When I started my latest article marketing campaign it was to promote a site that I’ve had for 9 months now. It was getting a steady flow of visitors although nothing too spectacular – around 20 – 50 unique visitors per day. The income was encouraging though and the standard line of thinking is that, as you increase your visitors from organic search traffic, your earnings should rise accordingly. So there is a motivating factor behind the campaign.

Over the last few months I have steadily been pushing my site up the Google SERPs from page 47 to its current position of around page 14 for my main keyword. My expectation was that this ranking would creep up as the article submissions were published.

To date I have submitted the article (which has been spun significantly enough for each new article to register as a unique article) to 24 different article directories. I have checked and the majority of my submissions have been published and according to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer, the links have registered.

However, 3 weeks after beginning the campaign, my main keyword ranking on Google is unchanged. In fact, it has actually slipped down a couple of pages. But at the same time – and infinitely more significantly – the daily average of number of unique visitors to my site has more than doubled.

The key factor has been the movement in my ranking for the many long-tail keywords that my site would naturally have picked up. Although I am not specifically getting links using the long-tail as the anchor text, the mere fact that links are coming in is reflected first in the less competitive long-tail keywords.

Needless to say this is a very encouraging sign for what will happen to my main keyword ranking. It tells me that, although there has been no movement yet, the links are taking effect and perhaps with some more site age and a new post or two will have the effect of giving my site the boost it needs. This observation also serves as a reminder that one shouldn’t obsess too much about the changes to the Google search engine rankings.

Your ranking serves as a measurable yardstick and gives you a target to try to achieve but the actual movements around the SERPs is ultimately dependent on the Google algorithm which lately seems to be taking longer and longer to register changes to your website.

My feeling is that as long as I keep getting an increasing number of visitors to the site each month I am on track to reaching the page 1 goal that should be your target with all money websites.

The bottom line, and the purpose of this particular post, is to emphasise the fact that article marketing works. It may not provide immediate results and the results may not manifest themselves the way you expect but the desired result is an increase in traffic to your website and my experience tells me that this is exactly what my article marketing campaign has resulted in.

Tags: article marketing //