unintuitive

Over the last couple weeks I have been experimenting with article marketing as an alternative to pure PPC advertising.

For readers who are unfamiliar with article marketing, the idea is to submit short essays to highly-visited article directories. These articles eventually appear in the Google or Yahoo search engine results pages based on the keywords those users search for. Ultimately the people who read your article will follow a link to your web page and (hopefully) buy your product or sign up for the service you wrote about in your article.

I’ve been focusing some attention on EzineArticles, a premiere public article directory, to see what kind of results I would get with them. So far the 3 articles I submitted have received a total of 74 combined views, and the link to my website has been clicked 12 times.

Now, granted, my foray into article marketing is still relatively new; I’m sure that 74 views on EzineArticles is laughable compared to some veteran article authors. But still - I’m seeing an average CTR of around 16.2% for my articles. In comparison, a successful PPC advertising campaign on AdWords might result in a click-through of 3 - 5%, and a highly targeted and very well done campaign could get to 16% CTR or higher.

It’s exciting that a new user such as myself can - at no cost - produce results similar to a very well run AdWords campaign.

But… do those visitors convert? None have so far, but time will tell.