Most internet marketing strategies have two sets of myths attached to them. The first is the most common – over-inflation of statistics. That’s where hundreds become thousands and thousands becomes tens of thousands. The second is disparity – putting things in a negative light and saying they don’t work. Both have been applied to article writing and distribution. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Claims of massive traffic flow from one article mass submitted are no truer than those that declare article marketing is a huge waste of time. If it was, why do we get such great results from it?
A few months back, Google made some changes in their algorithm that made publishing duplicate content either on your website or in multiple article directories an obsolete practice. If you want quality links now, you’ll have to write original articles and content pages and link them manually to internal pages on your website. This is the way we have always done it, so the change didn’t affect our clients. In fact, we’d been expecting the change for some time. It was necessary to improve the quality of information on the web. Far too much garbage content has been published in recent years.
There are those in our industry who claim to be organic SEO “experts” because they’ve been able to use auto-submitters to build links at a rapid pace for their clients. These charlatans are now running for cover as Google invalidates all of their work and client sites disappear from search pages. It’s evidence that short cuts simply do not work. Articles that were written by legitimate writers and submitted to reputable sites are still good for the back links they produce. Those other auto-generated, scrambled, spun, and kindergarten-level bodies of text aren’t worth anything and won’t be seen by searchers any time soon. Web surfers will now get quality when they search, as they should.
One article on a product or service will bring you on average about fifty page views. Writing about current events could get you several hundred. If you have an anchor text link in the body, expect about a 2% click-through rate. Those aren’t big numbers, so you need to write hundreds of articles to see a recognizable change in your traffic volume. That will come with time. The link juice comes immediately. Every article counts, as long as it’s original, quality, and submitted to a legitimate directory.
