I started out with a single article on one site. Everything happened slower because of this. Still I was amazed that I was able to get hits so quickly.The site I started with had a counter and my eyes almost popped out
next day when I realized that within 24 hours 10 souls had already read my article. The figure these days is closer to two or three hits per day, if your headline is good. I guess it's because fewer people were using this strategy then, so there were fewer articles and more potential readers. These days articles are many more.
Still articles work because sites that post free articles have also increased dramatically. It just means that to get same results, you have to post more frequently and on more sites. The quality of your articles also has to be quite high.
It is that counter in that first site I ever posted to that kept me going. Barely two months later and from that single article I received two serious enquiries. I was able to turn one into an actual sale.
That really got me excited about possibilities. Having been a direct marketer offline for many years, it was second nature to do a quick calculation of response rate I was getting, which I quickly put at 5%, thinking that this was very conservative.
Well I'm older and wiser now. There are two truths you need to appreciate when promoting using articles and in fact when doing any sort of online marketing.
Firstly, response rates are much lower. Quite often lower than 1%. This means that in most cases you will need 100 hits to get one paying customer (if you've got a good product and you're lucky). There are successful online enterprises I know of that do quite well selling to just one customer out of 500 hits or even 1000! It just depends on what your selling price is and more important, what your profit margin is.
