Like many in MMO I started using Ezine Articles for SEO link juice and on that regard I think it does its job. After being in the SEO/MMO game this long I have heard all the positives about article or bum marketing. As I am consider a new direction with article/bum marketing I wanted to revisit my history with Ezine Articles.
I downloaded my csv file of number of views, clicks, and the like to see what story the numbers tell. There are plenty of articles, in different categories, and over a period of time. What I did was develop two new numbers that I thought were of interest- views per click and days per click. View per click was checking to see how many views it took for each article before a new click is generated. Days per click is how many days an article is up before it generates a click. Now, I understand that most clicks will happen when an article is new or when SEO kicks in to generate some keyword traffic. But this was an overall review.
What I was interested in was traffic and not SEO juice. Essentially what I found was that on average I get one click per article per month. Also, that I get a “homerun” about 10% of the time, meaning articles that just leap out of the averages. But it was that one click per article per month that was interesting. Now, that is a number I can use.
See, it takes me about 30 minutes to an hour to write a decent 300 word article. I also can outsource with my favorite writer at a penny word and an article would cost me about $3.00 for 300 words. So, a click would cost me $3.00 for the first month. Relatively expensive, but when some Google adwords run between $1-2 a click and get no SEO juice, it is not that much more expensive. But consider it over 12 months, that would be 12 clicks at a quarter a click.
These are important numbers as all my sites are content sites. Not sales sites or sales pages, so conversions are a function of huge traffic. Meaning that a quarter a click is expensive as an average value of a site visitor is between a penny to a dime, depending on the site. On the other hand if I were serious about article/bum marketing I would be using EzineArticles to drive targeted sales traffic to a sales page/site. So, in some instances, depending on what I was selling and my conversation rate, $3.00 would not be that much and a quarter would be downright cheap.
Of course these figures are based on outsourcing 300 word articles at a penny a word. For the past few months I have been doing the writing, as I have not invested in outsourced articles. So, the numbers would be readjusted for what I think my time is worth. That would make the per click rates much higher as I would probably rate my time at two cents a word, so essentially double what was figured at a penny a word.
