Article Marketing For Traffic: Can You Really Make Money With This Traffic Strategy?

Most web traffic experts who are using article marketing as a traffic strategy will tell you that you can publish articles and doing this will bring you a consistent stream of traffic to your website.Other experts will argue that you should only do article marketing for link building purposes because articles never bring any traffic.Who should you believe? Can you really expect traffic from your articles, and can you make money with this article marketing strategy?

The first point you need to understand is that when you are doing article marketing to promote your website, there are basically 2 different strategies.You can do article marketing for traffic, or article marketing for SEO. With the first strategy, you will write an article with the goal to have this article rank high in search engines' results, or to publish it on a very high quality website that attracts a lot of traffic and where your article will get read by a targeted audience. With the second article marketing strategy, your goal is to publish an article only to get backlinks to your website from this article. In this case you don't mind if your article doesn't actually get read by many people.

Most online article marketing tutorials and e-books tend to emphasize the first strategy, article marketing for traffic, because a few years ago this used to work very well. However, this method does not work as well as it used to. And the truth is it would not be wise to think that you can make a consistent passive income with this method. There are two main reasons why we can say this.

If you are publishing an article on a third-party website, you don't know what will happen to this article in the long run. Maybe the website will be sold, or it will lose its pagerank and its rankings, or you will have your account suspended. Generally speaking, it is never good to build someone else's asset rather than your own. You need other websites, but if you are going to make the effort to rank your articles in the search engines' results, it might be better to put them on your own website because you will truly reap the rewards of your efforts and this will be more long-term. Now, you can definitely get some good traffic by submitting articles to quality websites and you should do it, but don't make this your unique article marketing strategy.

Second, if you want to build a sustainable monthly income with articles, you would need to write thousands of them. There are many other traffic generation methods that will be far more productive for you, including doing article marketing for SEO. Publishing 1,000 articles with good anchor texts in the resource box will push your website higher in the rankings and this will generate a much more stable income than relying on traffic directly from the articles. If you want traffic from articles, expect an 8% click-through if your articles are good. Writing 100 articles with one view per day for each one of them will get you about 3,000 views per month and 240 click-throughs. Let's say you convert 2% of these visitors, which is good, and make 20 dollars per sale. You will have made roughly 100 dollars in one month. If you want to make 500 dollars, you will need 500 articles. And you will need to repeat this, because after the first months of the article publication on a directory, even as good as EzineArticles, you will no longer get as many views. This is why we can say that you should not think about building all your income using this strategy, as this won't be a stable source of income.

The best approach is to use the two strategies. Submitting articles to directories and third-party websites is a great way to build backlinks and get some traffic, but make sure to diversify the websites you put your articles on. Use blogs, web 2.0, wikis, social networking sites, share your content on Twitter and Facebook for more exposure, and do not expect to make a lot of money from your articles, but do expect to build many backlinks and push your website up in the search engine rankings.

A combination of the two strategies will give you the best return on your investment and you will see that article marketing is a very powerful website promotion technique.