Revisiting my article writing case study.
July 31, 2007
So I'm doing my video review of Matt Callen's HyperVRE software (which I'll be sending out in a couple of days), and in the process I revisited the article writing case study that I put together last fall.
In that case study, I wrote 5 articles and did nothing else to advertise a site that I had built, following the results for one month (which were great). Well, I compiled the case study into a PDF report for Matt to send to his list to show the power of my Instant Article Wizard software.
That made me curious. I wondered if that site was still getting any traffic, so I checked out my stats, and WOW! What a surprise! The site is freedogtraining.net, and it's a 5 day mini-course on how to train your dog. In the "about the author" links of my articles, I (mostly) used the keywords "free dog training".
Do a search for "free dog training" at Google, and notice which site is ranking #8. Yup, that's me.
I checked the site's stats, and sure enough, I'm getting good traffic from those keywords. Ha! So I checked my signups and, sure enough, I've gotten hundreds more since the case study was done.
That site, which I'd long since forgotten about, has been quietly growing in its rankings and traffic, and collecting more and more email addresses from people, and making sales of its back-end product — all from writing and distributing just 5 unique articles on the subject matter.
The site is still getting traffic from EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com as well, many months later. So is writing and distributing unique articles a great way to build traffic to your web site? My site's #8 ranking, traffic logs and signup rate are proof that it is indeed. It's a long term strategy that really works!
If I accomplished that much by writing only 5 articles, imagine how much you could accomplish by cranking out dozens (or hundreds) of articles using Instant Article Wizard!
Please leave your comments about this below.
Comments
52 Responses to “Revisiting my article writing case study.”
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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. 
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Hey Jonathan,
Can't wait to read that HyperVRE review! And get this…this is unreal.
On my site [no links please] I put up a note about how I'm revamping my site and I apologize for the inconvenience, so I give away a free month of hosting. Well the site is really nothing at all.
But last week, I just typed in 'free month of hosting' and found that my site was ranked #2 out of 45,000,000 results. So I added the subscribe box.
I noticed I'm also on the first page for 'free month hosting', or 'hosting free month'.
DO you have ANY idea why this site would rank so high?
Ian
Yep, have to agree with you Jon. I've played around with many article writing softwares and so far Instant Article Wizard comes up tops. I guess it's because the research is just there right in front of you so all the hard work has already been done.
A good article can be put together in around 20 minutes or so and be immediately published to the web. It's simply a case of putting things in your own words. Remember, Instant Article Wizard is only there as a reference vehicle. You are not using the snippets produced word for word. Follow these guidelines and you have a great tool to help with your article writing.
Kirk
Hi Jonathan,
I did some quick looking at your site and see that neither Alexa nor Compete show any traffic at all to your site. How many visitors are you talking about when you say the site is doing great? Could you be more specific with the extra signups, traffic stats and sales?
I just thought I would also drop a comment and say that I love your innovative products and the way you look at marketing on the Internet. Your views and products are always a refreshing new look at things!
Sincerely,
Joel
Thanks Kirk! I couldn't have gotten a better testimonial for IAW if I had asked for one.
Jonathan,
I am enjoying your excellent product, Instant Article Wizard. I have found I can write a 500+ word article in less than 20 minutes! My first attempt at writing a tanning bed article took me over an hour unassisted.
Keep up the good work.
Andy
P.S. How useful was your PDF report in driving traffic? I see Instant Article Wizard as being very useful for reports and other information products.
Joel:
I'm getting a few hundred visitors a month, and I've gotten 300+ signups to my list, and made a couple of sales from a -very- lousy sales pitch at the end of the mini-course. The Google traffic is starting to pickup now that it's ranking well for those keywords.
All that from writing 5 articles. Imagine if I had written 50. I'd probably be #1 or #2 for my keywords.
Andy:
The PDF report did very well. I've always found that distributing reports is a good way to get traffic.
This was a great Case study. Since I have purchased your Instant Article Wizard, I am going to try this technique myself and see what happens.
Thanks John.
Hey Jonathan,
I really enjoyed your case study. I wanted to ask
- Did you send the articles out all at once or over the five day period?
- And did you send the same article to each site each time?
Thanks and keep up the good work. I am also going to try and duplicate your results.
Andre
Hey Andre:
1) I sent all 5 out at once, to 3 sites: EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and ArticleCity.com
2) Yes, I sent the same articles to all 3 sites.
Hi Jonathan,
I have to say when I first saw your website the first thing that came to mind was "will this work"? So I went ahead and bought the program I am very excited about what I can do with this, I have to calm my self down at times. Anyway I will keep you up to date with my progress I would like to say that people really need a way to get articles that have not been seen 20,000 times in one day. :0)
I find the IAW tool easy to use and it gets an article researched and roughed out in about 15 minutes - a few minutes to edit and the article is ready for publication.
Gets a thumbs up from me.
Kevin
Jonathan,
IAW does make it much faster to get some easy and free long lived traffic. We can all use more free traffic!
Ted
Hi Jon,
An excellent articles, as usual. I bought your IAW and am quite impressed with it so far. I was tickled pink the other day, when I wanted to write an article for another site I have and found my own site referenced from within IAW
At least I know that it extracts real, live article information - this site is only a couple of weeks old!
Keep up the great work. I am a fan of your software.
Barry
Interesting article. I will follow your advice and will hopefully see the same results.
I have improved my rankings using your software on other sites and your software does the trick. Instant Article Wizard does an excellent job and saves me heaps of time and having to do lots of research before coming up with good quality articles - something I have struggled to do in the past.
Thanks again.
Jonathan,
Can you tell us more about the articles themselves? Were they keyword optimized articles or were they more content or idea articles?
Thanks!
That's great news Jon, and indeed very good rankings for a site that has so little content on it.
By the way, have you done any split testing on a landing page of this type - does the audio you have added increase conversion rates significantly?
Andy
Hi Jonathan,
I set up a site today using your interesting dogtraining model, and I will be doing some article distribution and submitting to see where it goes.
Just a note on your doggie site: I subscribed but have not yet received the first lesson - after about 12 hours - and a friend also had the same experience today, we thought perhaps your autoresponder is broken?
Cheers, always looking forward to your ideas and tactics!
Andy:
I haven't done any split testing, since my goal for the case study was mostly to see how much traffic I could drive using articles.
Neels:
Thanks, I'll look into it.
Hi, Jonathan?
I was wondering if you could answer my question above? Thanks!
Sorry Chris, missed that one. They were not keyword-rich articles, just content targeted. The keywords "free dog training" were in the "about the author" section, though — thus its ranking for those terms.
Thanks for the info, Jonathan!
Jonathan,
In the PDF of this case study, you said that you wrote 5 articles that you submitted to 3 directories and that was it. That's all you did.
Towards the end of the report, you give a chart of what the results could have have been if you had kept writing articles each day.
In the report, you state: "Each article averaged about 70 page views, 25 signups and 0.2 sales per month. If I
started writing one article a day, five days a week, here’s how things would stack up…"
Then you give the chart showing what could have been.
But the numbers you state were for writing and submitting *1* article at a time were actually based on you writing *5* articles. When you submitted *5* articles, that's when you got "70 page views, 25 signups and 0.2 sales per month" and that was after 7 days, as the report states.
So I'm wondering if the chart should show numbers that are 1/4 of what it actually states? I was wondering if you could clarify this? Did I miscalculate?
Regardless, I REALLY liked the report and even if there is a mistake in the numbers, the results are still IMPRESSIVE.
Thanks!
Amazing case study Jon! When I analyzed it further, I notice other similar models on the net too but with a small twist.
Instead of just emailing the lessons contents, the email is sent but with a url web link to the actual contents in it. That way if you want to read it, you need to visit the link.
Once you click the link, appearing on the same page too, are the adsense ads, affiliate product links of similar theme product and the 'main affiliate' product link.
This is yet another simple case study method, you can use to upsell to your prospective customers and generate additional source of income, while driving repeat visitors traffic to your website.
Sunny:
That is an excellent way to generate more revenue, for sure.
Jonathan,
I'm sure you're real busy, so you haven't had time to look at my question above, but thanks anyway for a very inspiring case study!
I hope to see more soon!
P.S. Have you tried what Sunny describes above?
Jonathan Leger
This article has sent me back looking at things i have done,
like making a video from your {Case study on driving traffic to your site using video}
you have 1 and 2 spot
i have 3 and 4
I am sorry to use this post to ask this question about
http://www.jonathanleger.com/videos-case-study/
but hear I go:
question on website http://dogpictures.blogspot.com/
what script of software are you using in order for people to upload pictures to you at
http://www.jonathanleger.com/dogpictures/
sorry if you have covered this already, I am having no luck in finding out how.
thanks for your help
james
Jon. I found anothjer couple of things about IAW (thanks for the tip about appending 'is' and 'are' BTW.
It's real easy, onbce the research is done to get carried away and build an intro a conclusion and four bits in the middle - but I'm finding that's too much.
So I split the intro and conclusion and add a little into to four portions and I have two articles!
Finally - with the way this is set up, the small sections are just beautiful for small blogs, so I do these small 'snippets' each day rather than one blog article a week - and that's making a big difference too.
Regards
Martin
james:
I used a custom-written script.
Martin:
Great tip, thanks!
jonathan leger
Can I buy a copy of your custom-written script?
I'm afraid it's not for sale james.
Jonathan, when you get a chance, could you take a look at my question above? I'll repost it here:
"Jonathan,
In the PDF of this case study, you said that you wrote 5 articles that you submitted to 3 directories and that was it. That's all you did.
Towards the end of the report, you give a chart of what the results could have have been if you had kept writing articles each day.
In the report, you state: "Each article averaged about 70 page views, 25 signups and 0.2 sales per month. If I
started writing one article a day, five days a week, here’s how things would stack up…"
Then you give the chart showing what could have been.
But the numbers you state were for writing and submitting *1* article at a time were actually based on you writing *5* articles. When you submitted *5* articles, that's when you got "70 page views, 25 signups and 0.2 sales per month" and that was after 7 days, as the report states.
So I'm wondering if the chart should show numbers that are 1/4 of what it actually states? I was wondering if you could clarify this? Did I miscalculate?
Regardless, I REALLY liked the report and even if there is a mistake in the numbers, the results are still IMPRESSIVE.
Thanks!"
Thanks for your time, Jonathan!
Chris Hunter - if I may answer your question on Jon's behalf…
I believe Jon's number are legit. He simply divided the totals for the month by 5, rounded for simplicity's sake, and then used that number to represent each article. So, since the total page views for the month is 341, *each* article (theoretically) would have been responsible for about 70 page views. In reality, the distribution could have been 337-1-1-1-1, but that's not likely.
So, using 70 page views, etc. for each article, and then projecting into the future, is reasonable.
Hi Jon, I am a virgin newbie. (that means even more new than a regular newbie) And I have been considering your article writing product.
So I have been watching all the comments. Listing and learning as they say. But here is my question…you mentioned when you put up the "Dog training" site a few months back, you went off and completely forgot that you had it and then later went back out of curiosity when you remembered that you had done it to see what it was doing.
How do you forget about a site you are paying hosting fees for? I see all the time all these web sites people are talking about putting up. With no more thought or effort than brushing your teeth. (I know this may sound strange but I mentioned I was a newbie…I dont even have a clue as to how to put a web site together and making it live yet)
But where are all these sites being hosted? And how long does a website stay active without paying the bill for it? It seems that a lot of sites are just sitting around out there in cyber space and no one seems to be paying for all of this. How does that work? How do you put up a site, pay ongoing hosting charges and then just forget it is even there?
That to me is like forgetting about your bank account, or forgetting you have a car payment and never paying it. Seems to me that the account would be deleted after a month or two…unless it is a free. And if that is the case, where do you find free hosting. Can someone explain this? Carl
Carl:
I have my own servers, so I don't pay monthly hosting fees, just a flat fee for the server (which can host hundreds of sites).
Wally,
I get it now.
That makes sense to me. My math was off for some reason. Must have been late!
Thanks!
Truly amazing… I don't know how you do it. I have been working on some sites and still don't seem go get anyone to sign up. Did you create the 5 day course yourself?? That seems to be the hard part. What to give away to get the email. Does anyone else feel this way?
Keep up the good work.
Tribal:
I did create the 5 day course myself. It was actually quite easy. I just purchased a dog training ebook, scanned it and took notes of the points I wanted to put in each of the 5 day course. At the end of the course it pitches the whole ebook to them.
Hi,
What happened to your site on Google? Searched with and without quotes and didn't notice it on the first 3 pages for either.
Yea, I searched too and did not find it in the top 30 listings.
I wondered if Google is doing it's famous updates.
I do not see the site in google, why ?
I just searched on free dog training (without quotes) in Google and Jon's site is still listed at #8 for that keyword phrase.
I checked Jon's website and found it on the second page of Google, so it's OK =)
I think Google's just doing its usual shuffling.
This is very interesting. Especialy the "Instant Article Wizard"
Hi jonathan,
I am new to this blog and finding some great stuff to read here.
It's amazing that you can get so many email subscribers from such a low amount of content on your site. But you do have the focus on getting the email subscription.
p.s. I found your dog site at #11 on Google.
I look forward to learning more from you, thanks!
And when you take into consideration the law of averages over a much larger sample you will get a more accurate number. This may be higher or lower than 70, but even if it dropped to around 25 per month and you had 1000 articles you would be doing pretty good. Then also start doing all the other seo that you can and you will triple that response. Compare that to a piece of income generating real estate, your ROI is huge.
Kelly
Is it best to put p as many articles as you can on the article directories or leave some of the articles on your own site to be indexed by the search engines?
Kelly, I would submit all your articles (as long as they are good ones) to article directories, as well as posting them on your site.
Your own site will still get indexed and your articles will get high search rankings via the article directories.
Peter
Thanks Peter. I will do that.
Kelly
I ended up buying instant articles wizard which I found a great tool to create articles, thanks
Hello Jonathan,
First of all, I greatly appreciate the wealth of information you share on your site!!! Secondly, please help me understand the difference between Instand Article Wizard and the new & improved edition of Article Builder software. Trying to determine which will best fit my needs.
Thanks in advance,
Chris Blake