Writing articles - how long does it take?

How long should it take to see incoming links?

[markbaa]

Hi All.

So I've heard lots of people say how good article writing is for generating links. My site is on a relatively interesting subject, so thought I'd give it a shot and see how it goes. What I want to know is how long does it take?

I'm not terribly impatient, and expecting 100 links TOMORROW! but I also want to make sure my time spent writing is worth while. What experiences have people had?

Do you find you've submitted 10 articles and 1 gets used 100 times (and presumably generates 100 links) while the other 9 only do 1 or 2? Does it build up over months - or years even?

I would assume the subject matter & quality of writing have a fairly large impact. Is this correct?

Any more hints for a newbie appreciated!

[Buzliteyear]

Hey,

I'm in the same boat.

Today, I submitted my first article to one of the main article services. I will probably do a few more and see how it goes. Unfortunately, it might take a bit for the links to get picked up by the search engines.

[BlackRaven]

i tried writing articles, but very quickly discovered that most of the Ezines where my articles were published did not credit my site with a PR pass. Most of these sites employ techniques as to not pass PR, and all the while generate Adsense revenue for themselves from my hard work. Learned my lesson, never again!

[arrowman]

Submit? Article service? Ezine? What are you guys on about?

Just publish articles on your own website. If they're good, people will link to them. It may take a while though.

You can try to speed it up by hinting in the blogosphere. Can give you a huge traffic spike as well.

[arrowman]

Oh by the way, one thing that seems to work very well is to write an elaborate column or essay that states and explains a widely adopted but also controversial opinion.

People who hold this opinion tend to link to the article to explain there position. They're too lazy to come up with the reasoning themselves.

It works even better when the topic is relevant to webmasters.

Jakob Nielsen is a master at this ("Frames Suck Most of the Time" has 1~3.000 incoming links).

[robotsdobetter]

Submit? Article service? Ezine? What are you guys on about? Just publish articles on your own website. If they're good, people will link to them. It may take a while though.

That's true, but first you got to get visitors coming first.

Do you find you've submitted 10 articles and 1 gets used 100 times (and presumably generates 100 links) while the other 9 only do 1 or 2? Does it build up over months - or years even?

Some articles will get 100s of links, while others will only get 50 to 100 links. This depends mostly on where you submit it to.

I would assume the subject matter & quality of writing have a fairly large impact. Is this correct?

That's correct, better the article the more BIG web sites will pick it up, which is where the traffic really comes from.

[graywolf]

If you're looking for links from articles in a hurry the blogosphere your best bet.

Play with some of 'tag clouds' from places like technorati and cnet so you understand how they work.

Use tagging/pinging to get your posts into the 'blog stream'.

Write about hot/controversial/ subject matters.

Standing out is a good thing. If you can, be profound, insightful and well thought out. If that spot is filled, go against the tide of popular opinion and be an instigator. (hint: use a nome de plume).

Give 'gifts' to people who use your articles like free ebooks or $10 amazon gift cards. Think about how long it takes to get a one way inbound, is that amount of time worth $10?.

[jdhuk]

BlackRaven,

Did you find any evidence of them hording the PR? I have really looked hard and cant find anything. Did you wait for the next PR update once you submited your Articles?

The reason I ask is I also have written some Articles and published at the place you mention and was excited to see some nice PR7's pointing back at my domain.

Now my excitement has turned to disappointment :(

[notredamekid]

Some articles will get 100s of links, while others will only get 50 to 100 links. This depends mostly on where you submit it to.

You can pick up a dozen or so links from article banks rather easily.

I have found that for an article to do really well, I have to get it syndicated on several related sites.

E.g., Your site is on blue widgets, so you write an article, "How to Correctly Run Your Blue Widget".

1) Submit to somearticlebank.com 's blue widget category (repeat 10 times)

2) Now find authority sites on blue widgets, then authority sites on widgets, then sites on anything remotely widget-like. Submit your article to all of these. This will take a lot of time, but will also give you the good links, as well as direct traffic.

[jaffstar]

The truth about articles....

I searched and found a couple thousand sites that claim to accept articles. Eventually 60% of those hoarded PR. The rest I submitted to, only got about 20 acceptances after hundreds of submissions.

If you got the time/team investigate it, just difficult to justify ROI.

[notredamekid]

If you got the time/team investigate it, just difficult to justify ROI.

For the first article, yes.

For the second, only submit to those places that printed the first article AND gave you a link (and any other new good leads)... will take 10% of the time for the same number of links.

[texasville]

I am very pleased as to my experience with article writing. I hope that in the end it doesn't come back to bite me.
I webmaster a commercial site and to promote my value to prospective clients have devoted quit a bit of free time to this site attempting to push it's rankings.
I wrote articles that explained usage and safety of their products. Now they aren't the manufacturers, just dealers for a couple of different brands. I added an articles button to the menu and stored them on the site. I submitted to different ezine distributors that only seemed to distribute to other ezine distributors. I finally found an authority site that picked up one article as a fundraiser for their charity project. I donated back the funds that they offered a percentage of and they kept my article featured for quite a while on their frontpage with a hot link back.
Now, just yesterday, doing a search on these articles I found that a very LARGE authority site has picked up two of my articles that were chapter one and two and have displayed them on their site.
I think they must have found a link in one of the ezine distributors and visited my clients site and scooped them up.
Now this was great. Fantastic exposure. However when I visited their pages, all was fine except the link wasn't hot. Copyright was there. Name of clients company and url displayed.
So, I wrote them a nice note and thanked them for using my articles and asked them if they could make that a hot link. Presto! Got an answer back that said it was an oversight and fixed it.
Now, I have only one thought. Even with the link and copyright and all, will I run a chance of getting penalized for duplicate content by the se's (read google). I am hoping not and that I accomplished two things at once: created good content for the site and obtained some valuable links and shared information on the net, which is as it should be.
Just thought I would share my experience with you. Hope you are being successful with this.

[Buzliteyear]

Okay, I submitted my first article on June 30th. I've been checking search engines for the article, and I just found that it had been posted on two different websites.

Neither included a link.

So, I will email them both tomorrow asking for a proper link. More to come.

(MSN had it indexed first. I had been checking with G and Y, and it's not on either)

[texasville]

You should always include a source box at the end of your article requiring a link and author recognition. Sometimes this gets lost as it is downloaded from one distributor to another. Just remember to pay them a compliment and a thanks for posting it. At least that worked great for me.

[Buzliteyear]

Okay, I previously indicated that I had found two sites that picked up my article, but neither had posted the link.

I emailed them both today. One responded so far and added the link. Still waiting to hear from the other.

Also, when you submit the article, if you don't submit the link code, the link will not show up on the Articles website. I edited today, and now it shows up.

So, I am going to play a bit more with article submission. I just sent in my second article. We'll see.

[Sophist]

Since Nov last year I have 13 articles downloaded over 1350 times. I have pushed the backlinks to one site to over 600.

Articles writing works far better then reciprical linking and is a great way to leverage time. Plus the links are more natural.

I have started to write a condensed version of the articles for the articles directories and put the full one on my site. In my bio I have a call to click through for more info. This not only entices the click to my site but also helps me avoid duplicate content.

Seems to be working.

Dave

[JoeT321]

I'm new to this article idea and I don't exactly get what you guys do...

You write articles that are based on the same idea as your website, then submit them to article distrubutors, then they send the article out to people to publish on their websites with your link at the bottom?

What site does this for you?

How long does it take you guys to write these articles?

Do the articles have to be of extreme quality?

[Buzliteyear]

Okay, I previously indicated that I had found two sites that picked up my article, but neither had posted the link.
I emailed them both today. One responded so far and added the link. Still waiting to hear from the other.

Also, when you submit the article, if you don't submit the link code, the link will not show up on the Articles website. I edited today, and now it shows up.

So, I am going to play a bit more with article submission. I just sent in my second article. We'll see.

UPDATE: Bamm! Just got a link from a PR 6 page. Articles picked up 3 times linked twice.

This technique definitely requires followup and babysitting, but it does seem to work.

[nsusa]

What are the sites to submit articles to that have been most successful for you? Articlecity.com apparently stopped taking articles. I am now mainly using ezinearticles.com.

Chris

[Buzliteyear]

Chris,

There are a ton of different ones out there that I have not tried.

Right now I use Goarticles and ArticleWorld.

I will probably experiment with some more later. Good luck.

[alika]

We used to share our articles with free article submission sites. As an initial strategy, they work well in terms of creating link backs, though I've found several big sites that used our articles and never made our URL live (no linkback)

In our experience, the smaller the site that used the article, the more they are willing to create link backs that last longer (though we've had success in some big sites such as AT&T Worldnet and MSN Finance). We stopped giving our articles for free when we realized we could actually make money from syndicating our articles. Nonetheless, the few that we shared for free to smaller sites way back in 1998 are still alive today and still counts in our backlinks.