If you search the internet about "how to get traffic to your website" sooner or later you will come across the "Internet/Website/Traffic Gurus" who state various ways of getting traffic to your website. They usually offer you a promotion and/or a free "Traffic" e-book explaining the various ways, including advice on "How To Submit Articles". There is no really secret involved in Article Writing. Even as a natural writer (i.e. a non-marketing, non-salesman, writer) you have the ability to know how to give your article a good Headline grabbing Title. It's not rocket science. And the same goes for the article itself and its introduction. Regardless if you write naturally, without a care for marketing/sales tactics, or as a marketeer/salesman either way, if the article content contains Knowledge and Helpful Information it will gain an audience. Although I have outlined some basic article guidelines and advises below, this section focuses more on the Reality Of Article Submission and the Reality Of Article Results.

Below is a table consisting of statistical data from EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com and ArticleAlley.com (three well known article websites) in respect of six articles I submitted to each of them in July/August 2009. Although other article websites such as ArticleBin.com and Amazines.com have published the same six articles they do not give out popularity and/or viewing statistics.....which is a shame. Anyway. I have published these statistics for you so that you can see the reality of article writing, traffic-wise. Is it bad news or good news?.....read on!

The above results for the six articles I submitted to each article website are based from the Date Published, as opposed to the Date Submitted, in order to make them accurate. Meaning. When you first submit an article it takes anywhere between 2-10 days to get published, if not longer. This is because the article has to go through an editorial review process. Therefore, to be accurate you have to calculate the results from the Published Date.

As you can see, after one month the results from ArticleAlley are quite impressive! The results from EzineArticles though are not so great. This does not mean articlealley is better than ezinearticles. It just means my particular articles appeal more to the viewers using articlealley, at this moment in time only, perhaps because articlealley has more Computer-Related viewers for example. If I wanted to write/submit an article that attracted more ezinearticles viewers I would need to see what categories/topics rank the highest on ezinearticles, but the problem with this approach is that the popular categories/topics might not be in my area of expertise. Another problem is that article websites, in general, are not like blogs or forums whereby they are themed (i.e. cookery blog, health forum, etc). Article websites are categorized. So if your article does not fit into a popular category you have much more work to do than everyone else. You may have to submit the same article(s) to twenty different article websites whereas a health author might only have to submit to ten article websites for example. So before submitting any article, do your homework on each article website you want to be a member of.

To make sure the six articles had a chance of being accepted/published (getting past the review stages) I had to create them using various, popular, web page content taken from my already successful yoingco.com (free computer lessons) website. I could of written the articles from scratch but why do so when you already have successful web page content to use, of course. At this moment in time my Computer Memory article has already been used by two blogs (Here  and  Here). Even though this could be taken as a good sign of article quality, you also have to be aware that people want your quality articles in their blog.....without crediting you. If you click on the two links just given you will see my article with the name Sarah Phelt on it (my pen name - see below) but no link to my website. This is probably because they got it from an article website where I had no option to insert my website link below the article itself. So even if that article is to be used in two more different blogs each month, at say 1000 viewers per blog per month, not one of those viewers will be heading to my website. Therefore, when you sign up for membership on an article website try and make your pen-name the same name as your website. I say try because not all article websites like you having a pen-name named after your website, for whatever reason(s). Hence why it is so important to fill in your profile page (see below).

The above results show the beginning of article submission, for the month of August 2009. At the end of each month, for the next 2 months (September and October), I will show you my results so that you can see how my articles progress. Below are my general guidelines, advises and observations with regards to article writing, article submission and article websites.

Submitting Articles

Submitting an article is just a case of registering yourself with an article website (article directory), filling in an Article Submission Form and then waiting approximately 2-10 days for it to be published. Easy as that. However. The hard part is writing good quality, fresh, content that viewers will appreciate and at the same time other webmasters will want to include or link to within their own website, blog or whatever.

When you register with an article website you are generally agreeing to have your published articles made available to anyone who wants to use them; whether this be in their own website, blog, newsletter, leaflet or whatever. You do this in the hope that plenty of other people, besides the article website owners, will publish your articles. Why? Because whenever their websites, blogs and so on are crawled (searched and indexed) by the search engines so is your article content and its profile link (if the person was kind enough to leave your link intact). Therefore giving your website more exposure. It is not all about search engines and their rankings though. It is about building up your authority and bringing targeted visitors (in relation to your article subject matter) to your own website or blog.

With the market flooded with websites and blogs these days you have to submit each of your articles to at least five, if not ten, major article websites to stand even a small chance of being noticed. Saying this. I would not suggest submitting to every single article website simply because most of them are rubbish, in terms of doing anything fantastic for your articles' search engine rankings. Many people assume article websites are a foot in the door, but tend to forget they have competition from other article websites and struggle for search engine rankings too. Therefore. Look at an article website's credentials first - Its page rank (search engine popularity), the amount of articles posted on it daily/weekly, how many authors it has, the quality of article content, the average number of visitor views per article, what categories are popular, whether or not they publish your articles elsewhere (i.e. to other blogs and/or newsletter services) and so on. Unless you check out each article website you have been recommended to and/or liked the look of for example you will just fall into the trap of submitting to junk article websites.

Submitting The Same Articles

As you can see. The six articles I submitted have the same title (except for the last article title) when submitted to each article website, and definitely have the same article content (click on a title to see its content). Some "Gurus" advise you not to submit the same article to different article websites (known as: cross posting/submitting) simply because they feel article websites do not approve of this practise and check to make sure you have not cross posted/submitted your article before even considering it for publication. Obviously, you now know this is not true!.....the above proves that.

Auto (Spam) Submit / Manual Submit?

Another thing a "Guru" might promote is an Article Submitter. This is either a program or online service in the guise of an Article Submission Form that will automatically submit your article content to X amount of relevant article websites, and in some cases to rss feeds and/or other general websites. Some "Gurus" even suggest that you rearrange the wording of your article content so that it looks/reads slightly different and can therefore be classed as a completely different (variation) article when it is submitted. The idea of submitting many articles automatically, as opposed to manually, is plausible but to reword the same article is a spam (junk article) tactic that is frowned upon by article websites and search engines alike. This is because they know these kind of tactics/tricks only end up injuring the innocent article writer/submitter, because at the end of the day their articles are over shadowed by the vast amount of junk articles. It's a classic case of a programmer creating a genuine tool/service to help genuine people submit their genuine articles, only for that tool/service to be abused by the spammer.

Why do article websites and search engines care? Why? Because they do not like similar/repeat (spam) articles. They prefer genuine content that brings out the quality of their services. Article websites do not want to be known for Junk Articles - at this time www.junkarticles.com does not exist - and search engines database-wise do not want to be crawling and then listing floods of fake/repeat articles. Many article websites claim to check each submitted article by hand before it is published, which I doubt purely because of the amount of articles submitted each day. Imagine a huge team of staff reading hundreds, if not thousands, of submitted articles each day checking for duplicate articles, spelling mistakes and so on; and somehow still manage to publish your article within 48 hours (or within 16 hours over two days). If they can work through hundreds, if not thousands, of article submissions within 2 days they should be working for the Passport Office and Government Offices in general! The point here is that I doubt they have a huge team of staff.

So the big question is "Should I Use An Article Submitter Or Should I Submit Manually?". At the end of the day although it is not impossible to manually submit 5-10 articles a day, to 5-10 article websites, for example (over a period of 1-2 hours) it will be quicker to use an article submitter tool/service (taking 10-30 minutes). On the other hand. If you only have 1 article a day that needs submitting to 5-10 article websites you may want to submit them manually. Both methods normally involve pasting your article title and article content into relevant edit boxes, selecting various drop-down menu and tick options and supplying a username & password for each article website you are registered with. The only real difference between them is that the article submitter tool/service will submit your article(s) much quicker to many article websites at once - There are a couple of hundred tools/services out there that you might consider - The List. Not all of them will be of quality or of use to you though (i.e. some may not have a category for your subject matter). Also. Tools and Services do cost money. So the real question is "Do I have time to manually submit my articles?". Below is a list of some well known article submission softwares/tools/services.

Using Different Details

When submitting my articles I used different hotmail/live email addresses. Namely: sarahphelt@live.co.uk (Sarah Phelt), johncomputers2004@hotmail.com (John White) and traceykiel@hotmail.com (Tracey Kiel). These are email addresses I regularly use when posting/submitting/registering something on the internet, purely because I do not want to enter a website for the first time with my proper domain name email address (i.e. john@websitecreationhelp.com) because of the real possibility of receiving spam (junk email) from these first-time/unknown websites/companies. There is nothing wrong with using hotmail email addresses. When you first register with an article website their main requirements are a Name and Valid Email Address, and that is what I have given them. Some article websites even encourage you to set up a Pen-Name. So as long as you do not abuse their services you can register with whatever name and email address you like.

You may of noticed that I use unique/made-up names (Sarah Phelt and Tracey Kiel) when creating an email address. This is so I can easily track them through the search engines and therefore quickly see who publishes my new articles and how well they are doing in the search engines. I highly recommend using this unique name approach.

Male And/Or Female?

When submitting articles test the water by submitting as a Female and Male to the same article website. I have not done so in my case because I know the outcome from doing this with forums and blogs. Basically. A heterosexual male usually takes more interest in a question/article when it has been posted/submitted by a female. Why? Because under the "three second male fantasy law!" they think by viewing your article or by replying to your question they "might be in with a chance!". This is sad but true, it's just the way men are wired in general. There are genuine helpers, in every day life situations, who will help man or woman regardless but you will always get the sex-on-the-brain helpers too. And the same applies with article viewers. Some are genuinely curious, some are genuinely interested and some are genuinely wired! It is a fact of life. So by submitting an article as a female you might just get more viewers, which could lead to a higher position or ranking in the search engines.

You may be thinking the above said could be classed as a tactic/trick but if you think about it, it is only a tactic/trick to the non-interested viewer (i.e. the sex-on-the-brain viewer). The genuine viewer will view your article for its genuine content and not because it has been submitted by a "Helpless Female". Remember. It is about Traffic and Knowing Your Audience at the end of the day. Regardless if you entice genuine viewers, curious viewers or even sex-on-the-brain viewers they all help to build up your rankings. By identifying which gender gets better results for you, using the same articles, and by identifying the genuine viewer (if possible) the better you will be at understanding your article statistics - good or bad.

Identifying your audience involves testing female and male, testing your article titles, making sure the content is of the authority and so on. For example. If you think using a female identity is a tactic/trick by a male, let me demonstrate a perfect example of a female carrying out what could be considered a similar tactic. Below is a profile/articles page by a female. It is under the Relationships >> Sexuality category. There is nothing wrong with the articles this woman has written. They are headline grabbing with authoritative content. However. What could be considered a tactic is the fact she is wearing a revealing dress for her profile/articles picture, as opposed to wearing something that covers her upper body. Why did she do this? When I write an article under John White I post a profile picture of my face only. One reason why she uses that picture could be because she is tactically using her feminine profile to attract viewers to her articles and also to show its okay to be sexually liberated (within the context of her articles). Therefore. You could conclude that we both employ various internet marketing tactics, in this particular instance, to direct our attention specifically at the male psyche. And that it is our job to illicit the appropriate response from our male viewers. At the end of the day it’s about what works, what doesn't and what is appropriate to a particular need. Sometimes "Sex Sells" and sometimes it is inappropriate.

Fig 1.2  Did she really need to wear that Revealing Dress?

Your Profile/Bio Is Very Important

Always get into the habit of filling out your Profile page. And always upload a Photograph, even if its not you! In the case of Sarah Phelt I created a special effects photograph for her using a royalty-free photograph of a woman.

Fig 1.3  Sarah Phelt

Fig 1.4  John White

Just in case you are not aware. A profile page (also known as a Bio page) on an article website does not consist of your Name, Age and Website Address; It consists of links to your published articles and maybe a small description about yourself, depending on the article website, that is meant to contain your credentials (i.e. Computer Engineer for the last 20+ Years, Door-To-Door Repairs, Etc). Someone who has read one of your articles and wants to know more about you and/or your other articles are given some sort of link to your profile/bio page (i.e. Click here to see more articles by Sarah Phelt).

With the above EzineArticles statistics showing 67 profile page views, so far, for Sarah Phelt you can only assume people are interested in her articles. On the other hand it may just be 67 curious viewers or 67 sex-on-the-brain viewers looking at her profile page, but I doubt it. Saying this, John only has 1 profile page viewer. So the only real way of cutting out any doubt would be to have the same articles published on the same articles website by both Sarah and John, but as this goes against the rules of article websites you would never truly know if it is a female male thing. Or even an Article Viewers versus Just Stumbled Across Your Profile Page viewers thing. One thing is for sure though. Always fill in the profile/bio page (description), if it is an available option, because this can lead to all sorts of viewers clicking on your website link later.

The Resource Box

The resource box is the boxed off area, normally located towards the bottom of your article's page, that states your author information (filled in whenever you submit an article). For example. You might want the wording inside that box to say "For more information about computers please visit my website". This is your reward for using that article's website. It is a place to advertise your website link. Saying this. Do not be selfish! Plug your article content as well. Put something like "knowing the computer can lead to various, unthought-of, job opportunities. If you would like to know more about this.....please visit my website. www.???.com". There is nothing wrong with a blatant website link but leading into it is much better because you can squeeze in a little background about your website, the topics it covers and so on.

Some article websites may give you a profile/bio box or resource box but not both. So in these cases you may need to rethink what you put inside your profile/bio box or resource box (i.e. try and lodge a website link into whatever is available).

The Article Title

When thinking of a Title for your article it is easy to fall into the trap of just naming what you see. For example. With a computer hard drive article you might make the common mistake of using a title such as "An Explanation Of The Hard Drive". What is wrong with this title is that it states the obvious. People usually associate an article as being a document that states fact via an explanation of the subject matter. So a better title would be "What Exactly Is A Hard Drive And What Is Stored Inside It?". This title questions the viewer as to whether or not they really know what a hard drive is.

With the title "An Explanation Of The Hard Drive" the viewer may skip past your article link (title) because they either think "I already know what a hard drive is" or think "I am not interested". Whereas with the title "What Exactly Is A Hard Drive And What Is Stored Inside It?", and more precisely with the authoritative word "exactly", you are putting the viewer's own knowledge (if any) of this subject into question. Now they should be a little more curious about your article and click on its link; even if it is just to clarify what they already know about the hard drive, to gain new knowledge or to see if you really are the authority.

Remember. Although people look for articles that contain knowledge, advice and answers to their questions/doubts it is the title they see first and not the article content itself. So you must have a title that is of the authority, that poses a question and/or expresses an answer (i.e. What Is... and How To...) and above all a title that grabs attention. My title "What makes a computer slow?" is okay but if I wanted to make it more headline grabbing I could of used "What makes a computer slow?....Even When It Is Brand New?". It is these kind of attributes that are the deciding factors for a clickable article title. With so much competition from other article authors these days your article title, and article content, has to stand out from the crowd.

The Article Content

With article content you have to make sure that it lives up to all the hype of your article title. Meaning. It has to answer the question(s), solve the problem(s), crush the doubt(s), review the product(s) and so on posed in your article title. Sticking with my hard drive article as the example. In the first paragraph I have answered the two questions posed in my article title - What Exactly Is A Hard Drive And What Is Stored Inside It? And this is what you need to do. Sum up if possible the answer(s), product(s), problem(s) or whatever in the first paragraph. Do not worry too much about paragraph length (mine are usually between 5 and 7 lines long) because the interested viewer will still read your article regardless of its paragraph lengths.

In your second paragraph try and give the viewer a golden nugget. Information they would not know unless they were an expert like yourself and/or a piece of information (or website link) that would take them ages to find in normal circumstances. This kind of thing is what makes you the authority. A resourceful, credible, worthy person. Another good gesture (tactic) is to offer a FREE E-Book to entice them onto your website. This is normally done via your profile/bio page. Giving out expert information is what can bring in an audience - Do not be old school with the stupid attitude of "If I tell you all my secrets I will be out of a job".....People will get to know your "secrets" anyway via articles! and the internet ("Mumma's Secret Recipes" are public domain now).

In general you should try and leave out any technical terminology (jargon) and explain things in an every day language. If you are a cookery expert for example do not think people reading your article can understand your fancy cooking words (i.e. Technical: Vegetables and/or fruits on a bed of bread, top with a creamy white sauce - Simplified: A salad sandwich with mayonnaise!). Another thing you should do is make sure you are up-to-date with the latest fashions/technologies/etc, especially with technology changing every six months or so. If necessary, even if you are an expert, read up on the latest gadgets or whatever (nobody will know!).

Basically. As long as you know your stuff you should write your articles freestyle, with honesty, with value and for the human viewer (not for the search engines). By freestyle I mean; off the top of your head, how you like, thought by thought, idea by idea, piece by piece over time. Create your own ideas and writing style in other words and do not rush your article. That way your article will form a natural shape/style instead of a fake/robotic/formulated/scripted shape/style. Also. Emphasize the benefits, if any, of your service(s)/product(s) to the viewer but do not hard sell to them. The only thing to sell in your article should be your website link, if anything at all.

Handwritten/Pre-Written Pay-For Articles

If you are not a natural writer and need articles for your own website, blog, newsletter or whatever (but not necessarily for submitting to article websites) you can employ an article writer to write articles for you. However. This can be quite expensive and run into hundreds of US Dollars, depending on the number of articles you require of course. $5 upwards for pre-written articles and $30 upwards for handwritten articles tend to be the standard rates at this time. One important thing to bare in mind here is that someone could easily copy that article off your website/blog/newsletter/etc so think carefully about this approach. Although you normal find author on article websites you can also find them on the internet as freelance writers and copyrighters for example.

Be Patient!

An article is like a door-to-door leaflet. Some people will contact you straight away (via phone or email normally), some people will throw your leaflet straight in the dustbin (either because they are not interested in your product(s)/service(s) or because they do not like "Junk Mail") and some people will keep your leaflet until they or someone else they know can benefit from your product(s)/service(s). And this applies to each of your articles as well. Some people might look at all of your articles (now or later) whilst others might only look at none, one or two (now or later). Some people might even want to bookmark (save/favorite) your article pages and then look at them later. This is what internet marketing is all about. Promoting your website, individual web pages, articles and so on whenever and where ever you can. So while you are waiting for something to happen to your articles, in the meantime, go and promote your website elsewhere.

How Much Time And Money?

With the above results, and article results in general, you can see that in reality you would need to manually submit at least 10 different articles a week to as many as 50 different article websites per week to make it worth your while. Or put another way. 40 different articles in a month covering 200 different article websites. Sounds a lot but in reality that could be done at 1 different article a day, over 40 days (of course), submitting to 5 different article websites a day. Manually submitting 1 different article a day, to 1 different article website, should take you about 10-15 minutes (if that). So times that by 5 and you are looking at 50 Minutes minimum and 75 Minutes (1 hour, 15 minutes) maximum, per day for the next 40 days. It is not that much time really - You could sacrifice your 1 hour lunch break, a 1 hour evening tv program, etc if you really want your article submissions to work for you. Saying this. You could be sacrificing more than 40 hours of your time, which is a week's wage, which is fine if you are doing it on company time but not so good if it is on your own time. You have to ask yourself "Am I dedicated enough to sacrifice that amount of time and expense?".

You can get around manual submission by using an article submission tool of course, but these cost money and still demand your time to initialize/set-up (copy and paste) each article. And a pay-for-submission service, even at a rate of $1 per article submission, would still cost you $200 (approximately £123) and submission time. However. Regardless if these solutions work out slightly cheaper or slightly more expensive than your sacrificed 40-50 (minimum/maximum) manual submission hours, you still need to consider a few things:

1) Have I got enough article material of my own to submit? And if not, do I really want to pay for enough written articles?

2) What is enough for me? Do I really need to be writing a book load of articles? And wouldn't those articles be better placed in my own website or blog?

3) Is it worth even entertaining article writing/submission?.....with poor viewer numbers and more precisely poor url clicks.

I cannot answer these questions for you simply because my results (above) more than likely will differ from yours. You will need to carry out similar submission tests like I have done above, Manually And Without Spending A Penny, to test the water. That way you will know if it is worth your while investing in some article submitter software, a monthly subscription fee and so on. Although some of the answers rely on the outcome of your free testing, together with your time and money budgets, you also have to be realistic and remember that article submission is "just another jigsaw piece in your advertising quest".

The Feedback (Results)

Testing your own article submission results is very important. As with any marketing campaign it is a case of trial and error; seeing what works and what doesn't. Meaning. Rearrange your article titles, keywords and content, if need be, until you find your articles getting the attention they deserve. Years ago I used to design leaflets for new companies and sometimes helped them to deliver the leaflets door-to-door. This was because I wanted to know what their feedback was, both in the office (customer phone calls) and on the street (people reactions, opinions, etc), so that I could then rework the leaflet's Design, Call To Action, Prices and so on. In other words. I was not afraid to experiment design-wise, ask the public what they thought of the leaflet and what services they thought would improve the business. And it is exactly the same with article writing and submission. Test out an article's title for example with one article website, change it if need be and then submit it to another article website. Remember. The competition is fierce these days and the market is flooded with article content similar to yours. By viewing other peoples articles, to see why they get so many viewer results, and doing other research you should begin to see your own results flourish. Finding a gap in the market helps! Also. Do not think your article content has to be "matter of fact" to enjoy popularity; Sometimes it is the writing style that wins an audience.

With my article test results I am happy in the knowledge that while they may have poorish viewer results and very poor url/website clicks (known as CTR or Click Through Rates), I am assured by the fact that other people are using my articles in their own websites/blogs - This can mean they do better in those website/blogs simply because they are searched more by the search engines. On top of this, the actual articles from within the article websites are, and can be, indexed by the search engines too. Remember. The above results are only from the article websites directly, and not from search engine results and other people's website/blog results. So be assured that your own articles will more than likely be indexed/used elsewhere, hopefully with better exposure results. The key factor surrounding this whole scenario is the link or association between you and the article. Meaning. You must check who is using your article(s), by searching the internet, and make sure that person acknowledges you as the author (by way of a link). If they do not, write to them with a complaint. Unfortunately. One of the downsides of article writing is that there will always be someone who steals your article without putting up an author link and/or an author acknowledgement.

Above I was talking about, and gave two examples of, websites/blogs that used my articles without acknowledging my website link, because it may not of been available to them. In contrast to that, Here is an example of a blog that has used one of my articles with full acknowlegement of my website links, but no mention of the author (me). Here is a blog that displays my author name, but not my direct website link. It displays a link to my original article instead - The original article I submitted to the article website. And finally, Here and Here are two different blogs that display my author name, website links and the original article website link. So be assured that as long as you only submit articles to article websites that allow you a website link, either underneath or inside your article, there will always be a website/blog out there that finds those articles and displays their website links alongside them.

One thing to note here is that if you ever use an Article Submitter Tool, which I do not recommend you do, make sure you know which article websites it is submitting your articles to. It may be submitting to 'non-displayable website link' article websites (as just described). So if possible, try and visit all the article websites listed in the article submitter tool, or in its documentation, so that you know in future which article websites to submit to from within that tool.

Article Dashboard, Articles Factory and Bharat Bhasha have just included my articles on their website. Bharat Bhasha did not accept my Hard Drive article for some reason though?! Anyway. The good news is my articles have started to appear in Google from the following article websites - Amazines, ArticleAlley, ArticleBase, EzineArticles and GoArticles. You can find my articles by searching for Links: "yoingco.com", "Tracey Kiel" and "Sarah Phelt". Or you can search by specific article title or find them naturally. The point here is you should be aiming for your articles to be found in the same way and that articles do get listed, eventually, in the search engines. So if you have started your article submissions, keep going.....it is worth it in the long term.

Here are my results for September 2009 with regards to the three main article websites listed/exampled at the top of this section.

My september results, with regards to article websites only, show that once my new (august) articles were submitted they were only good for the first month (august) whilst fresh on the main page(s) of certain article websites. As soon as newer articles arrived on those article websites, from different people, my articles began to move down to page 2, page 3 and so on; Naturally losing sight with the public. The only people who will see them now, a part from people stumbling across them in a search engine and/or in a blog, are people who search for specific article titles within article websites. Hence why keywords matter, especially if they are offered as a separate entry when submitting an article.

Although the search engines have begun to list my articles, and blogs have begun to included them, these listings/placements only create article readers or article rippers in general. Meaning. The average person spotting one of my articles in a search engine or blog will more than likely just read that article for information reasons only, whereas a website designer for example might rip (copy) that article for inclusion in one or more of their website/blog projects. And the person who reads one of my articles inside a blog is more likely to read other articles in that blog before saying to themselves "I must investigate the author's website and/or bio.....later". It happens. People do think "I wonder what else this author has written" and click on your website link but the ratio is not that high compared to article (information) readers only.

So in other words, the above is quite normal. People will either read your article(s) and then click on your author's website link or they will just read your article(s) and then move onto other things. That is the reality. In my case my articles cannot be that bad because they are being used in blogs, but this does not mean those blog visitors are going to click on my author's website link after reading my article(s). This is just how it goes. You have to hope that more and more people will find and read your articles and more importantly that more and more people will click on your author's website link. What many people do not realise is that the market place, in terms of click-through action/results, is between 1% and 3% at the moment. Although this is a small percentage you should not lose faith. Remember. Article submission is just one avenue of marketing. So keep ploughing on - Write more articles if need be until you have tried most variations of article writing. Trial and Error play a big part. If at the end of testing you have done your best and still find your article results poor you will know for sure the article arena is not right for your subject matter. Yes, you will waste time testing and gain unwanted experience but in reality you should also get some good results.....even if they are in small doses.

Looking at my results for October you may think they are a little disappointing, and generally this would be true, but it depends how you look at it. If you follow your articles statistics like I have in this section you come to expect, and know, the pattern of behaviour from the article websites you are submitting to and can therefore filter out the "incompatible" or "not working for me" article websites. Remember. It is about trial and error - Testing all the time until you get it right.

So now I know that after the first month or so my articles will begin to be buried deep inside an article website, with less exposure as time goes by, what am I going to do now? Answer. Write a fresh article and plough on, which is exactly what I did. I wrote an article last month that took off quite well, out doing some of the above articles. It is called: WHAT IS BANDWIDTH AND WHAT WEBSITE ELEMENTS USE IT UP?

The reason it took off, and got listed by some web hosting companies for example, was because of the WHAT WEBSITE ELEMENTS USE IT UP? part of the title. That is what brings people to this article. If I had just used WHAT IS BANDWIDTH? it would not of had the same response. People are curious as to what does use up their bandwidth. They want to identify which parts of their website are using up unnecessary bandwidth in order to do something about it (i.e. make their videos shorter). So in other words. Do not give up. You should get better results the more you monitor, and learn from, your style of article writing.

Fig 1.5  My bandwidth article spans two pages of Google with more blogs linking to it than, almost, all of my other articles combined.

If you need article writing tips you need look no further than the article websites themselves. Many people overlook this and go for a book instead when the article website should be their first port of call simply because the article website owner(s) will have more knowledge, statistic-wise if nothing else, on what article styles/types work and what article styles/types do not work. And even if their tips seem obvious or too long winded, in terms of the amount of tips information they give out, you should read them. You never know, there might be a GOLDEN NUGGET somewhere in those tips.

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