I always enjoy reading your insights, and this particular post about getting more backlinks from articles has inspired me to ask you a few questions.
I have only written a few articles, and agree with the premise that submitting articles about hot topics, in the short term, can be a good sprint..

However, the articles with universal themes, like health, wealth, and self-improvement will be more of a marathon, with an increasing amount of reprints spread throughout cyberspace.

With that being said, I wrote an article entitled “Forgive All Ebay Sins.” It is about applying good customer service to “bidders & buyers” who might make mistakes, and are unfamiliar with bid retracting. It also points out some of ill treatment that auction sellers heap upon their customers..

To the point..If you search in Yahoo and Google for “Forgive All Ebay Sins” you will find the following results..

Yahoo—Results 1 - 10 of about 19,200 for “forgive all ebay sins”
Google–Results 1 - 10 of about 490 for “forgive all ebay sins”.

This amount goes up, and then down, depending on how temperamental the SE’s are that day, and how many times the article gets picked up. The number in Yahoo (19,200) use to be 24,000. Why it went down I don’t
know but I would assume that some sites were “delisted” from their index.

Be that as it may, even though there is a fair about of sites carrying the article, the traffic to my Productsforresale.com site is not that impressive.
I will say that most of the traffic from that title is coming from the article banks that I submitted it to like Ezinearticles.com, Ideamarketers.com, etc. I have been told that my text link and my articles do not focus in on keyword phrases that will show up in search engine results.

I realize that hot topics, and specific phrases are the key to a successful article backlink campaign, but you can’t always write articles with a “keyword” only factor in mind. I think having a catchy title (as you mention) is just as important.

And I know that “Forgive All Ebay Sins” is not a well searched title, or phrase. I thought it was a catchy though. Maybe that is why is has received the most exposure and is carried by a lot of sites. The fact that is about Ebay, might also contribute to it’s appeal.

I was also under the impression that my signature file, with my textlink, and some of the keywords (wholesale, surplus, etc.) might help me show up in the SE’s..

Even an article I wrote “Wholesale Secrets Revealed: The Holy Grail Of Wholesale” that appears on over 600 websites between Yahoo, and Google, (which does carry the keyword phrases I know would rank) the results are the same. Matter of fact, this month, I think I got two people clicking to my site from that article.

I have noticed that the first 100 results that I get (for each article) from both search engines (Google & Yahoo) are listed with some pretty decent websites, and the article has everything in place (signature box with active link to my site). But then, it sort of goes down hill when you dig into the results.

A good amount of websites, while they do retain the signature file, and identify me as the author, have the link to my site in plain text and not as a live link. I wish I could go to all 600, or 19,000 results to see where all my articles are appearing.

Also, some are using the article as a “keyword” stuffing campaign for their landing pages. This is especially true of “Wholesale Secrets Revealed!” I wonder how many sites are carrying my sig file correctly!

Personal anecdotes aside, I guess my question is, what I am doing wrong, and what can I do to improve my traffic results? Why do I have the articles on so many sites, but receive so little traffic?

In addition, do software programs like Article Announcer really work? I can’t imagine that you can just send your article to every article bank or group with the touch of a button. Most article groups, and ezine publishers want you to register first. What paid submission services (if you have used any) have you used with success? Such as..

ArticleMarketer.com
http://www.articlemarketer.com

ThePhatomwriters.com
http://thephantomwriters.com/

Your thoughts and comments are appreciated..

Robert C. Potter
http://www.productsforresale.com
Robert@productsforresale.com

The main reason for your observation that the number of links fluctuate is because sites like EzineArticles.com syndicate articles with RSS feeds. Many publishers use these feeds on their sites, so your articles get a short burst of exposure there.

But as new articles are added to a feed, the old articles disappear, so the number of links will fluctuate. Not sure why Yahoo and Google vary so much in the number of links they display, but I suspect its because Yahoo displays more sites with duplicate content, while Google is trying to weed them out. The size of their index also differs, and that might be a factor.

About the live link in the sig file, I try to ensure this by adding a line about it in my resource box, but have stopped bothering to write to sites and remind them about it, since I measure exposure not just in terms of links back, but also the number of reprints and branding that it creates.

Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to make sure that I covered all my bases. Looks like I covered the field as well! (LOL!) Anyway, this post will not be as long! Your points about RSS feeds, and fluctuation makes sense.

I have also noticed that my articles have shown up on a more than a few spam sites. Yahoo eventually gets around to delisting them (spam sites) so that would explain the drop in links as well.

You are right about Google. They do filter pretty well, and I find that most of the links I am generating from the articles, are featured on better quality sites. Thanks again for your perspective!

Warmest Regards..
Robert C. Potter