A case study on the traffic-building power of article writing.
November 8, 2006
If you've been around the Internet Marketing world for any length of time at all, you've heard one guru or another talk about the need to write and distribute articles to your sites. I've always done this, and it's always been a great way to build up my email lists, but I've never taken the time to actually sit down and do a case study on just how much traffic you can receive through article writing and distribution.
Until now.
On October 31st, I put up a dog training mini-course site, whose domain name I won't point you to so as not to skew my page view figures. It's just an opt-in page advertising a free 5 day mini course on how to train your "best friend". After the five day course the visitor is sent a sales pitch for a great ClickBank dog training product.
It's a very simple, one-page site with a good headline and some bullet points. It converts about 37% of its visitors into email subscribers, which I am very pleased with.
After writing the 5 day mini course, I wrote an additional 5 articles about dog training and distributed them to only 3 article sites: EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and ArticleCity.com. My purpose in only submitting to 3 instead of to hundreds was to see if it was really necessary to submit to a very large number of smaller article sites using submission software, or if only submitting to the "big 3" really mattered.
As a side point, all 5 of the articles were good enough to receive Expert status from EzineArticles.com.
I have done absolutely nothing else to get traffic to this site. I have not submitted the site to any directories, have not purchased links or ads, and I have not posted about the site anywhere online. The only source of traffic is the articles–period.
Well it's been 7 days since the first article was published (though the site was up two days before that), and how are things doing?
Here are my stats:
| 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 |
So after one week I already have 25 people on my mailing list, and most haven't made it through the course and as such haven't purchased anything yet. These figures also show that none of my traffic is coming from the search engines yet. In fact, only Google has the site indexed as of today. So all of the traffic is coming from people clicking on my link in the About the Author section of my articles.
I will be posting the progress report of this site each week for the next few weeks. That way you can see how much benefit comes from writing and distributing articles that point to your site. Of course you would normally pursue multiple traffic avenues, but this case study is just to demonstrate the power of article writing.
See you back here next week!
P.S. The success achieved by my new mini-course site is due to Michael Cheney's 11 Days to List Profits instructional videos. The methods taught in those videos were used to create the site.
Comments
31 Responses to “A case study on the traffic-building power of article writing.”
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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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Hi Jon, great article. eZines had never crossed my mind as a good medium to build a readership. I will need to cross-post some of my longer posts for my own blog to these sites.
You mentioned the three sites you submitted to, any idea as to which one (if any) is really the biggest and most effective? Do you know which has the biggest readership?
Obviously, would be better to only submit to one instead of three!
Thanks.
Ravi in Seattle, WA
EzineArticles by far sends the most traffic to my sites directly. So if I could only submit to one, that's the one I would submit to.
This is a nice and step by step follow real life online blog. Well done. I will return to read more. cos I am hungry….
Great stuff Jonathan!
We always hear false data from the so called gurus that certain techniques are dead and so get confused over what to do. Now I see that great articles will never die. The communication of ideas between people is so basic that it will always be needed and wanted.
Phil
This is a great tip Jonathan. An the sign-up rate is excellent?
Do you think that mini-courses are better than free e-books as a sign-up incentive in your opinion?
Jon, you beat me to the punch. I too have the 11 Days to List Profits and I was thinking doing exactly the same using a program I bought from you. Obviously you put it all together quicker than me.
Keep us up to date on your progress.
Hi Jon,
Good post. Thanks for doing this experiment. So far things appear to be going well with your site. You have a good sign up rate to visitor ratio. I'll be interested to see when people get through the course how many of them you can convert to sales through clickbank. You can have the best sign up rate to visitor ratio in the world but it won't mean squat if you can't convert the list to buyers. I'll be interested in seeing your clickbank stats when people cycle through your mini-course.
Jason
Jonathan - this is really interesting. Please could we have a follow up article in a few weeks to see how things progress?
All the best,
Jen
Hi Jon, would be great if you could post an update next week to let us know how the progress is going from this experiment.
Thanks.
Great little article Jonathan, I did a similar test with Blog and Ping, and that still works too. Like the other posters here, I have wondered if my articles are doing me any good before now, seeing your article proves that it is. I look forward to the updates.
Douglas Titchmarsh
I was just thinking about doing a simular test myself lately. it will be nice to see your results along side my own.
Jonathan - thanks for your email referring me to your case study. We've often heard how effective submitting articles can be, but conventional wisdom has suggested one must submit to hundreds of sites for the approach to be effective. It will be interesting to follow your progress and I greatly appreciate your taking the time to keep us posted. Thanks!
Dave
Look forward to seeing your results. I hear alot about article writing so I'm hoping youc an fill in the gaps and it will be interesting to read about your results.
Thanks for providing this great information.
Thats a great idea! I've been posting to these 3 for about the last 3 months and I've been getting fairly good traffic flow, now considering posting to many others too but want to know if its worth the extra effort. I'd probably create a program to do it for me if it was.
Keep me posted on the results. Very interesting
Chris
Jonathan, I'm curious. Were each of the five different articles you submitted to the three directories exactly the same or did you modify them so ezinearticles, goarticles, and articlecity each have a slightly different version of the same five articles?
Dave
Dave:
Each of the 5 articles was a unique article on a seperate aspect of dog training. They were not just modified versions of the same article.
Jonathan,
Sorry. I thought my post might be confusing. I assumed you used 5 unique articles (e.g., dog kenneling, rewarding good behavior, dog commands, etc.)
My question is this: If you submitted an article on "dog kenneling" to ezinearticles.com, did you submit the exact same dog kenneling article to the other two with no modifications or did you slightly alter them? I'm curious whether you're concerned with potential duplicate content penalties.
Thanks.
Dave
So Jon,
Is there anything wrong with fully modifing the same article if its unique enough and submitting it to different directories? Please advise.
Dave:
Ah, I see. Yes I submitted the exact same article to each directory.
WorkAtHomeCareers.com:
There's nothing wrong with that, no. It might be a good way to track which article site is doing you the most good, too, since you would know based on the version of the article which one is getting spread out more.
Hi Jonathan
Great post. New authors should also note that unless you are already a Platinum Author @ EzineArticles, they'll take between 5 - 7 days to get articles approved, so take that into account.
Cheers
Nick
Man on man,
I am amazed you have that much traffic and signups just from posting an article. I will start using this ASAP.
Thanks,
Brad Gray
http://blog.createafortune.biz
Great post. I really underestimated the results of articles. I have heard but never tried. I am on this one starting today.
Thanks for the info,
John Pfeiffer
http://blog.money-business.biz
The resyults sounds impressive!!!
So I have build my Article web site and want to promote ot which actually websites do you recommend to submit my articleforpublic com web site
Thanks
Jon,
Excellent study. Looking forward to more results.
What led you to the decision to do the 'dog training' course in lieu of another subject?
Ken
I love this clean blog format. Is this wordPRess?
3 of the 4 recommended links above don't work. I would love to peruse them all.
Thanks, great site.
Hey Jonathan great case study, it will be interesting to see how this turns out as others begin putting your articles on their sites.
Are you using any specific tracking to determine which article sites are most productive?
I have mostly used ezinearticles in the past and have been extremely satisfied with the results.
Hi, very interesting thoughts on articles, I had not given it much thought and was a bit surprised that no MSN backlinks credits for the articles? so is the article working or is the page just well optimesed for google? Good keywords and density can get you a free lift with out any links or articles. Hey, I work at it all the time and seek backlinks where I can and my site has no backlink credit. Seems google just picks a winner and sticks with it.
I also have other sites with #1-spots with less than 300 links and no aritcles.
I don't know or doubt the merits as I think anything you do that is good will help.
cheers
Jon
Well, I think this is a great idea so I am going to give it a try and see what happens.
Wish me luck.
Shane
Aerial One Mortgage Solutons Inc Asheville NC.
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
Thanks, I always thought you'd need those software that submits to 300 sites, etc..