Hi friends,
I had recently tried article marketing for my blog that is in my first signature link.

Before that I studied certain article marketer's sites and concluded that I can write articles on relevant topics as my blog and submit them to multiple article marketing sites. In fact I found that others' sites had good page rank though they submitted the same articles to multiple sites. Also anyway these articles are going to be syndicated across many other sites, then where is the theory about duplicate articles?

So i went ahead and did with two articles at 30 different sites. Of them only 15 sites have so far been approved and giving good backlinks to my blog. As the article title is "Make Success in Stock Trading with Next Best Bets", it is very relevant to my blog topic about stock trading (Next Good Bets).

I started this 2 or 3 weeks back. Since the first article got published in which I had also linked to two articles on my blog, there was a good rush of search engine traffic everyday of about 3 visitors from Google. Before that there was none from search engines. But recently since 3 or 4 days, the traffic died down and I am not getting any search engine traffic.

What not, when I search for "next good bets" in Google, earlier my blog used to show up at 3rd or 4th result. Now it is showing up at 12th result. Worse still is that my latest posts earlier used to get indexed in 15 minutes and show in Google when I search for the title of the post without Quotes. But now it does not show those posts at all. You can check out my latest post - "Apply Speed Breakers (Stop Losses) for Your Losing Stocks" in Google search.

I don't understand what went wrong with my strategy. I am wondering if it is a temporary phenomenon. But never faced this before. So got suspicious and wanted help from any friends here..

Now I started wondering if article marketing is effective at all?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and help .

I can't say I've ever actually maintained this strategy, but promoting your blog is supposed to be a long-term effort. This means you should be writing an article every day, or every other day.

If you have 100 pages of articles, it will likely be much more than 100 times more effective than 1 page of articles.

@wayfarer07,

Yes, I will continue long term efforts.. But this fluctuating behavior did not make any sense in the short term. I believe this must be a temporary phenomenon. once I get a variety of backlinks I think things will be on track again.

To add some follow-up with Abel's comments...

If you put it in perspective, you are trying to promote articles (your blog) with articles (posted to article sites). You are literally giving away a major part of your effort, in return for low quality links.

Just keep working on your blog. Try to improve the grammar (assuming it's the blog in your sig) it is a little hard to read. Good grammar is a must when communicating about finances.

I'd also recommend using google's webmaster tools or feedburner to try to track how many RSS subscribers you have. This is the number you really want to worry about.

Until you have a few hundred subscribers, use a service like pingoat to notify the various blog trackers of changes. If you put tags in your blog, you can use technorati to find similar post from others. technorati is also useful for meta-blogging (blogging about other people's blog posts). I think this would be useful in your niche (stock trading).

Once you have a few hundred subscribers, they will promote your site for you. You'll no longer need to do much promotion.

good luck. just keep at it

@willcode4beer,

Thank you for reviewing my blog and giving your suggestions.

I never thought that the article marketing links are of low quality. That could probably be. As I am learning more about it, I am surprised to find that it is mainly about getting traffic because your blog may not easily get traffic for the same keywords, while the article directories do. So it is particularly useful not for a blog but for an website selling some products.

I am already using webmaster tool, google analytics etc. I have joined technorati as well. But pingoat is new to me. I might have noticed it earlier but not paid attention to it. Thanks for sharing it. I am amazed after checking it out. I will do some tests and make use of it for whatever help it can bring.

I try to make sure that my blog does not have grammer mistakes in my posts. I spend good time for that. But as each of the posts is so huge, I may miss some grammer here and there. But I have plans to keep on correcting my articles during a particular time period dedicated to it once in a week.

For now I am posting to build my blog large enough to satisfy any visitors landing there. Also it does not really matter as long as my visitors are interested in the subject and I am providing unique valuable content from my experience. I will nevertheless improve it on a constant basis. Thanks for your suggestion.

You are right. Currently I have two of my friends as subscribers to my blog. I need to get more. Probably forums might help in that aspect in the long run.

Again, thanks for your review. I have learned new things today

Some tips for the grammar.
- try to find someone you know to help out
- try the Amazon Mechanical Turk (it's really cheap)
- practice, practice, practice

Here's why the article sites are low quality. Most people submit the same articles to many of the article sites. They are full of duplicate content. All of the major search companies downgrade them because of this.

This also explains why a blog can function better than an article site. 1st, the content will be absolutely unique. 2nd, many people actually search blogs and want to visit blogs (not so true of an article site). If people like what you have to say, many will subscribe to your RSS feed.

So, the trick, is to create posts that people will like because they're useful, informative, stimulating, and/or entertaining.

@willcode4beer,

Thanks for your tips. But I don't have any grammar problems. I verify, proofread every article before I publish. Moreover I don't publish immediately after writing. I am not a novice writer. I write my articles much long before I publish them. Presently my blog is on auto pilot with scheduled posts till next Wednesday. So I review my articles again and again before publishing them.

I know this is needed but I also know that grammar is not really important. It does not matter even if we cannot write good English but what is important is that we give value through our content. I am definitely doing that and on the top writing powerful articles with my experienced skills in writing. There may be some people who find some grammar problems or spelling but it depends on the region of the audience as well. If you didn't know I made 100% in grammar in my college.

What I am worried about is the current sandbox kind of situation my blog is in. As many experienced webmasters are saying that the sandbox is a temporary phenomenon and it takes a month or two to come out of it, I have prepared to wait for it.

Meanwhile I have other better things to do and will concentrate on that. I will agree with your suggestion about article sites being of low quality. I did not know this before as I am trying this very first time. I had intentionally ignored article marketing for years.

But there are also good article sites and they are very few, for ex, ezinearticles, goarticles and articlebase that come most often in Google Searches. I will try these for attracting traffic coming for competitive search terms related to my blog topic through articles, that would not generate that much traffic if otherwise published on my own blog.

Thanks again for your suggestions.

Originally Posted by BenjaminGates

But I don't have any grammar problems.

I'm sorry to say this but, you do.

Case in point:
http://nextgoodbets.blogspot.com/200...stocks-or.html

The importance of grammar depends on the topic. There are many topics where you are right, it doesn't really matter too much (software for instance). With many topics readers are very forgiving.

However, on the topics of investments and finance, things are a bit different.

Back to your blog. I have noticed that the quality, of your posts, is improving (a good sign). This is no doubt a result of practice. Just keep at it. I wouldn't worry about the sandbox. It can take some time to build a blog's popularity. Some of the most famous bloggers spent years with very few readers. Persistence is the key.

You will find that readership grows slowly until a critical mass is hit. At that point readership will grow very quickly and you will find that your readers will promote your content for you.

I see from technorati that you have a blog reaction:
http://technorati.com/blogs/nextgood....com?reactions

So try this for backlinks (it will take a little while):
Find several other finance blogs that talk about stocks. Write blog reactions (that means link to the other post) to those. This basically means, write a blog post in response to their post. Leave them a brief comment that you've written a response (link to your blog response).

This is a way of creating a conversation that spans several blogs (it's more than just meta-blogging). Notice, nobody owns the conversation.
This also provides a way for you and others to share ideas, readers of all of your blogs will benefit. You become part of a community, your (perceived) competitors suddenly become your partners.

Finally, when tagging posts, don't go over-kill.
Notice these tags:
http://technorati.com/tag/liquid-stocks
http://technorati.com/tag/illiquid-stocks
feeling lonely?

This one works very well:
http://technorati.com/tag/short-term-trading
(look at that community)

@willcode4beer,

I have to agree with you.. Though I don't have grammar problems with my writing, I ended finding some spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes. I think this is because the articles I am writing are too big in size. I need to review them thrice day after day before I can publish. This is because I review the article twice before publishing and it is really hard to find any mistakes by myself.

In fact it used to be worse in the past. I used to find mistakes in the second review. But later I improved as I made a habit of reviewing (and reading again) twice.

I do not agree completely about page rank. But I certainly agree that page rank is not all for traffic. There are tons of sites with PR0 that outweigh more PR sites in terms of traffic. But I had clearly noticed that all such sites had minimum of PR0. That means the page should get indexed and ranked minimum for Google. This is if you want traffic from search engines. But if you are looking for referral traffic then it does not matter at all.

On the part of article marketing, it was hard to accept that their value is less. This is what happened. My blog did not get page rank after publishing two articles. But immediately (in about 15 days) after writing at this forum with signature links, it got the first PR that Google assigns (PR0). Now the search results are good, It gets ranked at 4 (back again from 12).

But there is some value anyway. So I can try. Good value is in the blog reactions. This happened because one article got published at articlebase.com. From there many blogs have picked up. Only one of them seem to be noticed by technorati. That means it is good to try this at articlebase.com.

Again, thanks for your suggestions.

Originally Posted by BenjaminGates

.....On the part of article marketing, it was hard to accept that their value is less. This is what happened. My blog did not get page rank after publishing two articles. But immediately (in about 15 days) after writing at this forum with signature links, it got the first PR that Google assigns (PR0). Now the search results are good, It gets ranked at 4 (back again from 12).

But there is some value anyway. So I can try. Good value is in the blog reactions. This happened because one article got published at articlebase.com. From there many blogs have picked up. Only one of them seem to be noticed by technorati. That means it is good to try this at articlebase.com.

Again, thanks for your suggestions.

Maybe that's it but, after reviewing your site (when I posted above) I did a little promotion for you. I was curious about the opinions of some folks I know.

Hello Dear

Just follow most of the advices you get from this page, they all wanted to help and you can get good traffic if you do.

Article marketing is the most successful tactic I've used. I know quite a few other people who feel the same. It has given me excellent click rates and improved my site in search results.

The title is the most important part of the article. If people don't click on it in the article site or the search engines, then the article will drop fast in the rankings.

Second is making sure you have useful and well-written content. Some article marketers talk about cramming out five articles in an hour. The quality is reflected in the results.

The third part is the call to action in the resource box. You want it written in such a way that it gives people a good reason to click -- more useful information is available -- and not sound like a marketing trick.

I would suggest you go back to some of the sites where you submitted, rewrite some of the titles and links back to your site, and keep experimenting until you see better results.

I'm curious what the excellent results are?

For example, if I write a new "article" on my site, I'll usually see a few thousand hits when it's new (depending on quality and general interest). Depending on the utility, they'll usually maintain a bit of traffic from blogs and SE's at a fairly steady rate after the newness wears off.

I agree with what you say about quality though. I think it'd be near impossible to create 5 high quality ones a day, let alone per hour. Heck, sometimes I'll spend a few days on a post.

Originally Posted by promisem

Article marketing is the most successful tactic I've used. I know quite a few other people who feel the same. It has given me excellent click rates and improved my site in search results.

The title is the most important part of the article. If people don't click on it in the article site or the search engines, then the article will drop fast in the rankings.

Second is making sure you have useful and well-written content. Some article marketers talk about cramming out five articles in an hour. The quality is reflected in the results.

The third part is the call to action in the resource box. You want it written in such a way that it gives people a good reason to click -- more useful information is available -- and not sound like a marketing trick.

I would suggest you go back to some of the sites where you submitted, rewrite some of the titles and links back to your site, and keep experimenting until you see better results.

To my surprise article marketing was working. It is not just the forum post signature links that helped my blog get a PR0 and some initial search traffic, but also the combination of article links from ezinearticles.com and articlesnatch.com sites. There I submitted three for ezinearticles and one for articlesnatch all of which got atleast aa PR0 and one at ezinearticles got a PR2 within two weeks..

That is about the time when I was seeing some google traffic for my blog and just before starting this thread.

I thought that page rank was given because of signature links but later the same PR was taken away and I went into total confusion.

After reading your response, I went back to check out the causes. The signature links are there, articles links are there. But something changed. That is their own page rank. All my articles at ezinearticles and articlesnatch no longer have any page rank.

And that is what must have taken away my blog's PR too. It was a bit frustrating first, but I accepted that just links are not sufficient. We need to have atleast few links from pages that Google considers. That is they themselves should have a PR0.

@promisem,

As you said, I too felt that I need to go back to those sites where I sumitted articles and do some changes. I am in the process of that.

I removed the big sentence to entice the reader to click the link in the resourcebox and just made it as "More useful information is available at - Link". This anyway didn't matter much I think. because even earlier traffic was coming to my blog from those articles but only as long as they were getting some traffic. After starting this thread, at about the same time, those articles' views got frozen and that was the reason for not getting referral traffic from them. If they didn't lose their PR, they would have continued to send traffic and also backlink value to my site.

So the conclusion is to write articles and submit them to sites in such a way they themselves will get good backlinks. Here is a problem. We cannot make sure each articles gets a PR. But atleast one per three is reasonable. So I take chances here much like I do in stock trading .

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. Now I am moving on a road that has no obstacles.