2008 In Review
This week I’ll be doing a series of posts looking back on 2008 and giving my predictions for what will happen in the article writing & marketing field for 2009. For today, let’s take a look back at 2008…
EzineArticles.com ends 2008 with several records and firsts thanks to you!
- Monthly unique visitors is now over 15,000,000 (Yes, that’s over 500,000+ unique visitors daily!)
- Daily page views is in excess of one million per day (more page views means more exposure for you and your articles)
- Total articles live has doubled in 2008 well over a million+ quality original articles.
- Launched the EzineArticles/Twitter Directory that has 4,100+ members setup for auto-tweeting their newest EzineArticles
- EzineArticles Premium Memberships launched in Beta since August providing priority article review speed, article scheduling, and insider keyword/keyphrase traffic search term intelligence.
- New Members are being added at a healthy clip of over 10,000+ new Expert Authors monthly.
- We’re ending the year delivering more than 3.6 million monthly visitors going to members’ websites! (That’s a gross CTR of approx 10% leave us to member websites)
- We expanded our offices from 2,000 to 4,000 sq. ft. and doubled the number of Editors to improve article review speeds & member support.
- EzineArticles now serves 586 unique niche markets with more planned for early 2009.
The Recessions Impact on the Article Writing & Marketing world:
The hard costs of spending cash to acquire customers (advertising costs/investments) feels heavier in soft revenue times than investing human capital in the form of labor to create and produce dozens, hundreds and in many cases, thousands of new articles to help build a base of traffic coming back to our members’ websites.
Ie: Business owners, entrepreneurs and experts are exchanging their time to produce articles at a greater rate than they are exchanging their cash for hard advertising costs to acquire the same result: More qualified visitors back to their websites.
The members who were really rewarded this year, traffic-wise, were the ones who made article writing investments in prior years because your total traffic received from articles is in direct relation to your total articles in your article inventory times the total number of days your articles were live on the site coupled with a multiplier effect how in demand your niche content was + your articles quality level (greatly affects forwarding to a friend & other social media viral forwards).
Some members who are experts in Mortgages & Refinancing saw some pretty steep declines in traffic while others in Weight Loss, Health & Fitness, Business (B2B), Debt Consolidation/Relief, Finance Loans, Home Improvement (specifically Bath, Shower, & Flooring), Relationships, Mobile Cell Phones and Self Help saw very healthy traffic activity.
Lastly, the EzineArticles Premium Membership leaves Beta this Tuesday (tomorrow, Dec 30th) to become official: If you’d like to become Premium member before Tuesday, log in to your account, click on ACCOUNT MANAGER, click on PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP & sign up with your PayPal account. We have a cool 2008-only bonus planned and everyone who is a Premium member in 2008 will get the bonus even if you sign up before Tuesday.
QUESTION: Ok, it’s your turn:
How did your articles perform in 2008? Did you invest in writing more articles this year than prior years? Feel free to share your insights on how your article writing & marketing strategy unfolded in 2008. (Let’s keep the 2009 looking forward predictions for another thread later this week please).
This was my first year writing articles. Despite a lul early in the year, later in the year I kicked it into high gear and really really began to see results for my business from articles.
[Reply]