I have been doing article marketing for several years starting in 2003
. I started doing blogging in the make money online niche in 2005 and have really leaned on that over the years.
I do an equal amount of article marketing using Submit Your Article as well as post articles in my blog. I always post any content that I might be using for article marketing on my blog first and then use SYA to make it unique.
I then bookmark that using Only Wire to at least 30 social directories. This has really paid off in terms of traffic generation and ranking for keyword phrases.
So at this point my top two traffic sources from article marketing are:
1. My blog. It is amazing how many individual blog posts continue to bring traffic.
Some of these only bring a handful of visitors each month. However, when I look at keyword phrases that show up on my Google Analytics report I see that I'm being found by over 5100 unique keyword phrases.
This does show you how many ways people will search for things in the make money online niche. It is a crowded niche in some ways, but if you want to get creative you can still get quality traffic in different ways from your competitors.
Having a large keyword list that you attack in your article marketing and blogging is one of the keys to this. Understanding longtail keyword phrases is another important point.
I'm noticing that people are finding me via Google for keyword phrases of 10 words or more. People are typing in very long keyword phrases, and although these do not bring high traffic numbers, this is very good traffic for your Internet business.
2. Idea Marketers. This is the top article directory I get traffic from after all of these years. Marnie L. Pehrson is the creator and really runs a great article directory with many different ways you can get your articles noticed!
I never submit articles to them directly. I use Submit Your Article and submit articles to multiple directories with the click of one button.
Idea Marketers brings me more traffic than any of the other article directories I have articles in. This includes Ezine Articles. Article Base, and many others.
The moral to the story on Idea Marketers is if you want to submit articles to one directory only this would be my suggestion. Also here is a list of the Top 50 Article Directories By Traffic, Pagerank: http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php
After 8 years these are my top two traffic sources from article marketing. I include blogging as part of article marketing because when I write articles specifically for article marketing purposes I also use them on my blog first.