You've already agreed that putting some of your best articles into distribution is a great way to build your brand, grow your targeted traffic and get oodles of free quality back links to your website. You publish a small handful of articles and submit them to the major article distribution sites and then wait? but nothing happens or your results are depressing. What went wrong?

Ten years ago, if you were doing this strategy, a dozen to 20 articles was all that you needed to get all kinds of traffic from your investment in this strategy. Today, you need 200+ articles to begin to get the same return.

Note: For this article, we're only going to examine the amount of traffic that article distribution sites can deliver to your website from your articles. Normally you can expect other sites and ezine publishers to pick up your articles and that would expand the traffic ROI from this strategy.

Let's Talk Page Views:

(1) Page View = (1) human viewing your page.

The average article will generate anywhere from 10 to 10,000 page views per site submitted per month with a realistic average being 25-100 page views. It's very rare when you'll hit a home run and achieve just the right article title and body copy that is rewarded by the search engines with a high rank to get a windfall of traffic.

Therefore if you have 10 articles and you submit them to only (1) article distribution site, you can expect approximately 250 to 1,000 page views to your article and approximately 7 to 30 direct clicks to your website. Click through rates for your website URL located in the resource box of each of your articles are typically 1-3% of the total traffic delivered to each article.

In the same example, if you had 100 articles submitted to only (1) article distribution site, you could expect 2,500 to 10,000 page views to your article and approximately 70 to 300 direct clicks to your website.

If you wanted to set a goal to attract 1,000 visitors to your website per month from article marketing, you'd need approximately:

• 400 articles submitted to 1 site or
• 100 articles submitted to 4 sites or
• 40 articles submitted to 10 sites or
• 4 articles submitted to 100 sites.

Disclaimer: Not all article distribution sites or article banks are created equal. There is a wide range in quality in terms of traffic and some do not include an active link to your site (like they should). If it's not already obvious to you, never waste your time submitting to an article distribution site that does not give you an active link to your website in your resource box.

Lightbulb Article Marketing Moments To Consider:

1) At a certain point, you'll realize that it's easier to produce 40-100+ more articles than it is to submit 4-10 articles to 70-100 article distribution sites. Focus on producing dozens to hundreds more original articles and submit them to the top handful of article directories rather than trying to submit a handful of articles to dozens to hundreds of sites.

2) Stop writing 1,000, 2,000 or 3,000 word articles. A well crafted 250-400 word article produces the same or better result than a 1,000 word article on the same topic.

If you already have a 3,500 word article, why not break it up into 7 different articles? I do not recommend 7 different "parts" to the article under the same title -- but rather 7 different article title's all together from the 3,500 word original article @ 500 words per article. Make sense?

3) Set a goal to get to your first 100 articles available for distribution if you have not produced 100 yet. If you've already produced 100, then set your goal at achieving the first 500 to 1,000 into distribution. Consider repurposing existing content into 250-400 word articles that have article TITLE's that reflect what people are searching for related to your niche topic.

Bottom Line:

Think about each of your articles as your "agents." What would you rather have: 10 agents, 100 agents or 1,000+ agents? Because competition is heating up, you've got to step it up a notch to rise to the top. Consider either producing 100 more articles or repurposing existing content that you created previously to create 100 more articles to put into distribution within the next 30 days. Once you break through some of your existing plateau's, you'll find that it's easier to produce 4 to 10 articles at a time rather than sitting down 4 to 10 times to produce the same articles. It's about efficiency and quality ROI on your time.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ directory. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links in tact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/