I have been reading some of your material for awhile now and it is top notch! I do mostly consulting now, but I got my start with affiliate marketing and clickbank.

Anyways, my point is that I am now venturing in CPA, because I feel there is a real opportunity in this field. I have a lot of experience with article marketing (over 1,000 articles on ezine) but I am now focusing my efforts on working smarter and not harder.

ezinearticles.com obviously carries a tremendous amount of weight, and I have seen ezinearticles on the first page of google for some competitive phrases.

I read your above post and think it is great, but if I do some thorough research with SEOquake and determine that I can rank (I think) on the first page of Google with 20-30 backlinks to an ezinearticle, don’t you think that is a good strategy?

When you consider that if you spend 10 minutes getting 5-10 links pointing to each submitted article to a high authority site, then each individual article page becomes a pr2-pr5 within a few months, some of that link juice is going to rain down on your site.

I realize that anyone who is the least bit savvy about PR knows it’s not more important than key worded backlinks, but when you posess a higher pr site, you simply don’t need as many because you have more juice to push other sites aside. That’s how fat sites move you aside even though they don’t have your exact key words. They have big pr numbers. Once you have a higher pr, you can also target other key words with greater ease, which is what we all want. Then rinse and repeat.

I personally think pointing dofollow links to submitted articles helps 100% of the time. Just be sure you download the nofollow add-on by Firefox, so you can spot nofollow sites instantly. Nofollows, like Digg, don’t give juice to pr thirsty webmasters and are a waste of your precious time.

A query – nothing to do with the article – howcome some of your comment links are dofollow and some nofollow?. There doesn’t seem to be any logical reasoning to it – even your own replies vary with dofollow and nofollow….

I agree with you and IMHO it’s just doesn’t make sense to build links to a site that already has a million links running to it.

Especially when you consider the fact that 80% of the traffic will probably click on all the adsense.

I’d rather spend the time methodically building all the backlinks I can to my own sites.

I am new to SEO and article marketing and have been doing an experiment w/ link building to an article. After a few days of watching it bounce on and off the first page of Google, I came to the realization that my time was not being wisely spent! Most of my traffic from the articles and all my opt-ins came in the first 24 hours of submitting the article to ezinearticles. Despite my work and successfully moving the article up in it’s Google ranking, it didn’t necessarily drive any more traffic and I got no new opt-ins.

Clearly, all the time spend link building for the article would have been better spent on my own site! This is the exact info and explanation I was looking for to better organize my strategy from this point forward!

I would add this caveat.

For the beginner, with a brand new site, they WILL get quicker results with building links to their articles.

However, this shouldn’t be done exclusively and one must focus most of your effort on link building to your own site.

Over time, you will get more results sending traffic to your own site, but more immediate results piggy backing on a site like EZA

Ranking a squeeze page for 10+ keywords is rather tedious and to get around it I’m just piggy backing off the success of EZA and trying to increase my click through rate.

I will build a blog soon and build a list through it. What I am doing right now is getting it going.

Jay.