Content Caboodle Blog

Article Marketing Isn’t Free Traffic – But It’s Quality Traffic When Done Right!

I often see people tweeting or blogging about how article marketing is a free way to get traffic, and it always makes me cringe just a little.

Sure, you can write and publish an article online without paying a penny, but to create a quality article requires at-least a modest investment of time for the researching and writing–and isn’t your time worth something? So, for that reason I think it’s misleading and unfair to describe article marketing as “free” traffic.

Perhaps it would be better if everyone started referring to article marketing as an easy source of “premium” or “great” traffic, because that’s where article marketing really shines when you do it right.

With just a few paragraphs of well written and crafted words you can pull in boat-loads of highly targeted, quality traffic.

To demonstrate just how valuable the traffic can be with article marketing, let’s look at an actual example from Content Caboodle. Here is a screenshot from an article published on our site:

Notice that I’ve highlighted the first link from the resource box. The anchor text of that link is “printer cartridges” and this specific link has been clicked hundreds of times by visitors to this article page. I know the actual number of clicks the link has received, but without the actual author’s permission it would be wrong to disclose that here, so we’ll stick with the general and generic “hundreds of clicks” for the sake of this posting.

Now, lets look at the average CPC (cost per click) that Google charges for that particular term:

$6.31 per click. Now, of course that reflects the cost when bidding in Google’s search network more than from content page displays, but even still you can easily estimate that it’s going to cost you over $1 per click for that term even in the content network. You could bid less than $1, but I doubt your ad would ever get displayed if you did.

So, at a minimum of $1 per click in value, and with hundreds of clicks to that link, it’s easy to see just how valuable article marketing can be when done right.

And just by the way, this specific article has a 2nd link in the resource box as well with a different anchor text term, and though it hasn’t received as many clicks as the first link, it has received hundreds of clicks to date too.

The key to this article’s success is that the author spent a little time to create a very good and engaging piece of content that naturally guides readers from the article body to his resource box links.

Article marketing is easy, and it’s a great (but not exactly free) way to grab premium traffic, if you do it right and give quality content then you will get quality returns.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article writing, engagement