Article marketing may be out of fashion with most internet marketers but it still works. Especially for new sites which need targeted visitors.

In September 2013, two of us launched a brand new site.

By definition, there was no content on it and no links pointing to it.

We’ve been working on it now just over 4 months. It’s a part time project – at most, we’re each spending about 4 hours a week on it, the equivalent of just over an hour a day.

At first, we concentrated on content for the site itself.

We’ve now got 67 pages of content on the site and that’s increasing week by week.

Google have indexed all those pages.

Bing have only indexed 12 of them. Which is one of the reasons Bing isn’t exactly a threat to Google.

At the end of October, we started putting articles on EzineArticles. To date, there are 36 of those, the most recent 8 of which were only published today.

They’ve been responsible for sending 41 visitors.

Not earth shattering by any means but consider that to get to the point where they click the link in the resource box, chances are that the visitor will have read through a 500+ word article.

So they’re interested in our site – they’re not just random traffic.

They had to find the targeted article first, read (or at least skim) it and then click through to our site.

Which makes them a lot more dedicated than the average web surfer.

Compare that figure of 41 visitors with the search engines:

Google has sent us 3 visitors.

And interestingly, WordPress search (which I didn’t previously know existed) has sent us one visitor.

So – wow – a whole 4 visitors from the search engines!

In fact, our best performing article has sent 9 visitors. Over double the amount from the search engines.

Sure, it’s small beginnings.

We’re not paying for traffic and we’re not currently doing any other form of promotion.

But there’s another interesting statistic…

Because the site is so new and because it had never been registered before, we know there were no existing links.

The main private backlink services crawl round the web and do their best to find links.

EzineArticles – and likely a lot of other big sites – specifically disallows them in their robots.txt file, so not all backlinks will be picked up.

Ahrefs reports 24 backlinks from 6 domains:

Most of those are quite recent and they’re all as a result of other sites re-publishing the articles we’ve put on EzineArticles.

Majestic SEO is a bit slower to index. It’s reporting 2 backlinks from 2 domains:

One of those domains is reported by Ahrefs, the other isn’t.

Add in another different domain found by Open Site Explorer (which has found 5 links from 4 different domains) and that takes us to at least 8 different domains plus EzineArticles giving our new site backlinks.

All just with simple article marketing.

We’ve not done anything else on the list of suggestions on my internet marketing in an hour a day post.

So there are – as yet – no document shares or videos or anything else promoting the site.

But it’s getting traffic.

And, over time, that traffic will build up.

We’re happy with the results so far.

And the best part is that you can do the same.

The domain cost around $10, hosting we’d already got so it’s an add-on domain, WordPress is free as are the plugins we’ve used.

So that’s it on cost apart from our time.

If you spent around an hour a day, you could get similar results.

Nothing to write home about at the moment. But keep at it for 6 to 12 months and the results will start looking good.

You can find out more about how to do this on this page.

And feel free to report your results in the comments box below.