There has been volumes about how Ezinearticles have suffered and having read some comments you’d be start to believe that none of Ezinearticles content was ranking.

You’d be wrong.

I am still getting clickthroughs from Ezineartilces, I have actually been scratching my head over the past week wondering why there has been so much written about something that impacted me and several people I talked to so little.

Having lived through numerous google updates one thing is certain the initial changes will be temporary, google will continue to tweak and modify it’s algorithm to ensure the best content ranks. Although for some reason google seems to thinks in many niches the best most pertinent content is stores… Go figure!

Several major sites were affected and there were several major ones that didn’t seem to have any adverse effects so lets look at 2 of them and see what we can deduce.

Lets compare eHow and Ezinearticles. I searched both for an article on how to clean brick fireplaces, look at the images below and tell me which one looks the most appealing to a visitor. They both have ads yet one looks like a MFA site (made For Adsense) and the other looks like an informative site with images and a step by step guide.

If you were google which would you choose to rank higher?

The images above show that The Ezinearticles content starts much further down the page and under the title , it’s not content but ads. It seems logical to me that if google see’s a title then it expects to see content next , instead it’s getting ads

eHows content starts higher and is immediately below the title, I am not saying that this is a factor BUT it may well be worth testing. But as that may impact the income Ezinearticles earns from OUR articles then it probably won’t be tested.

Once again if you were google which one would you rank higher??

Ezinearticles identified the 7 niches that they say are the biggest problem :

1. Penis Enlargement
2. Get Your Ex Back
3. Acai Berry
4. Reverse Cell Phone Lookup
5. Credit Card Debt Relief
6. Male Enhancement Pill
7. TV for PC

We’ll wow those are certainly not niches full of scams and low quality products are they! If you go to each site and check out how many articles they have on each topic you’ll find Ezinearticles have way more of each.

While on these topics Ezinearticles overall response has been very indicitive of how they treat their authors. Last year they introduced new rules in an attempt to stop what they called Derivitave articles , multiple articles saying the same thing. Good idea, it’s just a pity they didn’t enforce it.

When the Farmer update hit last week they introduced more rules and wanted feedback on what to do with the magnificent 7 above. It’s obvious, what they should do. The editors should do their jobs and not approve poor quality articles.

The top author in the Get you Ex back at ezinearticles has written almost 2000 articles on the topic.. She really needs to get over it and move on!

The top author in the penis enlargement niche has over 1300 articles… he needs to get out more!

Maybe we should hook both of them up!

Now let Ezinearticles tell me that those articles are not derivitive! Every solution EZA have proposed have been aimed at changing the rules , it’s their mess they approved the articles , get in there and re-edit the articles.

So what should you do about the farmer update…. Nothing!

Ask yourself this if you were searching for a solution online and found your own article would it be useful and helpful or just a pile of rehased poop?

If you write good quality content unique content then you’ll be Fine if you are writing poor quality articles then you’ll have problems… It’s always been like that and it always will!

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.

Please Click Here to Tweet This Post

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

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

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

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!

Hand in hand with the recent outsourcing experiment I documented here and in the WordPress Goldmine Forum I have also been testing back linking methods and the system I finally settled on turned out to be much more powerful that any other method I tried including the profile links which seem to be all the rage at the moment.

I’ve structured the system so that it gets you thousands good quality links over a long period of time. It is also structured so that it can grow with you so that if you have little spare money at the moment you can use the free features and as your income grow you can add new “modules” until you are creating links on an industrial scale. Using this method there is nothing stopping you dominating the Google rankings with multiple sites in the top 10 (one experiment I tried got 13 out of the top 15 for a relatively easy term). You could also use this to dominate the rankings with your ezinearticles pages or hubpages and squidoo lenses.

Anyway enough waffle , you can grab your report from the link below, it’s free and I don’t want your email address.. If you like it please use the retweet icon at the start of the article. I’d also welcome your comments so please tell me what you think.

Leverage Your Articles

Right click to download , left click to read online

When I did the article marketing course /step by step in  Wordpress Goldmine I showed how to quickly and easily increase your click through rate to 20 or 30%. What I didn’t show at the time was a quick and easy way to check those CTR percentages so you can see what articles need to be worked on and which ones are performing well.

The Video below show a really quick method I’ve devised , there is probably an even quicker way but this works for me and I am not too good with excel!

If You answered yes to one of those questions then isn’t it’s time you did something about it?

It’s June 1st today so why not dedicate the next month to laying the foundation of a long term business.

I am not suggesting that at the end of the month that you’ll be able to retire but I am saying that you’ll have a usable system in place that you can build on. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is an Internet marketing career. I’ve been doing IM for over 4 years now it’s only in the past 9 months that I’ve finally got myself organised so that I can work a few hours a week if I wish and still maintain my income.

If you are willing to sacrifice 30 hours this month and $30 then you can succeed.

The first stop you should make is ezinearticles.com. Ezinearticles is a great place to research business models.  There are loads of categories here find one that appeals to you. Once you click on a sub-niche you’ll see a link to the top Authors in each niche. Follow this link and you’ll get a list of the Top Authors in that niche. Now all you need to do is to click on some of their articles and look at where their resource links go.

This way you’ll get to see the business model they are using, and believe me if they have bothered to write lots of articles it is working. Follow the process to the end and see all the tricks and tactics they use

It’s now down to you to replicate the business model.

Even creating your own product can cost less than $30.  The graphics on my Twitter Tips and Tricks Site cost me  $17, the domain cost me $9. I wrote the book in less than a day. Although I am giving away the product at the moment I could start to charge for it or even sell it as a complete business package via a site like sitepoint or digitalpoint.  Check out the graphics at www.twittertipsandtricks.com

Go On do it now!!  Build For Your Future

I decided that as I was paying almost $100 I had better make sure I submited at least 100 articles a months to get my moneys worths. In order to test the effectiveness of this level of article marketing I have focussed on 5 sites 3 of which are clickbank 2 are adsense/ebay sites.

I used one of my clickbank accounts that was earnign about $50 a week on average for the 3 clickbank products.  I also did nothing else to the sites, no new content or other forms of site promotion.

I also wrote articles in the style I advocated in my Article Marketing Step by Step in WordPress Goldmine, so in general the articles took less than 70 minutes a day to write I tried to write a minimum of 5 a day.

So 2 months down the line how are things going??

Well The clickbank account is now averaging around $400 a week with a best day of $137.  One of the Adsense/ebay sites with 3 content pages has earned almost $600 on it’s own.  The final site is a bit of a failure but it has had the lowest number of articles submitted for it so $150 is probably acceptable.

I’ll let you decide if you think that this proves that article marketing works… I know what I think!