Normally I wouldn't give out this information about my own articles, but as affiliates I think you'll benefit from this.
So, very quickly, I'm going to reveal the top 3 articles at Ezine Articles from the 74 I've written so far, and explain more about them so you can tailor your own articles to the success pattern.
Here they are, rated by viewing numbers:
8,023 views - How to Win the Lottery - Should You Use Lotto Quick Picks, Or Select Your Own Numbers to Win?
6,796 views - How to Win the Canadian Lotto 649 - A 30-Second Way to Predict the Next Lotto 649 Winning Numbers?
Some points to note about these articles:
1. Traffic is through organic SEO. None of my articles have had any help through backlinks etc, though the top article did receive a couple of thousand views after I promoted it briefly in a blog post. Traffic has been affected by the last Google slap but is slowly working its way back to average readership.
2. There's no predictability of viewer count with any keywords. In fact, the top-viewed article has less numbers of keywords than the third-viewed, yet the most viewed article has nearly three times the readership. My advice is to use keywords that describe winning the lottery, and localise them... select one game and concentrate all your articles around them as I did with the Canadian 649 above.
3. The 4th article (not shown of course) has less than half the views of the 3rd article. The 4th-viewed article also has a 5-star rating from viewers, against a 4-star rating for the top article. So Ezine Articles stars don't have much effect on readership.
4. Most of my articles - around 66 of the 74 - have less than 1,000 views each, even though the titles contain many of the keywords in the top 3 above, in particular "how to win." It seems while this keyword phrase is popular, it is not effective for getting or increasing traffic.
5. The length of the title appears to make little difference to views. Some of the <1,000 view counts also have long titles.
So, because there doesn't seem to be any logic to traffic counts and keywords - do you continue to write articles with keyword emphasis in the body?
The answer is a definite YES. And it's even more important now to ignore the short term trends and gimmicks, and write quality articles that last.
Here's some tips:
#1. Ezine Articles (www.ezinearticles.com) are only accepting articles of a minimum of 400 words. I recommend going above that figure - even up to 1,000 words. There is a theory that Google is rewarding longer articles with high SEO prominence on the basis they are more useful than short ones. A high word count can imply a better quality article. The longterm advantage is that long articles can later be broken down to several smaller ones for inclusion in other article directories.
#2. Keep your titles keyword rich. I try and write longer titles for the additional keywords that may be picked up... there is a lot of serendipity going on from other areas of interest. For example, a general article could be sprinkled with "Powerball" keywords to get traffic for that game.
#3. Important - make your articles unique. This is probably the best advice you can have. While I often suggest partially rewriting my own articles for your own distribution, a better bet is to do a full rewrite where no phrase or sentence is the same. Google in particular has a sophisticated method of determining originality, and as far as we know, downgrading it in the SERPs.