I would say that AB will probably *not* do much to help you here – and you’ll have to decide for yourself, whether or not the return on your time and energy is worth it. (which you can measure if you are using analytics – or tracking links, etc)

Overall – there are other benefits from posting to multiple article directories, even if you never get a single click. It gives you "authority" (not YOU per se, but your site…..something that people tend to mix up often) and usually will offer a nice (and more permenant) bump to the site where the links are pointing. Overall -it’s a longer term strategy for creating authority.

Short term, it’s a great way to make some sales, build a list, etc. If you you aren’t getting the clicks due to page structure, etc (and yes, this is frustating but the price of rice so to speak) you simply have to gage how the time you are investing in this is being spent. (there are other good places to submit – I’ll cover some of those in a post this week)

So, how could AB approve junk like this and how could Google rank it so high? I’m ranking well with AB, but have just submitted 6 so far. In 4 of those 6, there is way too much space between the article body and the bio box, so a person would have to scroll down just to see the bio box. I would have to be losing clicks because of it and have written to AB about it, but have not heard back yet. If they don’t correct it, would you suggest going someplace else? If so, what might be a good alternative? Thank you.

Don

You may want to check out Glenn’s PDF above – he does this with Pay Per Click exceptionally well – I’ve seen him do this very well in exceptionally BIG markets – and in the PDF above he uses weight loss as an illustration of how to do this for PPC for a live project. (and can be extraploated for articles, organic traffic strategies, et al)

When I write an article for a very competitive market, I start backwards and decide which keywords I want to rank for and then write the articles around this. I don’t want to try to rank for “lose weight” with 47 million serps , but I might try to rank for “shed pounds naturally” with 1 million serps. Does this make sense, or is it not necessary?

Thank you, Deane

(the amazing thing is, it really IS that easy – and if you keep it up, you’ll have LOTS of those sorts of results in no time, flat)

I would stick with AB for a little while and just continue to measure how well they do for your goals – and then just double back and start adding in some of the other strategies we covered above – if you start getting traffic, and making some money, it’s amazing how many more windows of opportunity begin to open!

After wasting plenty of time trying various things on the net, I decided to use article marketing. You have given a lot of good information on it. Anyway, I was going to submit articles to EZA, but they seem to change the rules all the time, so I sent one to ArticlesBase. It was approved the same day and in 5 days it was number 1 in Google with 1.2 million pages. So I submitted 2 more to AB. Within 2 days, they ranked 1 and 2. I was totally shocked. This is a very competitive, but evergreen market. It seems to be working so well, that I’m inclined to keep doing what I’m doing for now and worry about the blogs etc. later. What would you suggest?

Thank you very much, Ian.
Don

I think I should stick with AB until I get more written

There is never any harm in that at all – (and usually good benefits ) and the ONLY time you have to worry about “duplicate content” ( In my View) is when you are publishing the very same stuff on your OWN blog, that’s showing up, and indexed elsewhere already.

(and the only “penalty” is that most often, you won’t get any traffic or “love” from the search engines on that particular content – but I don’t really believe there is a “penalty” insofar as that which you hear people worry about so often)

Again – I’m not a SEO expert – (although I really DID stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night..:-) I just know what I see with my own stuff!