I’ve been doing article marketing a long time. It’s a favorite tactic, as it doesn’t have to cost money, just time. But you do have to think about how effective it is.

There are a lot of factors to consider. First is simply how well you’re writing your articles. If you’re just writing and distributing junk, of course you’re going to do poorly. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

Second is the topic. Some topics are more competitive. Some get more searches. You really can’t say that you should expect x amount of traffic by writing an article about topic y, no matter the quality of the article.

Third is where you distribute the article. There are all kinds of sites you can send an article, and many tactics for doing so. Some people like to use article spinners so that their articles aren’t duplicated across hundreds of article sites. Some prefer to only distribute their article to the top few article sites. And others use an article distribution service to send a single version of an article to hundreds of sites with little effort. And of course you can send an article to individual ezine and website owners in the hopes of publication.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each tactic. I tend to use an article distribution service, and it’s done pretty well for me.

I’m not a fan of article spinning because I don’t trust software to do a good job of changing my content and keeping up the quality. I gather it has improved some since the early days, requiring more effort in rewriting rather than pure computer algorithm, but it’s not my style.

Sending an article to individual ezine and site owners can be quite effective, as you can pick where your article will appear. That’s handy for getting onto quality sites. It’s more effort, and you’re best off saving this tactic for your better articles.

I’ve found that results can be quite variable in article marketing, and it pays to know which ones do well so that hopefully you can figure out where some of the good response comes from.

Most articles will get maybe a few dozen hits a month, but others will go into the hundreds when listed on a quality article site such as Ezine Articles. But let’s be honest here. It’s not how many people read the articles. It’s how many go to your site and from there do what you want them to do.

I have one article on Ezine Articles that has been there a few years and has done rather well, I’d say. 4872 views, 3472 clicks on a link in the resource box. That’s a 71.3% click through rate. Too bad it doesn’t lead to a sales page or sign up page, but there’s certainly something to be learned from it.

In this case the article gets into a common work at home problem, and the resource box links to a page with the solution. It’s a great combination, and you can see that in the click through rate.

That’s the kind of combination you want. A well-written article on a good topic with an appropriate link in the resource box. Ideally one that will lead to sales or subscribers for years to come, which is the one failing of this particular example. But it has likely lead to at least some ad clicks, so I doubt it’s a total loss. Hard to say for certain.

That particular example is exceptional in its click through rate. My next highest has a 58.2% click through rate on the resource box, and plenty have yet to get a single click through. Clearly I don’t have it down to a science yet.

Any time you have access to this kind of data from an article website you should take advantage of it. See which articles are really popular. Which resource boxes get the best click through rates. And if you can, which earn you the most money. Combine this information to figure out what kinds of topics you should be writing on. It will be a big help to your business.