How I Use EzineArticles for SEO & Traffic

— Expert Author Case Study Questions —

1.    What sets you apart from other Expert Authors?

Personally, my writing skills are not the best.  In college, I almost got kicked out because I could not write an argument and I never got better than 390 on the verbal section of an SAT test.  My writing is very “speech” sounding, but the content is always good.  My goal is to communicate my strengths, even though writing itself is a weakness.  I’m honored to be listed as an Expert Author.

2.    What’s your secret to article writing and marketing success?

Content is king!  Providing useful information to others to key to making article writing work.  No need to be promotional within the article (a resource box is great to send them to your promotional sites)

3.    How do you stay motivated to write articles?

If people are willing to read my articles, I’m more than happy to supply them.  (The traffic and the SEO from the resource box is pretty darn good motivation, too!)

4.    How do you decide what to write about?

I originally started to write articles primarily to support the SEO efforts of my websites.  The SEO IS strong, but I was surprised at the amount of direct traffic EzineArticles has provided to me, too.  The content usually goes hand-in-hand with what I am currently working on with my websites.

5.    How do you balance writing for quality and quantity?

There are times and places for quantity.  I’ve always respected the traffic and leverage EZineArticles has provided me over the past and focus entirely on quality, non-duplicated content with them.  Still, I do hire-out quantity article writing for other efforts (which includes creating backlinks TO my EzineArticles).

6.    How has using EzineArticles affected your traffic?

I did a test in an unspecified niche.  My goal was to see how much traffic I could build to a website solely on article writing.  After one year, one article per week, the website naturally received 200-300 unique visitors per day (and it still does!).  Of that, 60% of it is organic search and 13% of it comes exclusively from EzineArticles. 

7.    How does article marketing fit into your overall marketing plan?

Article marketing is CRUCIAL to the success on my marketing.  Pay-per-click has become too unreliable over the years.  Social marketing is great, but it can take a lot of time.  Article marketing has solidified most of my SEO efforts plus, as an added bonus, can provide some quality traffic to the site, too (and this doesn’t cost me anything).

8.    What EzineArticles tools do you find the most beneficial?

I don’t specifically use any EzineArticles tools, but the resource box is crucial for creating quality backlinks and references for external traffic.

9.    If you had to start over again, what would you change?

At the beginning, I focused too much on promotion within the articles.  It is not needed, and in fact seemed to push people away.  As long as you provide good, useful information (and not trying to sell anything), you will find it will rank better, more people will read it, more people will repost it and more people will click onto your resource links.

10.    What advice you would give newbie article marketers?

#9 is very important, but consistency is also very important.  If you are going to do article marketing, do it regularly (think of it almost like a blog).

11.    Anything else you’d like to share?

One of the biggest fears I hear about article marketing is “I Can’t Write”.  My answer to that is:  “Neither Can I!”.  You don’t need a PhD in literature to write articles.  As long as you know something that someone else doesn’t know and you can convey that into words some way, you CAN be an article writer.

cheers…matt

Visit Matt Bredel’s EzineArticles Profile and Articles