Squidoo or Ezine Articles: Which is Better in Article Marketing?

I have used both Squidoo lenses and Ezine articles to promote my websites and services and I often get asked which one gives you more bang for your buck. Well, technically they are both free, so it’s really a matter of which one will give you more traffic. After all, it all comes down to getting more traffic to your sites or affiliate pages which will translate into more sales, leaving a bigger income in your bank account.

Before we break it down it is important to note that the rules have changed a little bit. Recently, Squidoo has announced that it was no longer allowing some of those “spammy” lenses promoting paid surveys, water for gas, and undeniably promotional weight loss lenses. They had said this from the beginning but now they are really cracking down on it and even deleted some of my own. I have also noticed a big drop off in traffic from Google to my Squidoo lenses recently. And this leads me to believe that the new crack down on spammy lenses is linked to Squidoo falling out of favor with the giant search engine and losing money from the lack of traffic.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have some Squidoo lenses that give me quite a bit of traffic every month and I am glad I have them, but by FAR my traffic just pours in from Ezine Articles.  Your results may be different and you get a slew of hits from Squidoo, but I am betting that is because you have spent a lot of time developing those lenses, adding content to them now and then, and even soing social bookmarks and back link building to them.  But with very little effort I can see my Ezine article skyrocket in traffic without any of that.  They are strict on spam and self promotion, but that is NOT a bad thing.  That makes Google love them even more which is good for everyone who can get articles approved on Ezine.

Look at the kind of traffic I can get from just ONE article on Ezine (which took me 10 minutes to write):

I found a topic that had not much information about online about it yet but I knew that very soon people would be searching for it.  I know these are not earth shattering numbers, but an extra thousand new visitors a month can make you a lot of extra money.  I wrote an article with a very similar title on Squidoo and got absolutely nothing.  I added pictures, videos, and more but I did not build any backlinks to my lens.  A month later and no traffic to speak of.

For short term traffic, Ezine articles is the way to go, but if you want long term traffic day in and day out, I recommend you check out the Ezine Article Manifesto that a buddy of mine wrote.  It is excellent and will give you some short cuts for eplxoding your traffic with article marketing.