Chris Meistre

A while ago I wrote this blog post about writing articles for your website.  While this method might work if you have one or two websites that you’re trying to promote, you can quickly get frustrated with this process if you repeat it a number of times.

I decided to employ some freelance writers to see if I can make this whole process work better.  If I could find an affordable way to get someone to write articles for me, I would consider this a win!

After having done a lot of work on RentACoder I thought of trying their service first.  Even though it’s a predominantly Software Development Freelance website, I have seen a number of requests being made for writing articles.

My approach would be to find 10 articles I wanted written, provide the person with the keyword phrases and in a day or two’s time get back 10 uniquely written articles, ready for me to publish under my name.  Sounds simple enough, I know.

Through a process of trail and error, I started to get the hang of what I need to do to get the person to write decent articles.

Some challenges I faced:

• I’m no English Grammar and Spelling expert, but I can now take comfort knowing that there are people that are worse at it than me.  Even though this could be overcome, it took too much time to read and reread articles to get them right.
• Timezone delays are a problem, especially if you need to provide feedback or if you need to keep “helping” the person write the articles
• You get what you pay for, so don’t take the cheapest or first bidder!

I overcome most of these challenges though, and am happy to say for a minimal amount I now have at least 2 people that can write articles for me.  Turn around time is about 2 days per 10 articles, and one of them even helps me find content for the articles.  Language errors are no longer a huge problem.  The last batch of 10 articles I received, I had to read through each of them and fix a few small errors.  A lot better than the previous 10 times rereading episodes.

I would say the whole exercise of getting to a point of getting decent articles written cost me about $100.  Worth the effort if you consider that I now have someone reliable to help me.

When I’ve look at ways to advertise a website, I normally consider how much traffic I’ll get from Google Adwords.  Let’s say I want to look at $100.  At $0.07 per click, that is about 1428 clicks to your website.  For the same $100 you could get about 30 articles written.    Depending on keyword choice and market, each article should (basing on my article stats) be able to generate 131 (4.3 clicks per article per day) clicks to your website a day.  If you look at it like that, your $100 pays for your first 11 days of 131 clicks per day, and then thereafter you get your 70 clicks per day for free.

The above is not to say that you must substitute Articles for your Google Adwords, but rather use it in conjunction with it.

If I had to spend $1000 a week on advertising, I would do this:

1.  $100 per day Google Adwords Budget ($700 for the week)

2.  50 Articles written at $200

3.  Get another freelancer at $100 for a day’s work to upload all 50 article to article directories

The result?

1.  9996 clicks to your website from Google Adwords

2.  1505 clicks to your website from the Articles, with an ongoing 1505 per week thereafter for FREE

That’s about 12,000 visits to your website for the week.  If you had a 1% success rate (i.e. 1% of the visitors buys from you) and on average you make $10 per sale, you made $200 profit ($1200 sales) for the week.  But remember, the gift of articles is a gift that keeps on giving.  The following week you don’t need to spend $200 again to write 50 more articles, and you’ll still get 1505 clicks.  So with the same traffic, and less spent on advertising, you can make $400 profit ($1200 in sales).

All the above is just speculation though, and your traffic and success will depend on a lot of extra factors.

Next step for me is to try and determine which of the Article Directory sites work the best.  In the past I’ve found that EzineArticles works the best in terms of traffic.  I’ve recently signed up to ArticleBase and GoArticles to see what the response is like.

If you want to drive traffic to your website you need to write articles for it.   It sounds a lot harder than it really is.  I used 1 article that I published to 1 site and it generated led 600 new visitors to Karma Sutra Positions.  That is 1 article submitted to 1 article site.  And because my domain name is still very young in the eyes of Google, my article also ranks higher in the search results than my actual website does.   But that’s okay because I still get the traffic.

I also used to think writing articles are difficult, but after seeing the results I got from just 1 article I decided I need to make writing articles a lot easier for myself.

Choosing your topic

This can be a very difficult thing to do.  The first thing you need to do though is do the keyword research legwork.  Doing this will give you the advantage of being able to incorporate your keywords naturally into your article, instead of trying to make them fit once the article has been written.  Read my article about keyword research.  Decide on 1 main keyword phrase and then 2 or 3 secondary keyword phrases that enough people are searching for, but that doesn’t yet have that much competition in terms of other websites having that keyword phrase.  It helps choosing something that is of interest to you, because there is nothing more difficult writing about a topic that doesn’t interest you!

Check out http://www.searchenginespy.co.za/ that shows you a list of what people are searching for each day.

Writing the article

Now go and look for some content on your topic.  Wikipedia, Ezinearticles and Goarticles are just some of the places that will help you find the content.  Find 1 or 2 very good articles and copy and paste their text into a word processing file.

Read the article once, and then a second time.  What I normally then do is start typing my article above the pasted text.  This allows me to have everything on the one screen while I type my article.  Write the article by trying to remember what you’ve just read and putting it in your own words.  Glance down to the original article only when you get stuck.  The idea here is to write a totally unique article and not just something that you are rephrasing.  While you’re writing, remember to incorporate your keyword phrases into the article as well.  If you’re going to directly quote the original article, be sure to include a link to it or mention it.

I aim to have about 300-500 words per article.  My main keyword I want to use at least 5 times and then use the secondary keywords if they can be used.

Reread your article at least 3 times to make sure there are no grammar and spelling errors.

That whole process shouldn’t take you more than an hour to do.  It gets easier the more you do it.  While you’re at it, why not write another one as well?

One last thing you want to add is a short footer for the article.  This is just a short link to your website making use of your main keyword as the link.  For instance: Learn more about the Karma Sutra Positions.  This will be the link that drives traffic to your website.

Words of caution

• Keep the article that you are writing sounding natural.  You don’t want to saturate it with keyword phrases that causes the article to have grammar errors.
• For articles you submit to article directories, don’t include any links in them.  This is what your footer is going to be for.  PLEASE NOTE this is just my personal opinion and using links in your article may or may not increase clicks  to your website.

Making it work for you

For the articles to start working for you, you need to start submitting them to article directories.  There are thousands of them and a simply Google search will yield the results.  My recommendation is to use an automated article submitter called Article Marketer.  This allows you to save some time by using their service to publish your article to article directories and other publishers.  It’s not necessary to do this, and you can do it manually, but I just prefer using this method.  It can take anything from 2-10 minutes to submit an article manually, so if you can save an hour by using Article Marketer, you can rather use that time to write another article.

How long will you wait to see results?

It can take up to 3-4 weeks before your articles get approved so just be patient.  I found that once the article is approved it instantaneously starts generating traffic for me.

Other examples

I also have an article about Blackjack Counting that I submitted.  It was approved about 8 hours ago and it has only led to 3 new visitors to my website on Blackjack Counting.   This goes to show you that the amount of traffic that your article will generate depends on your keyword and if you did your keyword research correctly.

Some tools you can use

How to write article

Article Marketer