you are ready to give up article marketing

ust when you are ready to give up article marketing forever... you find out that if you do just a little more, you can blow the roof off the top of your online business.

Let me guess, you have heard all about article marketing, and you have even submitted a few articles. Sure, five years ago that might has been a great way to drive traffic to your website, but it just doesn't work like that anymore. I mean, look at the five articles I have submitted, I have just past 100 views, and only three people clicked through to my website.

That was a lot of work writing those articles, and it sure was not worth having only three people click through to my website. I am just going to go back to pay per click, at least I know I am getting some regular viewers to my cite, and it only took me 15 minutes to set it up.

Does this sound familiar? It should, it represents 90 percent of the people who post articles on article directories. Let me share a little secret with you that might change your mind. You have to post more than ten articles. One of the top article directories has said that 90 percent of all authors who publish in their directory never publish more than nine articles.

I have to admit, I have published more than 50 articles, and there are days when I feel a little discouraged. Then I noticed this interesting statistic on another authors *Extended Author Bio.* EzineArticles.com shows how many articles an author has posted and then it shows how many views they have gotten to date. Here is the first one I looked at: 465 Active articles, resulting in 50,335 views.

When I first read this, I thought it had to be a misprint. I mean, my best article today only has just over 90 views. Even if all my articles finally ended with 90 views, that would only be 4500. Then I thought that he has probably been publishing for ten years. Nope, all his articles had been published within the last three years. What? How can that be? Even if you multiply 4500 X 3, you only get 13,500. I thought that 13,000 was the absolute best I could ever hope for: boy was I wrong!

I decided to look into it farther to see if there was some kind of mistake. I will admit, I had read that at some point when writing articles, you hit what they call, *critical mass.* They say that it is somewhere among 100 and 250 articles. Anyway, here are a few of the stats that I found with very little research:

1,130 Active articles, resulting in 670,296 views, Member since April 27, 2005

58 Active articles, resulting in 27,164 views, Member since March 24, 2005

45 Active articles, resulting in 13,449 views, Member since July 19, 2006

74 Active articles, resulting in 194,018 views, Member since October 27, 2004

After I found these, I decided to focus on authors that had around 200 articles, since that is around where they say you hit critical mass. Here is what I found just around the 200 articles published mark:

238 Active articles, resulting in 339,172 views, Member since June 28, 2005

233 Active articles, resulting in 30,740 views, Member since October 25, 2007

232 Active articles, resulting in 184,233 views, Member since November 01, 2005

231 Active articles, resulting in 57,886 views, Member since July 14, 2006

236 Active articles, resulting in 63,417 views, Member since December 06, 2005

At 200 articles, if you received 90 views each, which I thought was impossible until today, which comes out to 18,000 views per year. The longest time any of the authors over 200 has been publishing is 2.5 years. That means they should have, in a perfect world, 46,250 views max. Only one author has not blown that number out of the water, and he or she has only been publishing less than a year.

Now I have to admit, I had no idea that there was near this kind of potential. I pride myself on answering questions that you just cannot seem to find the answers for anywhere else. This is one of those questions I have had for a while. Just give it to me strait, what can I expect? Well, here it is.

I did not use any of the author's name, because this is not allowed on many directories. And remember, to see these numbers you do have to look at the extended author bios. If the author has not posted their picture and information about themselves, the directory doesn't setup an extended author page. This means you cannot see these numbers on everyone.

I can tell you this, after looking at these findings, I am so motivated that I am taking the rest of the day off from my job to write articles. Looks like the first one to 200 articles wins see you there.