Submitting Articles To Article Directories How Much Traffic Can

Submitting Articles To Article Directories: How Much Traffic Can I Really Bring In?!

I like to surf around different internet forums that deal with internet marketing, link building, traffic building, and search engine optimization. Lately, I have seen a lot of questions about using articles as a marketing tool. The question has been this:

“How much traffic can I get from submitting articles to article directories?”

I would honesty love to tell you that you get loads of traffic. On the other hand, I would love to be able to tell you that you wouldn’t get a lot of traffic. However, I cannot tell you either way because it really just depends.

It depends on these things:


How many articles you submit
How many directories you submit your articles to
Where you submitted your article
Quality of your article
Usefulness of your article
Value of your article

So if article writing appears so iffy, why do it? One thing I will say is that article marketing is not something you will usually see results from overnight. Article marketing is a great long term investment for promoting your website, building links, and generating more traffic. Article marketing is only iffy if you are looking for a short term or fast, quick way to generate traffic.

My best advice is to avoid writing garbage content. Provide useful information in your article. Keep a constant mindset that you are writing for people and not to see the traffic stats go up through the roof. You are not writing for numbers! You are writing for people. If you are writing for numbers, you may begin to feel discouraged because your traffic will not usually jump overnight. Quite simply, it takes time to realize the positive effects from article writing.

I know that I am guilty of taking short cuts and forgetting about the reader in my articles. Sometimes I am feeling lazy and think, “Well I’m writing this article. My link will be on my article, so therefore, people will click my link and all will be well.” That is wishful thinking on my part! The truth and reality about that statement is that nobody will care to click to my website if my article is not worth reading. They won’t even make it through the article to see my link! That’s a shame.

If your article fails to meet the reader, you also miss out on another important aspect. You miss out on the chance that the reader will take the article and distribute it to other people with your link attached to the article. That’s even more possible traffic you are missing out on!

Quality is so essential to article marketing. The other factors of article marketing have no match for a quality article. You could submit to few article directories and many would read your quality article because it is an article worth reading.

To summarize, write quality articles that meet the reader. Give the reader exactly what they want. Do not take shortcuts because there are no shortcuts in article marketing. Article marketing can be a time consuming process, but if done right, it will really, and I mean really, pay off in the long run.

BONUS : Successful Article Marketing Is In The Tracking

I submit articles to a lot of article directories and through http://www.isnare.com. A lot of the articles are my own, but most of them are ghostwritten for clients. Isnare and other article directories do an ok job of tracking how many views your article has had at their directory, but that's where it stops.

Plus, once you submit to any article directory, how do you know where else that article was reprinted? Clients ask me about this all the time.

Sure, you can search for your article title in Google and get a lot of results and sift through them to find which search engine listings are your article and which are just web pages that are related to the same phrase used in your article title, but is that the best method for tracking how well your articles are doing out there?

Submit and forget is the normal approach taken to article marketing. You just keep producing new articles and have "faith" in the system and that your articles are getting widespread distribution. For years, this was the approach I took to article marketing as well.

Since then, we have developed ways to do more with the content that we wrote or paid to have written for us.

For starters, those old articles you own and have already submitted are still good, useful content. You can continue to distribute them to other article directories they have not already been submitted to. You can offer them to be printed on other websites for a link back in your bio. You can break them into parts and reuse them on your blog as part 1, part 2, part 3, and so on.

The content you wrote or paid for still has value beyond the one time they were submitted to directories. How many articles do you have on your hard drive right now that you could be using?

Another method you can use is to place a tracking or serial number into each article. Use something unique as an identifier. Something with numbers and letters. Before you develop your serial numbers, search them in google and if you get a no results page, your serial number is perfect.

You can place the serial number into the actual body of the article or into your author bio. Anyone reading the article will ignore it, but you will be able to search Google for that serial number later and you will start getting results that are your own.

With this method you can track which article topics get the widest distribution, track which websites and blogs reprinted the article after finding it in article directories, and which distribution method got you the most bang for your buck.

Stop guessing and start tracking and you will improve your article marketing results tremendously!