Since I released my 2 article marketing reports last year I have had a number of people ask me if I intended to write a book about article marketing.  I finally got my act together and combined the two reports and some new material into a 47 page ebook.

I am going to put the book up for sale next week but until then you can grab it for free from http://articledominance.com/freereport.html

As you will know by know I like to look after my customers and the people who read my blog so as an additional bonus I’ll be allowing people who get the book to sell it and get Instant 100% commissions.  yes the payment for the book will go directly into your PayPal account instantly.

I would really really appreciate it if you could leave any comments or testimonials in this thread so that I can use them for the sales page.

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You can’t have but noticed that every marketer and his dog is pushing the upcoming Video Boss product..(we’ll almost everyone). Given the people who are promoting it they generally don’t get out of bed for less than $1000 commission per sale you can bet that you’ll need to find $2000 to buy the product.

There is no doubt that the videos are compelling but I must take issue with the claims of the videos being responsible for millions of dollars worth of sales…surely it is the guru’s who pushed the products that should claim that honor!

Anyway since the first video there has been a lot of interest about video and the impact it can have on your online business, there are really excellent reasons why you should consider creating Video, one of the most compelling is that they work and they get people to buy the products you are promoting. I am shortly due to interview a marketer who makes a $10,000 a month income from approximately 10 sites and her main weapon is video.

Another great reason for using video is that you can get your message across in under 1 minute where as it can take someone 4 or 5 minutes to read your articles.

One final reason is that they are cheap to make and once you play around a bit you can achieve some very professional results using free products.

This month I am running a Video creation step by step in the WordPress Goldmine forum, so if you would like to know how to create videos why not check out the special offer that currently running.

I thought the best way to show you Why you should use video was to show you. So if you would like to know how to plan and produce simple videos like the one below check out the Video step by step this month in WordPress Goldmine.

Finally to answer the question in the title..No video won’t kill article marketing but it will give you more competition.

*** no your speaker aren’t broken ..but please put them on or use headphones
*** and no i don’t own that url..it’s just for demo purposes

Recently in the WordPress Goldmine we’ve been looking at a tool which lets you know which pages are indexed, this works for your own sites and also articles you may have distributed.

Having checked lots of EzineArticles author feeds i was surprised at the low level of indexing. Watch the video below and I am sure you’ll also be surprised. You’ll also learn which article directory had 100% indexing for the articles I checked.

If you really want to find out which of your articles are indexed get Andy Blacks Index Checker

Then submit the unindexed urls to www.hostmyrss.com

You can then distribute the feed either manually to Feed aggregators or by using a tool like RSSbot

I am currently testing other methods of getting the unindexed articles indexed. I should be able to release a report about the best way of doing this later in the week , if you would like to receive this report then please sign up to my mailing list using the form on the right

I was tempted to call this post “Article marketing Is dead long Live article marketing” But that would have just been plain ridiculous. Although reading some of the posts in some of the bigger forums you would be forgiven for thinking that Article marketing was on it’s death bed. One post referred to some posts about Ezinearticles and said that it was obvious that people should no longer use EZA and what were the alternatives. I have never so much rubbish spoken by people who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

So lets get this straight Article Marketing is alive and kicking and going from strength to strength In fact 2010 is going to be bumper year for article marketers.

So before I look at what’s to come in 2010 and finish with a prediction lets have a look back at what happened in 2009. The most obvious things that had an affect on Article marketing was Ezinearticles and their bit of house cleaning. To listen to some people over react you would have thought the sky was falling. I admit I was very critical of some of the things that EZA announced and that was said by the management but they now seem to be being sensible about things. I suspect there was an initial knee jerk reaction on both sides.

For example When they initially announced the keyword density changes and the more stringent review policies I asked Chris if domain names would be counted as keywords. The answer I got was yes they would. This was obviously poorly thought out as surely an article about blue widgets pointing to a site about blue widgets was preferable to one pointing to a site about pink fluffy bunnies and yet because my sites are well targeted I get punished. However this doesn’t seem to be the case now so perhaps common sense has prevailed.

None of the changes are cause for concern , the only thing you need to do is to adapt your articles. If your keyword is 4 words long then you need to increase your word count to over 400 words. The great thing that the EZA changes did was to make people look elsewhere for links and post articles at other article directories. Personally I’ve slightly reduced my articles that go to EZA and increased the articles that go elsewhere and where I used to only give EZA unique content I now often include content that has been posted elsewhere. After all Article marketing Is a 2 way street.

So what for 2010?

Well the first thing that is already happening is that There is now more than 1 good article directory, ArticlesBase and GoArticles are making headway and challenging EZA. They are not quite there yet but it’s only a matter of time. Goarticles recently had a big SEO audit done and this can only mean that their articles will start to rank higher in future.

Access to stats will also become more prevalent, EZA recently started showing CTR which is an excellent step forward, I want to know my CTR and which links get clicks.

Articlesbase is an excellent directory and already starting to outrank EZA in some cases. I know very little about the management and ownership but I’ve had a very positive discussion with them after they rejected some articles. The great thing is that they are prepared to listen to common sense.

With sites like Go articles you can currently add links in the Body and also link directly to sales pages if you wish. The more visible links in an article the higher the CTR. So if you aren’t using these directories then it’s time to start.

My big prediction for 2010 is for a rise in the number of article directories who don’t have any adverts and allow 3 of 4 links in the body of the article in return for a small monthly fee. I can see this business model becoming prevalent. EZA state that a CTR of between 2 and 12% is normal, I can regularly get 3 or 4 times that so a site with no ads and well placed links and resource boxes should achieve 50-70% CTR I for one would happily pay for that!

Article marketing is as strong as it’s ever been and is going to get stronger, more competition is a good thing and can only help us article marketers.

Good luck with your article marketing in 2010

If you have read my blog a few times you’ll know that when I start with a disclaimer that I am going to rip someone a new one! So here is my disclaimer.

I really like Ezinearticles and Chris Knight , Ezinearticles and Chris have provided a platform that have allowed myself and hundreds of other marketers to make profits from our sites. Even as I write this I am drinking coffee out of an EZA Mug. Several thousand dollars a month of my income can be directly attributed to EZA. Of course Chris also profits from my articles so it’s a good symbiotic relationship.

I completely respect Chris’s rights to do whatever he wants to do with ezinearticles and change the rules when he feels it’s for the best. Surprisingly that’s not what this post is about .Occasionally Chris seems to say things without thinking them through. Maybe in a bid to lessen the impact of his “War on Internet Marketers” (dare I say that EZA has been built to the position it is today largely by internet marketers?) he posted a video and a post last night about the statistics of the Problem articles they have.

http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2009/10/derivative-content-be-gone.html

The part that make me angry is the following

Get this: Over 142,000 articles are currently in “Problem Status.” Of those, 41% are under 399 words. Compare that to those that are over 750+ words which account for 1-2% of the total. That means you can significantly increase your chances of having your article accepted purely by increasing your word count to the 400+ range. Watch for a full blog post this week with the details on this internal stats study.

Thats the type of stats a politician would quote to justify something that is basically unjustifiable.

Let me explain more, The stats mean absolutely nothing without something to base them on.

142,000 articles in problem stats …against how many live articles?

41% are under 399 words ..Ok but what percentage of live articles are under 399 words?

2% of articles of over 750 words are problem articles .. so how many live articles are over 750 words?

It could be that when we know all the stats that articles less than 399 words are statistically LESS likely to be in problem status.

Additionally no mention of why the articles are in problem status is made. Surely unless it is due to article length then the stats above mean absolutely nothing. How does an article that is in problem status due to a keyword stuffed title have any relevance on the article length?

I realize that Chris is trying to make people improve the quality of the articles and I fully support that, but more keywords doesn’t mean higher quality. I’ve often spent time trimming a 500 word article down to 300 to get the facts across quicker. Unfortunately most people just skim read the articles so the shorter and more concise the article the better. Of course if they get bored they are more than likely to click one of Chris’s Adsense adverts!…hmmm

How about this for a compromise if Chris is happy to move the resource box to the top of the article I will happily write 1000 word articles all day long

There is absolutely no need for Chris to justify the recent rule changes but by using weak statistical data with nothing to support it he is doing himself a disservice.

Before I go there is one stat that would end this discussion right now.. whats the average CTR of 700 word articles against 300 word articles?  I suspect it’s considerably different!