It’s a little over 7 minutes long. Check it out – Two powerful research sites

But it’s important to understand that direct traffic from those articles shouldn’t necessarily be your focus or the way you judge whether or not your article marketing efforts are a failure or success.

Some of the commonly talked about ways article marketing can help you include:

1) Direct traffic to your site via article directories where you submit your articles.

2) Writing and submitting articles can generate lots of backlinks to your site from the article directories and other sites that pick up and use your articles.

3) Indirectly, these backlinks may improve your organic search engine rankings, helping your search engine optimization efforts, and drive more traffic to your site via the search engines.

These are all great reasons to write articles.

However, if you are focusing on building an internet business that is successful over the long haul, these aren’t the real power behind article marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, they are great for short term results, which helps your motivation and your profits, but the really good stuff comes later.

I’ve never hidden the fact that my core business isn’t selling ‘how to make money on the internet’ products.

Instead, I’ve had an online fitness business since 2002.

I’ve seen, over that time period, the real power behind article marketing and having your own web site.

The real power is the opportunities that can eventually present themselves to you because of your article marketing efforts.

When I first started an online business, I was constantly seeking out link partners, trying to get into other fitness ezines, etc.

Now, people seek me out. And that’s because they find me everywhere.

And they find me everywhere because my articles are everywhere.

I’m becoming more and more known in my industry and am currently involved in some great projects because other fitness professionals have found my articles and then my web sites, like my information, and want to work with me.

It’s a great feeling. But understand that it’s not instant.

However, if you go after the short term results of article marketing, and you stick with it, eventually you’ll see the real power of writing articles by becoming an expert in your niche, someone that others seek out for advice or to work with on projects.

So does article marketing work? Absolutely.

Just maybe not the way all the hype explains it to you. Get writing!

Check out this article marketing case study for a step by step plan to get started.

For example, my top article for 2007 was viewed 42,898 times on EzineArticles.com and also received 1,188 clicks (highly targeted traffic to my site)!

Those article marketing numbers are only the immediate stats direct from EzineArticles.com.

Article Marketing Update:

Some articles have legs and it really is set and forget. You never know which articles will achieve this which is why you need volume. Keep writing.

In addition to the above mentioned stats for 2007 that same article already has the following numbers for 2008.

Remember, these numbers are specifically from EzineArticles.com

Articles Views: 3,080
Click Throughs: 408

I don’t want to cherry pick and make the picture seem rosier than it is.

I have articles older than this one that don’t have any many views as this one has click throughs. That’s the nature of the beast.

The more you write, the more likely you’ll generate some articles that give you big numbers.

Article marketing doesn’t work like it used to but is still very effective.

It’s even more important than before to do good keyword research, use effective headlines that grab attention, write high quality content and provide the information on a niche that is in demand.

This will help you stand out amongst all the low quality recycled plr content from people that are throwing up 40 – 50 software generated “articles” each day.

I know plenty of people complain that EzineArticles.com has become very strict about the articles it accepts. The truth is this is a good thing.

If you do things right, from article marketing to blogging, to social marketing or anything else, you’ll have very little competition.

Very few people follow through and take action. Most do nothing at all and some try and take a shortcut and use things like article “writing” software to recycle crappy PLR content to create crappy articles.

Don’t let this be you.

Massive Action Equals Massive Results!