Article Marketing Traffic: When Will The Traffic Come Pouring In?
A pretty common question I receive from folks is about when article marketing traffic – so traffic resulting from all the articles you have out there – will start pouring in.
There is a definite learning curve when you start website marketing, and if you don’t learn what expectations are realistic you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment.
I wanted to go over some of the most common concerns/questions related to the topic of trying to drive traffic to a new site or newly marketing an existing site.
Hopefully seeing these questions and explanations will ease your mind enough that you can focus on the long term goal and stick with it long enough to see the fruits of your labors.
Can I get immediate results with Article Marketing or any other online marketing tool?
I wouldn’t count on it. Don’t get me wrong–results certainly can be dramatic. For example, publication in a major ezine can bring a surge of traffic over a few days. In a case like that you would see a sudden boost in traffic, but spikes like that are not lasting–they will die down after a few days or weeks.
When marketing your website, you are trying to build enduring traffic that continues to build over time.
You accomplish this by increasing your search engine ranking. Changing your search engine ranking is not something that happens overnight.
No matter how well you market your site, you cannot change how the search engines do things. When you’re trying to change your search engine ranking you just have to cooperate with Google and gauge your expectations accordingly.
How does Article Marketing help a site get a higher search engine ranking?
Through Article Marketing you will be building links. Search engines look at your links (among other things) to establish the authority of your site and how your site should rank in searches for certain keyword terms.
You want a higher search engine ranking?
Then you will need to build more links to your site…legitimately. I’m not talking about buying links–you need to put for the effort to create content that is valuable to other website owners so that they will link to you. Those are the types of links that Google values.
Article Marketing can also help you rank higher for keywords, by strategic and natural sounding usage of your keywords in your article, resource box and title.
I’ve been submitting articles for 2 months–why am I not seeing a big change in my traffic?
It will likely take 3-6 months at least before seeing results, longer if your site is brand new.
Why does it take that long?
As I mentioned earlier, the main way that article marketing increases traffic to a website is through an increase in search engine ranking–so when people search in Google or the other search engines (SEs) using your keywords terms, they will see your website listed higher in the search results. A higher listing leads to more traffic.
It is the increase in links that will cause Google (and the other SEs) to change your search engine ranking.
But when you build links to your site, they are not automatically calculated by Google. The links you build this week will not “show up” in Google for several months. The links are there, but they just haven’t been calculated to impact your search engine ranking.
The reason for that is that Google does not recalculate your backlinks every day, every week or even every month–usually it’s every 3-4 months that Google will revisit a site, recalculate the backlinks, and then adjust the search engine ranking.
My site is brand new –when can I see results?
If your site is new, then the site needs to be indexed by the search engines first, before they know to go to your site and see what’s going on with your backlinks. So, it can take longer to see initial results when your starting with a brand new site.
I’ve got a story for you below about marketing a brand new website and how long it took…
I need some encouragement to stick with it–can you give me an example?
Certainly–when we were starting our blog Creative Article Marketing last year, it took about 5 months before the backlinks showed up in Google.
Yep, 5 months.
I know from personal experience that it is very hard to wait–when we were starting this blog we were checking expectantly every month to see when the links would show up, and it was a long wait (seemingly to us!) before we got to see the fruits of our labors.
Now our blog is getting great traffic that steadily increases, and it has a PR4 (and climbing!). This is after many consistent months of faithfully marketing this site with articles. Our blog is still a relatively new site (only about a year old), but it’s made a strong start thanks to Article Marketing.
In the first 4 months, though, it was like a flat line on a graph–we could not see much of any effect from our marketing efforts.
It took a while for the site to be indexed (it was brand spankin’ new), and then even though we were link building, the links were not showing up in Google yet.
Then, suddenly in the 5th month the links showed up and we received PageRank and the traffic started to increase.
This is the way that Google (and the other SEs) work. That is something that we wish we had some control over and could speed up, but unfortunately we can’t.
If you are wanting to market your site online, it is going to take time and consistent effort, whether you use article marketing or some other marketing tool.
It is not the sort of thing that has an immediate payoff. This is what is happening with your site, and it is what all of us go through when we’re starting to market a site.
It is unreasonable to think that at some magical date I will get a flood of traffic and backlinks–why do people tell me that?
It is actually not that unreasonable knowing how Google works. The date isn’t magical–it is the date that Google re-evaluates your site and adjusts your search engine ranking that you will see that flat line on your graph start to spike up. If you give up before that time then you will not see the spike.
Can you give me some more in depth information on what I can expect when I’m just starting to market my website?
We have some resources on our blog that you will find helpful:
The #1 Reason Why Article Marketing Fails
5 Things To Do Before You Start Article Marketing…
Alright, I understand now, and I want to give this a go. What do I do next?
*If you are seriously interested in driving traffic to your website, then please read those resources above.
*Come up with a plan for how you will realistically track your progress (the 2nd resource I listed gives you some ideas for creating that tracking plan).
*Check your stats once a month–not every day or every week, but once a month.
*Consistently submit articles every month.
*Know that it will take 3, 4, 5 and sometimes even 6 or more months before seeing the initial results.
Trust that you can market your site. Others are doing it, and so can you.
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PS. Free report! Grab a free and comprehensive blueprint on how to attract sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term targeted traffic through the power of article marketing - just click here.
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Comments on Article Marketing Traffic: When Will The Traffic Come Pouring In?
Daily effort pays off, or regular effort. I have to manage my emotions with both good news and bad news. Mike Logan
Because the nature of the internet is immediate it’s natural to believe that results will come quick and fast.
This is helpful information for your readers.
Thanks for the insight – we started our site 2 months ago and have been very frustrated as we expected instant results!
A lot of very valuable points here that seldom get made. Everyone seems to want instant results and with the primary keywords on Google
As they say lots of luck.
The beauty for those of those who persist and have a longer term view as well is that first of all SEO is a double edged sword:
It takes a fair amount of time, as well as consistent effort to get in. Once in, the next guy has to put in as much effort and waiting time as you , if not more if you have done your job well and thoroughly as well.
Secondly few , even among so called professionals are willing to do the work and as well be patient for results. Its a wide open world out there for those willing to do the work.
I find that often a few days after publishing a few articles that I will get a spike in traffic when the article becomes indexed. It can be frustrating to see the drop off after that initial spike. Usually a couple of months later though a really good article will almost “rise from the ashes” and reclaim it’s rightful place at the top of the search engine rankings and stick there. That is when I see the results of all my work as that steady traffic begins to come in from the search engines off of those quality articles. Exciting stuff!
Thanks for the advise!
Doing good keyword research before you write your article will greatly improve your results and speed the response time. Instead of going for the 50,000 searches per day elephant, pick a keyword that delivers 100 searches per day. Time and again when I approach this strategy, I see rank improvements in a MATTER OF DAYS! Don’t be greedy and you’ll see quicker results.
With articles it can take a while yes… The funniest thing happened for one of my sites. It was on page like 300 and then all of a sudden it was #1 for the main keyword, now it’s doing a solid 100-200 visitors per day from search engines, totally hands off and free…
But how many articles should one submit? 1 per day, 2 per week or 10 per day? That’s the biggest question, and it can be hard to answer… what do you think? I mean, this service only allows 2 per week and I’ve got 60 sites to take care of =)
- Chris
I am a brain dead newbie, please could you explain two things -
1: I keep getting my article refused by ezine articles as I seem to have the wrong link to the website on it, it is the same link that I have given to everyone else – http://gvoleaders.com/nett why won’t ezine accept it?
2: could you explain links and backlinks please (very simply!) I don’t really understand what they are or how to do them.
Thanks very much.
Annette
Steve,
With all the article theft on the web, I wonder if it’s worth distributing articles at all. I mean, someone can copy your article, Google may pick it up instead of yours and the rouge site gets the credit and traffic.
So, I’m wondering if it’s not better to simply post the article on your own site — reduces the chance of theft.
Does Google rate ALL websites taken together using Whois or something like that? I have several websites that I believe are quality sites; howver, I have 1 site that is just for experimenting with different colors, fonts, etc. It could not be considered a “quality” website. Would I be penalized on my quality sites for this one site that is not quality and not intended to be quality content?
Yeah, you definitely can’t see much traffic. But i know from my older sites than after a period of time, say X months, your article marketing efforts will really start to show results.
its true that if no dedication and patiences is applied on the marketing part of it no dude will see the site. i have been marketing http://www.sebule.com for now almost a year and the site is still to come up on the search engine after around eight months of writting articles and submitting to the search engines I can now see some traffic building up gradually. its all hard work and eventually pays
Thanks for sharing this. I have a brand new site and have done some social bookmarking and just started article marketing. We’re getting very low natural traffic but from experience with another website which gets ’sweet’ traffic from search engines, I know it’ll take some time to see the fruit of my labor. Nice reminder to just chill. The traffic will come.
Thank you for offering this information to newbie article marketers. I was led to believe there would be instant results and have am still in flatline after one month of publishing my first article. This is a truly encouraging post to me and I am sure to many others.
This is very good lesson I learnt as I was also disappointed about not having visitors to my new site.
I am waiting while submitting articles, posting in forums and commenting on blogs to build back links.
Hope I would see visitors to my site soon.
Thanks for valuable guidance. I have been following you since many days and now I am seeing the result of increased traffic. Thanks a lot and keep it up.
Regards,
Totally agree that articles are an absolutely essential part of gaining SEO but don’t wait for the SE’s to do all the work. We started getting constant traffic almost instantaneously on a brand new blog because we marketed it in Facebook on a relevant group.
Use your social links to tell people about your blog and your articles. Tell the world and keep telling the world and you will get traffic much sooner.
I would like to ask a question addresed to SEO experts rather then to newbies. The question is, is it really worth writing many articles that link to the same site? After all all those articles will be published by the same publishers in the same category. That means that all the backlinks to my site will be coming from a fixed number of sites. Is it worth having several backlinks from the same site? Will Google still value those backlinks or is it enought to have one backlink from each site?
Thanks for your comments everyone. In reply to questions/comments:
Chris–
SubmitYOURArticle.com allows unlimited article submissions–you may submit as many as you like.
What we recommend though is to submit 8 articles a month for each site. Since our service distributes to an extensive list of publishers, that number of submissions works well and allows links to build gradually. Submitting tons more is not a plus or necessary.
But still–it is up to you. You may submit as many as you deem necessary. And if you have 60 sites, you will be submitting more articles than 2 per week.
Alan–
Google looks at each site on its own. The site you have for just playing around should not affect your other sites.
Anthony–
Yes, it is worth it to distribute articles. If you simply post the article on your own site, you do not build backlinks. The main purpose of doing article marketing is to build backlinks, which allows you to elevate your search engine ranking for your keywords. There may be some renegade sites on the web that will steal content, but those are not quality sites, and for the most part publishers honor the rules of article marketing. If having content stolen is your concern, you would still run that risk by having the article published on your own site. Focus on the big picture–article marketing is still an extremely effective marketing tool for a website. Doing article marketing allows you to build backlinks to your site.
Annette–
It would be a good idea to get in touch with Ezine Articles as to what they are objecting to about your link. If you log into your account there, there is a “Contact” page where you can submit a question.
Also, you had asked about “links and backlinks”. Sure, I’ll try to explain as simply as possible.
A link is a reference on one web page to another web page on the internet (or another place on the same page). If the reference text is clickable (meaning the viewer can click the reference and be taken to the that web page) then the link is a hyperlink (also known as a link).
A backlink is an incoming link to a web page. Other terms for backlinks are: incoming links, inbound links, inlinks and inward links. So, for your site, backlinks would be links going back to your website.
When you submit articles, the backlink is formed by the link in your resource box. The link in your resource box would be going back to a page on your website.
Annette–I hope that helps. I will try to put something together that explains it a little more in depth and put the info in an upcoming post.
Michelle–
I would recommend submitting about 8 articles a month per site–that’s 2 articles a week. If you write 1-2 articles a week for each of your two sites, then you are submitting 4-8 articles. That is a reasonable amount, and that can have a definite impact if you keep it up.
You also said that you had developed the habit of first publishing an article on your site and then reworking it for submission–that is a great approach, as it creates a steady stream of fresh content on your own site (with Google likes to see), and then you’ve also got your article submissions working for you. You can use the original article on your site as an outline for your article marketing submission. It takes a little more time than just writing an article and submitting it, but you are getting a greater reward. You are producing fresh content for your site and also you have an article marketing campaign going. Here are some tips on how to re-work content from your site to form an article.
Greg–
That is a good suggestion about going for the long tail keywords (the ones that produce less traffic, but are easier to get ranked for due to less competition). You have an article marketing campaign going full steam so you see results quickly from your submissions, which is great.
Leonid–
Your question: “is it really worth writing many articles that link to the same site?”
Answer: Yes, this is called link building, and it impacts your search engine ranking when done consistently.
Your question: “all those articles will be published by the same publishers in the same category. That means that all the backlinks to my site will be coming from a fixed number of sites.”
Answer: Actually, that is not correct–these are free reprint articles, so when you put your article on an article directory, you are not just gaining one backlink. The idea is to submit an article that other publishers will want to pick up and publish on their own sites. This is how article marketing builds links in a compounded fashion–however many article directories you place your article on, it will end up on more sites when publishers pick your article up for publication. Website owners go to article directories to find content for their sites. When they find and reprint your article, you gain another backlink. The number of backlinks is not limited at all, but continuously expanding.
Your question: “Is it worth having several backlinks from the same site? Will Google still value those backlinks or is it enough to have one backlink from each site?”
Answer: Yes, but with article marketing you would not just have links coming from one site. Each time the article is republished you gain a backlink, so the sites linking to your site are varied. Yes, Google values those backlinks. For the best results with article marketing you would consistently submit articles, rather than just putting one article on each site. The idea is to get your articles on many sites.
You might find these resources helpful:
What is the purpose of an article directory?
Is there any point in having your article published on a smaller website?
I hope that helps!
Really informative stuff, thanks.
Thanks – good tip to check statistics less frequently. I suppose we all suffer with impatience but these things can`t be hurried.