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.

I enjoy article writing and distribution. It’s an affordable way to get the word out about my sites, especially since I have a lifetime membership to Content Crooner that dates back to when it was Article Marketer. Makes things quite affordable when the expenses are already paid.

Time’s another factor. But I’ll go into that another time.

There are a number of factors to consider when deciding if article marketing is right for you. But for this review I’m only going to look at factors relating to the distribution of the article, not how well my writing skills and so forth bring me money. That part’s my own fault if it doesn’t work.

An article that I had them start distribution for me on 1/6/2010 currently shows 350 instances in Google. It was submitted to and accepted by Ezine Articles, which is generally considered one of the best article directories, and of course many other directories.

But before the article was submitted by Content Crooner to their article distribution list, it had to be reviewed by them. That went well, and it was reviewed on time, and distributed on the day I specified.

They check to be sure that your writing is likely to be accepted by article directories. I’ve had articles rejected at times back when it was Article Marketer, generally for minor reasons, but it’s a help. It means I don’t lose out on that distribution because I made some stinking mistake.

You can schedule your article distribution up to a year in advance if you like. This is a feature I appreciate, even though I don’t schedule out nearly that far in advance. I’ve done a few months in advance, however. It’s nice to be able to spread articles out and to have articles sent out at an appropriate time of the year if your inspiration for writing strikes at the wrong time of year.

You can get a monthly, annual or lifetime subscription, and then submit unlimited articles for however long your subscription is. They also track where they submitted your article and give you links so you can see how often the various search engines have found your article out there, searching by title.

You can also tweet your article through their system and they’re working on adding more social features.

Now the disadvantage of distributing a single article with no rewrites, as done in this service is that Google will note that it appears in many places, and essentially ignore the duplicates. When Google does that for this article, the number of appearances goes from 347 to 15. Ouch.

Adding in the link: command, it looks like about 7 currently count as backlinks. At least that’s what Google is willing to admit to on what I can see.

I do note that on some of my older articles that number goes up somewhat. But that’s an issue with distributing one unspun article. But then article spinning has it’s own problems, such as not always coming out as a clear, understandable article. You decide which way you want to go.

Overall, I like Content Crooner. They get my articles into the directories I absolutely want them in without a lot of effort by me trying to rewrite them just so for proper spinning and whatnot. One of these days I’ll have to try a service that offers that, just to see what happens, but not right now.