I was reading a post the other day on Massive Traffic Techniques written by Mitch from ImJustSharing and he was responding to another post he had read. Now before you go off on me saying “hey Mirjam, what happened to you not reading other blogs anymore?” let me explain that there are a small number of blogs that I do continue to read occasionally for a number of reasons, but overall I have severely cut down on the hours spent reading.

I do go to Mitch´s blog though because he gives me food for thought and more often than not I find stuff to discuss, but anyways, back to the posts on Massive Traffic Techniques…

Have you noticed that when it comes to this type of post, 95% of the bloggers are saying the same thing over and over again? The same techniques are shared and shared and shared and they supposedly all lead to massive traffic for our sites.

The first on the list of “massive traffic techniques” was article marketing and I am going to quote it here so you won´t leave just yet (you can always go check out the posts later, after commenting here, right?)

1) Write articles: believe it or not this is an incredible tool for driving traffic.

I have 10 articles on Ezine Articles and Evan Carmichael, and, according to Analytics, I’ve never gotten a single person to any of my sites because of them. They’ve been used elsewhere, though, so I’ve gotten links, but traffic,… nope.

That comment to me was … how to say it politically correct… different from what I have found.

So I actually decided to dive into my EzineArticles account and look at my own stats. Some are just too embarrassing to admit really, but hey, trying to make a point here and being humble once in a while can´t be all bad, right?

So I do have a few articles that did not get me one single click at all. None, zero, napa, zilch, niente… even though they had a decent amount of views, or at least enough to be expecting a few visits.

But lately, even though I am still not getting the thousands and thousands of views per article, yet…, there are also articles that received as much as 60-70% of clickthroughs per view. Now the percentage isn´t really that important when it comes to numbers, but it is actually important to find out myself how I need to write the articles I submit to EzineArticles in order to get people to my sites (and hopefully buy the products that are on there).

In total I have only submitted about 70 articles or so, received over 8300 views on them and as a result of that had 1,400 clicks to the different links in there. Far from great stats but if I look at them and compare the beginning of my article writing venue and where I am at now, those 70 articles have taught me quite a bit, (which I will be sharing here in the near future so stay tuned for that!) and both views and clickthroughs are improving from when I first started.

Back to the original reason for me writing this post:

Most Posts on “Massive Traffic Techniques” are Fooling You into Wrong Thinking!

Yep, that is my opinion and my personal opinion, and feel free to disagree with me here, but I will explain why I am thinking this. I hold my “grudge” not so much with the techniques themselves (although I do feel that some techniques are way more productive than others when it comes to making money) but with the overall stigma they keep alive: “the more traffic, the more money”

Right, I am sure you must have seen that hundreds of times already, that the more traffic you have, the more money you can make. And even though this might be true when you want to sell advertisement on your site (in order to do so, you will have to be able to show that the advertisement spots are placed on a site that gets plenty of traffic) I don´t think that the more traffic always gives you the more money.

I think it is way more subtle than that, you can create absolutely useless traffic in huge amounts without selling a thing and you can make a sale from only a few visitors (did you notice that my main reason for getting specific traffic is making sales?).

When I first started doing the “article thing” I did see a rise in statistics of traffic on different sites, I even saw a rise in certain keywords in the SERPs, but it stayed far from becoming a big earner and after having submitted 30-40 articles to EzineArticles, I thought it was not going to do anything for my business and ready to join the huge amount of people that proclaim that article marketing doesn´t work to create massive traffic to their sites.

But then I started looking at other authors on EzineArticles, have you ever noticed there are people with hundreds if not thousands articles to their name? Now call me stupid, but I firmly believe that people wouldn´t keep beating the article marketing path if it wasn´t working for them, so I decided to have a closer look at just what they were doing, how they wrote their articles (and very important too, their author boxes) and started reading the blog on EzineArticles that offers really good information on how to make article writing a success.

I took what I learned from that and actually changed not only the way I was writing those articles but also the author box information, made shorter articles, more catchy titles and author boxes that looked as if they were part of the articles themselves.

Can you guess what I saw changing in my stats? Come on now, give it a shot!

Back to why I think those Massive Traffic Techniques” posts are fooling you into believing you need huge traffic … I like to think more into percentages, productivity and ROI. And I will give you a specific example.

I have two articles that I published on the 18th of February and the 11th of February, both promoting a lens project I had been building. Now I know that according to the One Week Marketing Plan I should have submitted one article per lens but life got in the way and I got sidetracked a bit, but anyways, back to those 2 articles.

The have respectively 58 and 127 views and a total of 100 click throughs. I did nothing to promote those articles, just wrote them and published them and that is it. They are both 250-260 words and have an adapted author box of around 200 words, so in total that is not even 900 words. Between having a really really slow internet connection, writing the article, making the links and writing the bio box, that took me about 30 minutes to do.

100 clickthroughs might seem like nothing if you are shooting for thousands and thousands of visitors, I know, but these articles actually lead to 2 sales, totalling 51.18…

This is where it becomes interesting for me because it is proving me a few things, and by doing so, turning most information that is rehashed on almost all of those MMO blogs into plain myths:

  • It only took less than 200 views and 100 click throughs to make 2 sales
  • 900 words were enough to drive the targeted traffic I needed to cash in on $50 for now
  • I made those sales without doing the selling myself but left that to the vendor on his landingpage
  • I did not spend hours and hours using “massive traffic techniques” like commenting, socializing nor submitting to directories or other things “people tell us to do to become a succes”
  • The articles were published on a new account, so no “fame”, not being a “big trusted name” myself, no buzz no nothing, not even being popular, just 2 simple short articles.

Keep in mind that this is only one personal experience and example, but I am pretty sure that the better I get at picking the products, creating mini projects and improving on my articles on EzineArticles, the more sales will follow.

Thought that was enough food for thought for now, seeing that I want to get back to work and will be doing a personal challenge today that I might post on shortly (another reason to get back here or sign up for my rss as to not miss out on information that might actually help you make money or if the challenge fails, to save you from going through the same ;) )

I do hope that you all start thinking for yourself without just copying what others tell you to do.

Don´t just buy into hype because it is fun to spend your time navegating and socializing, at least not if you are serious about your online ventures in terms of creating an income. And hey, more power to you if you are actually making big money already following all the “massive traffic techniques” and have a MMO that makes those big bucks, by all means, do what is already working for you and giving you a high return on investment. I´ll just continue working on what is bringing me personally a higher ROI and so should you!

Don´t even take what I am saying for granted, but check your own personal stats and see what you can improve on in order to make more money and build a solid business online. Find what really works for you and start building on your most productive ventures and ditch those that are just time-wasters.

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