The WMF Archives: What She Got Out of Writing 100 Ezine Articles: A Q&A With Angela Wills

Thursday, February 18, 2010

What She Got Out of Writing 100 Ezine Articles: A Q&A With Angela Wills

6:00 AM

By Carol Tice

I came across an interesting article on MarketersMojo, marketing maven Angela Wills's site, about why she wrote 100 free articles for Ezines and what she felt she got out of it. Angela is NOT primarily a writer, and I found her point of view very interesting. I think she represents a distinct proportion of people who write for content sites -- they're not doing it because they're writers, they do it to promote their business consulting, book, or other enterprise.

I'm actually a fan of writing free articles on sites such as this as a marketing tool, even for writers. I prefer it to writing for low-paid sites, for reasons I delved into last week.

Here's a look at the questions I asked and her response -- OK, I totally grilled her about why the heck she spent so much time writing free articles! I think her answers are helpful to any writer who's thinking about how to attract and monetize traffic to their own niche sites.

Here's what she had to say:

I posted an article about the results I got from writing and publishing 100 articles at EzineArticles.com and got a really interesting comment from Carol Tice.

(read the post first by clicking here: 100 articles)

Instead of replying in the comments I thought the questions she asked deserved a brand new post. Some of the questions were quite challenging and caused me to stop, think and DIG DEEPER into what I really got from those 100 articles (thanks Carol!).

So what I’ll do here is just break up the comment and answer all the questions Carol posed because I think you’ll find benefit in the answers too.

Making Money Writing Articles?

WM: Is it all free? Did none of the people who decided to publish your articles pay for them?

Angela Wills: Fair question.

First let me briefly explain how article directories work. I submitted my 100 articles to an article directory called EzineArticles.com. It’s pretty much commonly accepted as the top article directory on the internet and their quality standards are fairly stringent (they don’t accept crap articles).

The whole idea of article directories is that you submit your articles and other publishers can take them entirely free with the requirement that they keep your author’s resource box and all active URL’s in that box.

So to answer your first question: No I did not get paid for any of those articles nor did I plan or want to.

WM: Did you get any paying clients from the exposure, and if so what were the projects worth, and did they pay at decent hourly rates?

AW: Ok, in order to answer this I need to give you a little bit of back story.

I have been submitting to Ezine Articles since 2005 and over that time I have had more than one business. Each business had different goals. Not all those goals were for clients or projects. Here’s how it went:

2005 For Leads – I submitted articles related to and promoting a network marketing candle business I was a representative for. My goal was to get leads for new team members and yes those articles did bring me leads. Some of those leads did turn into reps but I really couldn’t tell you how many now or how much money that made me.

2006-2008 For Clients – My articles were promoting my virtual assistant business. For this business my goal was new clients and yes I did get clients. My hourly rate at the time may have been anywhere between $25-$45/hour.

A previous client tweeted this out after seeing yesterday’s post:

2008-2009 For Subscribers & Sales – Most of the articles submitted during this time were for MarketersMojo.com, the website you are currently visiting. The goal of this site isn’t services or product sales. It is affiliate sales. I promote other people’s products and earn a commission for doing so. So the important measurement to me here is subscribers and straight affiliate sales.

While I can’t give a specific monetary total due to lack of tracking all those situations, I can tell you that without a doubt the articles I have submitted have made me money.

The benefits go much further than that though.

You see, about 50 of those articles were submitted more than two years ago by my estimate. They are still getting clicks, still sending me traffic and still turning into profit and will continue to do so for years to come.

And let’s not forget about the benefits of inbound links!

The number of inbound links coming to my website have a major effect on how I get ranked in the search engines. 100 ++ quality inbound links to my website means ALL my pages get ranked higher in the search engines which in turn gets me more traffic and makes me more money. The inbound links have very likely also helped with my decent Alexa ranking of 201,373 and Pagerank of 3.

WM: “You’re saying the ultimate upside for all that work is you got 94 people to get on your marketing list, from 100 articles? That’s an average of less than one person per article, who maybe might buy your services or products in the future…or maybe not. It seems hugely inefficient.”

AW: No that’s not what I’m saying, I guess I wasn’t really that clear in the last post.The 94 people on my list were from ONE article, not one-hundred. That result is pretty awesome but it’s not typical. That article that converted 94 people to my list had over 400 people and the conversion rate of clicks to sign ups on that page was about 30% – which is pretty darn good! Of those 94 people, 4 of them did go ahead and sign up for hosting I recommended which alone made me $260. Now where they ended up from there I don’t know. They could have gotten onto my other lists or bought an affiliate recommendation from my website.

By the way, the list that article send 94 people to was my mini-course on How to Create a Wordpress Website in 7 Days or Less.

My list is extremely valuable to me. They’re not just leads, they’re people who I spend a lot of time creating a relationship with. They trust my advice and recommendations. The value of that over the next ten plus years is something I think was very much worth the time spend writing all those 100 articles, let alone one.

WM: “I’d love to see you state how many hours you spent writing those articles. I think I could get that many contacts at two or three in-person networking events, which would take perhaps 8 hours total including commuting time. If it took more than that to write 100 articles — and I’m betting it did — there are ways to get leads that would leave you more free time.“

AW: Well I could estimate that. I certainly didn’t keep track but it typically takes me 15-20 minutes to write an article (though this one is taking a little longer!) so let’s say 20×100 = 2000 minutes /60 = 33 hours.

Yep that’s a lot of time and I could possibly make some really great connections at networking events in that same amount of time but it’s highly doubtful I’d get almost 10,000 people reading an article I wrote and 703 visiting my website for that time investment at a typical networking event.

Plus, you’re assuming I’m a GOOD in-person networker. I’m not. I’m shy, I get nervous, I freeze up when someone asks me what I do. So while you might be better suited to making great connections in person, it’s definitely something I need a lot more practice in to get efficient at.

Actually – here’s great example of how BAD I am at networking. I’ve been spending 1 hour almost every month for a year and a half attending a local networking meeting and I’ve earned exactly $150 from that.

Another point here is that so many of those hundred articles were re-purposed from other places. I didn’t sit down and write each article with just the intention of submitting them to Ezine Articles. Some were reformatted blog posts, checklists for my team, outdated information products, old website pages, etc, etc. Just because I use them at Ezine Articles doesn’t mean I don’t use them elsewhere.

WM: “I’m getting more than 300 site visitors a day and I’ve posted less than 40 short blogs on my own site. I didn’t have to deal with any being rejected since I’m also the editor here! So how is being on Ezines better exactly?“

AW: First of all, wow! That’s quite a lot of visitors from just a few blog posts. I’d love to read an article on how you did that – great SEO? Social Media?

And to answer your question here I never said submitting articles is better than adding content to your own website. I have over 300 posts here on Marketers Mojo and I have a number of other websites so I have no aversion to posting content to my own websites. But in order to get great rankings in the search engines you need incoming links and in order for you to make sales on your websites you need traffic.

I’ve chosen article marketing as a method to do a number of things, including:
- Establishing expert status.
- Establishing quality incoming links.
- Generating traffic through direct article clicks and through reprinted article clicks.
- Generating more traffic through the search engines due to higher rankings.

WM: “It seems like keeping it on your own site is a better way to go in my view…not sure you’ve proved the case that using one of these content-aggregation sites is useful. Appreciate more info.”

AW: I’m not sure what you mean by ‘content-aggregation site’ or ‘content mill’ but if it’s what I think then Ezine Articles is far from that type of site. It’s a high-quality article database with probably the most strict terms and conditions of all the article directories.

Yep I definitely agree that getting great content on your website is Step #1 but if it can be re-used to go even further then it just makes sense for me to do it.

Are there other things I could do to get me faster results? Absolutely!

There are so many ways you can get traffic to your website and they all work. For me it’s a matter of choosing something I enjoy and something that I can track – submitting articles to directories fills both those needs for me. What I plan to do now with the results I achieved from Ezine Articles is improve and maximize.

In fact, just the other week I did a guest blog post for a friend with a high traffic site and got 37 new subscribers to my email list in three days. The value? It’s long term.

Labels: Angela Wills, author interviews, Carol Tice, Content Mills Week

3 comments:

Alyssa Ast said...: Great interview Carol! Very insightful.; February 18, 2010 8:22 AM
Jenn Mattern said...: I do get why people write free articles for marketing, and it's a great idea -- just a much better idea when professionals do it for respected publications (like trades) rather than article directories. In essence, they're selling links for free content that they monetize (why Google hasn't penalized them for that yet is beyond me, but I wouldn't invest that much time into EzineArticles knowing it's always a possibility and I'd get a better return elsewhere). While yes, ezine can get quality writing out of people looking for exposure, there's also a lot of garbage there. When I tested the site for review on my blog a while back it was awful. Their editors couldn't count to 4 properly, nonetheless weed out lousy content. I remember seeing hundreds of articles from one "author" there that were mostly spinning off the same few pieces of content -- might have had ten real articles, but hundreds on the site because they couldn't filter out that kind of spam effectively. More power to her if she feels it's truly the best ROI she could have gotten for her time, but I'd steer clear. Getting results and exposure isn't about sheer quantity. Quality pickups are infinitely better, because that's when word spreads and you're reaching the most targeted audiences possible (those interested in what you're offering).; February 19, 2010 12:51 PM
lisaswrite said...: Great review. I love doing the HAHD challenges and I've found it well worth the time. In response to Jenn's comments, there are some valid points made but in response to that, Ezine Articles staff has also upped the ante so to speak when it comes to how they filter articles. They now have stricter guidelines but articles that were previously published are "grandfathered" so they do not get pulled from the site. They also have a strict stance against spinning and rewriting and are constantly working to "reverse engineer" the programs that do this and try to prevent this spam from getting on their site. They will ban accounts and remove articles of anyone proven using these methods.

So while it wasn't a 100% perfect system, they are top of the game when it comes to article marketing and every day are taking steps to improve even further.; February 23, 2010 3:01 PM

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