I started out with a single article on one site. Everything happened slower because of this. Still I was amazed that I was able to get hits so quickly.
The site I started with had a counter and my eyes almost popped out the next day when I realized that within 24 hours 10 souls had already read my article. The figure these days is closer to two or three hits per day, if your headline is good. I guess it's because fewer people were using this strategy then, so there were fewer articles and more potential readers. These days the articles are many more.
Still articles work because the sites that post free articles have also increased dramatically. It just means that to get the same results, you have to post more frequently and on more sites. The quality of your articles also has to be quite high.
It is that counter in that first site I ever posted to that kept me going. Barely two months later and from that single article I received two serious enquiries. I was able to turn one into an actual sale.
That really got me excited about the possibilities. Having been a direct marketer offline for many years, it was second nature to do a quick calculation of the response rate I was getting, which I quickly put at 5%, thinking that this was very conservative.
Well I'm older and wiser now. There are two truths you need to appreciate when promoting using articles and in fact when doing any sort of online marketing.
Firstly, the response rates are much lower. Quite often lower than 1%. This means that in most cases you will need 100 hits to get one paying customer (if you've got a good product and you're lucky). There are successful online enterprises I know of that do quite well selling to just one customer out of 500 hits or even 1000! It just depends on what your selling price is and more important, what your profit margin is.
That's the bitter pill you have to swallow.
But there is the bright side, which I must say is very bright. And it is in the fact that there is an amazing viral effect that ensures a massive audience for any well written useful article. It means that if you write and post articles regularly, getting 100 hits on a collection of your articles will happen in a very short time. Meaning that you will end up pulling in more paying customers in a shorter time.
To succeed by using articles to promote your business, you will need to keep a careful watch on the kind of response you are getting and increase your activity accordingly.
Of course there are ways of increasing your conversion rate. One of them is by making better use of the resource box (visit my blog for details at: http://big-online-story.blogspot.com.
You can also dramatically increase your traffic by combining your articles promotion with a listing on a heavy traffic site like eBay. You can get all the details about increasing your traffic using eBay from an amazing Ebook which you can get at the following link:-
Christopher Kyalo is a writer/marketing expert who makes money online only by posting free articles. Get his free course at bizboom@freeautobot.com and visit his blog http://big-online-story.blogspot.com. He can be reached at strongwallafrica at yahoo.com.
