One of my clients, John Piteo, told me how he was getting traffic to one of his sites and making money from that site by distributing ghost written articles.

I found his story quite remarkable from the standpoint that although the article submissions were made years ago and he has done nothing else to the site, his income has actually increased over the years.

Here is John's article marketing story in question and answer format.

Q. How many articles did you have ghostwritten?
A. I wrote the articles for the 5 main pages and had 25 articles ghostwritten.

Q. Did you use a service such as Elance or Scriptlance to find a ghostwriter?
A. I hired someone from elance. I paid her $150 ($6.00 per article)

Q. How did you submit your articles to the directories?
A. I used Article Announcer and I submitted the articles to only about 15 article directories.

Q. How long did it take to submit your articles to the directories?
A. The first article takes the longest to submit because you have to fill out a few form fields at each of the directories, but after this was done it took about 20 minutes total to format and submit an article to all 15 directories.

Q. Did you space your submissions strategically?
A. I submitted 5 articles the first week and one a week until they were all submitted. I also put the same articles on my site without changing them at all which they say you shouldn't do. I put them all on my site within the first month. So my site has a total of 30 pages.

Q. How long ago was your last submission?
A. I haven't added or submitted any articles for it since 2005.

Q. Have you made any other changes to the site since then?
A. This year I added some affiliate links and pop-under's, but other than putting some affiliate links on the site I haven't really touched it in almost 3 years.

Q. How much does the site earn?
A. Within 6 months it was making between $5 and $10 per day. It (now) brings in about $20 to $30 per day on average ($5.00 to $15.00 of which comes from Adsense).

John invested $150 and now earns $20 to $30 dollars a day from having just 30 articles on one site 3 years ago and has done nothing with the site since!

What I especially appreciate about this story is that it is a reasonable result and expectation for what one can achieve with article marketing, and I too can confirm that the value of article marketing increases over time.

Back on November 1st, 2005, I reported my Article Announcer test results in an article titled "What Happened When I Tested Article Announcer. As I was writing this article on February 19th, 2008 I checked for inbound links from that particular article and I see that they too have increased in the past 2.5 years --- and I didn't even finish submitting the article to all possible directories!

Although John wouldn't permit me to publish his site URL, I can tell you that the niche market that he works in is HUGE and that his site ranks only a PR2 ... which makes an even MORE compelling argument to try article marketing.

To get started, consider picking up content from private label rights distributors or have some articles ghostwritten by writers at Elance or Scriptlance. You can then submit your articles to the main article directories, such as Ezine Articles, ArticleCity and GoArticles, or use an article submitter like Article Announcer to speed up the submissions process.

Can you imagine how much you would earn if you had 5 or 10 of those article sites?

Then consider what might happen if you added a new batch of private label rights articles to it (and the directories) every year ... or better yet a blog to which you post a few tips and one new article every week?

Or not... the point is that article distribution works as a wonderful marketing method in both the short and long term.