Article Marketing and Duplicate Content

Article Marketing and Duplicate Content
I'd like to talk a little about article marketing. Article marketing has long been a favourite method of gaining traffic and back links to many a web-site. It is not as effective as it use to be but it is still VERY Worthwhile.

I would also like to take this opportunity to clarify a few issues around duplicate content. You see, the old method of submitting your articles to as many article directories as possible has recently come under a lot of scrutiny, as Matt Cutts from Google started to talk about duplicate content penalties.

Well, as always, it pays to test. So, here's what I did. I tested three different methods:

1. I created one article and posted it on my site to an 'orphan' page i.e. not linked in. I then wrote another article and linked that to that page. I then submitted that article to Ezine.

2. On another orphan page, I created another article and then posted that same article to Ezine articles.

3. On another orphan page, I created another article and then posted that same article to Ezine PLUS every other article directory.

I then placed tracking code on each of my 3 pages and waited. The results are not what I expected at all...and if you don't get this right then you are going to waste a heap of time, effort and money following the wrong strategy. So, this is what happened:

Method 3 outperformed methods 1 and 2 by a ratio of 10:1 ! Yes, article marketing the old way is still the most effective in terms of traffic generation!! You also get more links, despite what the gurus say. So, just how many links and visitors can you expect from article writing?

Lest say you write 142 articles and submitted them to Ezine. You will most likely become a platinum level author so this is reasonable test size:

Those articles could be viewed 74,000 times, around 500 times each. They have been published 1508 times, which in theory generates around 10 links per article. They have also generated 2745 visitors, around 20 visitors per article.

Now, of course, it depends on your market, but if you allocate a dollar value to those (highly targeted) visitors and links then you should be able to come up with a sound financial argument to keep on article marketing. When you add all the visitors and links received from the other article directories and web-sites then it's a no brainer. Enough said.

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