I thought I was done with the initial series, but not quite. I have been lazily oberving figures and observed something interesting. What seemed to have been the worst performing campaign by far – 2 articles on SEO combined have since made up for lost ground and caught up to my views on a niche article. Obviously the niche still wins hands down for achieving a greater number of views on its own merit, but when I last wrote I think the gap was at least 12 views, so it’s interesting to see the gap close down like that. Similarly, between the two SEO articles there have been 4 URL clicks as opposed to the 5 click on the niche article’s URL.

I also got a few views through the search engines. Literally only 1 or 2 views on some of the articles. Great for articles just over a week old? I don’t know. Maybe I had a poorly optimized title or maybe it takes time for the title to achieve a series ranking.

The searches that lead to article views weren’t very well targetted in all cases other than the SEO articles, interestingly enough! Also, all these search engine originated views happened the day after the article went live, and the second day after for those articles that achieved a second search engine click through. Looks like they got buried soon just as quickly as they appeared.

It will be interested though to see whether I do start receiving search engine traffic again and how long it takes before that starts happening.

On checking my analytics stats recently I noticed google (organic) and google (referral). I had no adwords campaign running on this, so I was wondering what the heck was going on.

After a bit of searching I found the following direct from the horse’s (google’s) mouth:

Not all referrals from Google.com domains come through organic search or AdWords ad listings. Referrals may come from a variety of sources, including Google Groups posts, base.google.com listings, or static pages on related Google sites. Such visits are tagged as [referral] instead of [organic] or [cpc].

Pity really that the referral can’t be more specific than that. In this particular circumstance I’m wondering whether youtube.com now counts as a google.com referral, as the content viewed the site concerned was related to a youtube video, and that site is still new and unknown so I’d be surprised to be getting a referral from any other “related google  sites” that I’m aware of. Hmm…

Okay, after the initial euphoria and suspicion this wouldn’t last, it is now confirmed. after about 2 days of good traffic, it’s started to filter leading me to believe that most traffic I got was simply because the article was new (no kidding Sherlock!)

However, that said, I am also aware that I should get secondary traffic in time assuming I have chosen a good keyword rich title for those articles with phrases searched for in signifcant volume but with little competition for that phrase.

If so, then hopefully I’ll start to see traffic coming in from people that find the article through search engines. And of course as Ezine Articles itself has a high PR, it does a small favour to my website by providing backlinks through the resource box that appears with my article and through the link(s) on my author page.

Of course, 1 article alone isn’t going to do much for me, so I think now that I’ve seen what it can do in the short term, I need to aim at the most laziest level to do at least 1 article per niche per month.

Hopefully there’ll come a time when I start outsourcing so I can create articles more frequently. But first I need to see more results.

I will be very interested to see what results the 6 articles currently in the pipeline bring, especially as 3 are on one niche that I got a few decent adsense clicks on, and 2 are on a site in a very saturated and heavily in demand market.

Oh, and on that note in the case of the latter. One interesting thing happened. I got a signup to my mailing list. This is significant as an adwords campaign was getting high click throughs but few signups.

But there are differences between the two. The article is designed to get traffic to my website. The adwords campaign is designed to get people on a list and/or purchase an affiliate product.

Also, perhaps the landing page used in the adwords campaign wasn’t compelling enough to be worth them signing onto the mailing list. But this is a whole different topic to discuss. I just throught it was great that I had a signup when I didn’t even call or ask for it in my resource box.

One more interesting thing. My niche article got 4 clicks on the Ezine Publisher link. This basically is a page where people can get the HTML or plain text versions of an article for republishing elsewhere.

Now frankly I am amazed that for someone that has just gotten started with article publishing, with writer’s block, has managed to delve into a niche and produce a quality article that people deem worthy of republishing.

I just hope they are practicing good faith and republishing my  article complete with resource box fully intact with live links, and without adding nofollow tags to those links. It would be great to have some free backlinks!

Okay, my preliminary results have been enough to spur me on to complete my goal of submitting a further 8 articles to EzA by the 20th Feb has just been completd. I made it – whew! Now I just need to sit back, and wait for the articles to go live. Hopefully there won’t be any problems with any of them this time. I don’t think there should be but I don’t work for EzA either.

Anyway, the 2 articles I did on Link building SEO were the worst performing out of the currently live 4. The article I published in a saturated market did the best. Averaged about 12 visitors a day with a 14% clickthrough rate. Question for the traffic is whether this is due to the article being new or if people were actually searching for an article and mine came up in their results and caught their eye. Question for the click throughs is whether my resource box was appealing enough.

My niche article had almost half the views of the most popular one, but with 18% clickthrough rate. I also got a few adsense clicks in the process which brought a smile to my face as I haven’t achieved much with adsense so far. This was an encouraging and welcome development.

I actually need to start affiliate marketing with the niche site. However I need to add a few more pages to it first to help ensure I get approved. Right now though, with article writing being a new concept to me. And with the psychological writer’s block having been something to push through, getting those 10 articles done has been a bit taxing and I do have other things that I need to attend to. So I’m taking a little break from adding content for now.

Just need to sit back and wait for the next 6 articles to go live – that’s not how long my break is going to last btw!

Okay, I now have live an article live for a niche market and one for a saturated market. Surprisingly (or maybe not so) I have had 12 views on the first SEO article, and with the new articles only going live a matter of about 6 hours ago, they both have got 5 views.

Maybe there’s a greater ration of interest contrasted with number of articles for the non-SEO topics than the SEO one…

Anyway, I’m certainly much more excited by these two new articles with these great results in a matter of a few compared compared to the results gained by the article running a few days already!

Hmm, I have to admit, getting started is difficult. Does it work, is my effort justified, who am I to succeed in this business and all manner of self-defeating efforts.

I’m battling against those thoughts. I want to stay the course and prove it’s possible.

Oh, and I earned a little bit from AdSense today too. Nothing major, but I’m just getting started and it’s a great start as far as I’m concerned. Thank you and keep em coming in more quantities more quickly!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaa!