monthly audio service cost, site development cost. I will be able to see the whole pitcure with these numbers.
December 2nd, 2006 - 17:35
Hello, Johathan. You are a genius, thank you very much for this great case study. Do you have any other case studies or resources? Again, thank you for this great information.
December 2nd, 2006 - 15:50
Thank you Jonathan for posting the results of your case study. You certainly convinced me to start writing articles to promote my website. In reviewing your results I had a few observations that I thought might be helpful.
1. Did ArticleCity.com ever publish your articles? I could not find your articles on that site.
2. Yahoo now lists 4 backlinks to your website. All the backlinks are reprints of your articles. Three of the articles came from EzineArticles.com (there is no source noted on a blog that reprinted one of your articles).
3. MSN lists 9 backlinks to your website (only 6 are counted and display when you take the MSN default to group results from the same site). MSN listed backlinks from all 5 articles on EzineArticles.com, 2 articles on GoArticles.com and 2 articles reprinted on another website.
In summary, EzineArticles.com seemed to give the best results. At the time I look your articles had received 620 pageviews and at least 8 backlinks (5 from directory, 3 reprints). GoArticles.com showed 133 pageviews, with at least 2 backlinks.
Thank you Jonathan for sharing your knowledge and experience with us.
December 2nd, 2006 - 13:35
Hi Jon,
Now that you can churn out relevant articles quickly. Why not take this test to another level. Write an article a day for 30 days and submit to those 3 article sites.
Steve McArthur
December 2nd, 2006 - 13:31
Hi Jon
Very impresive results, and this will be free traffic for your new site for years to come! You could also submit these articles to more article directories with a good article submiter and get even more traffic. By the way, congratulations on your Instant Article Wizard Pro! I have been using it for the past few days and find it one of the most amazing research and content tools I have come accross in a long time.
Anteek, SEO Consultant.
GetSearchEngineTraffic.com
December 2nd, 2006 - 12:54
Actually you did much better using this method over just going for AdSense because you went for Opt–ins which if factored as being worth about $1.50 per person by selling to them later you will eventually crush any AdSense earnings this method may have produced.
And like you noted your sales pitch was less than stellar. Had you really spent a little time on it who knows how many sales you may have made. Maybe not a lot, but far better than any potential AdSense earnings adn again the big prize was still the opt-ins.
-Stephen
December 2nd, 2006 - 12:52
Hi Jonanthan,
I’ve been following this test. As someone who submits a lot of articles to directories, I really appreciated it. I have added a summary of your test to my blog at websitetrafficandconversion.com. Keep up the great work my friend.
Scott
December 2nd, 2006 - 12:31
You can have even better success with your articles being picked up and put on other sites by carefully selecting your articles headline. I’ve split tested very similar articles and found that the headline has a tremendous effect of the articles success.
If you decide to use Adsense on your page you should try to make it look just like the regular content. The Ads should have the same font as your body content. The Ad title URL’s should match those on your page percisely.
I’ve had the greatest success with clickthroughs leaving the Adsense URL at the bottom of the Ads the same color as the text.
December 2nd, 2006 - 12:15
I really like the idea of doing are article marketing. It is definitly a short and long term way of generating traffic to the site. I will surely use this method to generate more traffic to my site.
Great Post Jonathan
John
http://www.JohnTanBlog.com
December 2nd, 2006 - 11:31
Any idea how much of the traffic was from the articles directly and how much was from the mini-course… or was the page linked to from the articles just a sign-up for the mini-course?
December 2nd, 2006 - 09:41
Hi Jonathan,
Great case study — appreciate the time you took to post about your experiment.
Another twist to I thought of is to put your mini-course lesson, each on its own webpage and impregnate the page with adsense. There is a risk that the visitor won’t focus on your issue and click off to somewhere else, but then again, you just made an adsense commission. I would probably keep the location of the next issue hidden to force the visitor to wait for the next lesson location via email.
Hmmm, now that I think about it, this solution also has the added benefit of making your mini-course searchable by search engine spiders. So let’s say a visitor found one of your course issues by an organic search — let’s say he finds issue 3 of 5. Because the location of the other issues is not posted anywhere on ‘issue 3′ (nor any of the others for that matter), he would have to signup for the whole mini-course to get the rest. Obviously, you would have to a link at the bottom of each issue that goes back to your squeeze page.
Just my two cents.
December 2nd, 2006 - 09:29
Hi Jonathan,
I too was thinking about shifting the balance to more sales of my own products (using plr products)
I get the feeling that the roi is higher then using adsense. specially if you use you own articles
On this new site of mine I will try it out and keep a record of it.
I do not believe in the “dead of adsense” but I do think you should never put all your eggs in one basket
December 2nd, 2006 - 08:59
Hi Jonathen
Your study realy shows the power of article marketing, imagine if you multiply it just by ten times. Yes its a lot of writing but Instant Article Wizard Pro makes this task an awful lot easier.
I have ONE article i wrote using your software that has nearly paid for my investment already in less than three weeks. Naturally i bought the upgrade which is great so easy! thank you Jonathen and good luck.
Robert
December 2nd, 2006 - 08:11
Do you find it is more effective to submit to these top 3 article directories alone — or can it be more effective to submit to a couple hundred directories?
December 2nd, 2006 - 08:04
Your case study was incredibly useful and interesting. It’s about time someone presents a no BS case study. I think you did a great job in presenting the results objectively, and I hope you do more of these case studies in the future !
Just one question though – Did you use Instant Article Wizard to create the articles you submitted in the case study ?
Thanks
Don
December 2nd, 2006 - 06:59
Hi jonathan,
This case study has definately been enlightening
for me as no money is involved-just Articles.
I have just purchased your Instant Article Wizard which i think is a great tool and have written my first article . I will be doing my own case study as soon as i can. keep up the good work!
December 2nd, 2006 - 05:04
Hello Jonathan,
When you wrote these articles do you write just 1 and distribute to all
directories or write separate articles for each directory?
Steven–
December 2nd, 2006 - 04:44
Thanks Jonathan for sharing this with us. I have found it to be very interesting and informative. It goes right in line with another party that I have been following along the same subject line. Keep up the good work! JB