Does Article Writing Really Work

With so many website owners putting a lot of effort into writing articles, what evidence is there that this technique actually does any good? Well, the aim is new targeted traffic arriving onto your website, and for this we can have direct traffic and search engine traffic.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic will arrive in the form of people who have read our articles arriving onto our websites. Given the time and effort it takes to write an article (not that much, really), then a handful of visitors per article would be good. Even if you have to pay someone $10 to write each article, as long as the subject of the article is closely related to your website, they will be targeted visitors.
Looking at my most successful article of last month, in the 3 weeks since it was published, it has been viewed 376 times, producing 24 clicks over to my website. Those 24 targeted visitors would have cost a fortune through PPC systems, so I am quids in there. And that is just 1 reprint of the article, which has also be reprinted by some of those readers.
Search Engines
But what about the search engine benefits? Well, that article has only been around for 21 days, so it is too early to see any changes, but I also did a batch of articles 15 months ago on a new keyword phrase. That phrase was one that I had not worked on before and since then, I have left alone.
Before I worked on it, my sites were nowhere to be found on the terms. After a handful of articles I had reached 2nd and 3rd position on Google with 2 separate websites. And then I left them alone and didn’t do any further work on the term.
Well, 15 months on and occasionally I still check the keyword phrase and a couple of related phrases. It has become a benchmark of mine – the websites still hover between 2nd and 4th places on the first page of Google, occasionally one will drop further down and then make a quick climb back to these positions.
So, for the sake of maybe a dozen articles submitted to a website that specialises in distributing them for SEO benefits, my two websites made it to a good search engine position and have remained there ever since. In fact, on one of the alternative names, I am now even in top position.
My experience is good
My experience of article writing is that with certain sources you can get a load of people reading your articles and then visiting your site and other sources can really improve your search engine rankings.
What more than that could you want? Article writing really does work!