Article Traffic – Ways And Methods

December 6, 2008

by Stuart

I’m sure many of you have used article marketing as a means of generating traffic. No doubt, it’s a good strategy to drive traffic… but… is it an efficient use of time? Personally I think article marketing is a very powerful approach. However, the problem lies in the following:

Many people in Asia are not comfortable writing in English.
Writing is a tedious process because it is not usually a habit.
It’s a tedious process to even generate good ideas for articles even if you can write.
To submit completed articles is a barrier because you want maximum exposure, and submission is an administrative process that wastes time.
Even if you do submit articles, you end up not really knowing which is the best category for you.
There’s a gazillion different software that confuse rather than help leverage.

photo credit: Adam (adamjinj)

So how do you address this? Here’s my suggestion. First of all, you have to remember that article traffic can be done by you, but you don’t have to be the only person doing it yourself. Even if you’re proficient at writing, and you really want other people to do this so that you can automate the article marketing process.

Next, you need to hire people who are reliable. It’s a common sense question – how do I hire people to get this done for me without creating more work for myself? My suggestion is to split up the work. Instead of just hiring individuals, hire a team or company you can outsource to. This way, if there is any problem, it’s the company’s responsibility to ensure that the work of writing is completed.

Then it’s the process of submission. Get another group/team to submit your articles for you.

So, at this juncture, you probably think that it’s going to be hands off for you? Wrong. You should set up a checking system where another individual is hired to police the submissions and writing. If you can do this, it will definitely save you lots of time and effort while generating a huge amount of traffic.

I also know people who have bought submission tools for their team so that the team can be more efficient in submission work!

Why do I NOT recommend using the commercial approaches to article writing and submission? Well, because there are too many people who are using those services and I have no clue as to the quality no matter how many gurus recommend those services. Personally, I would rather set a private system for myself and let that be my own secret weapon, not need to share this with other people!

So, in summary, you need:

a team of writers
a team of submission grunge workers
a project manager to handle the tracking and supervision

Wow – isn’t that going to increase your costs?

Well, if you do this effectively, you will need to set a target in the first place. What is your goal? Is it to submit 100 articles in a month? Hmm.. here’s a calculation. You could do this at around $5 per article, meaning $500 a month.

So, you will need submission assistants, right? If you want to submit 100 articles to at least 10 article engines, that may cost you another $300-$500.

The question is how much does that bring you? Investing $1k is not a small sum, right? Well, how much traffic will it build? How fast can you opt-in your visitors? That’s the real question. After you’ve got subscribers, shouldn’t you think of the offers to bring to them? That means you really need an autoresponder system to handle that. You’ll also need a way to write your autoresponder sequence!

Wow, some more work? Well, the truth is you need to manage your business model. If the business model is not properly formed up, you will not be able to have any clarity on the business approach in the first place. Lack of clarity will cost you more money, and therefore you need to systemize your process, email writing and so on.

I hope this article will give you a starting point at least. Start drafting a basic business model surrounding article traffic, and use outsource talent to move toward your desired goals in internet marketing.