Article directories are the sites like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com and many others that allow you to submit articles on your niche topic in exchange for getting a back link to your site.
One appeal is that, theoretically at least, webmasters and bloggers can pick up your articles to run on their own sites, with the agreement that they retain your resource box, which is a small “mini advertisement” with a link to your website.
The question is, How much traffic can you really get from submitting articles to article directories? The answer is, of course, that it depends on a lot of factors, these being primary:
- How many articles you submit.
- Which article directories you submit to.
- The quality, value and usefulness of your articles.
Is article marketing iffy? Well, it is certainly not something you will see results from overnight. Article marketing is more of a long-term time investment. It is not a short-term or quick way to build web traffic.
Each individual article tends to do better when it is first posted to the directory. This is because new articles generally appear on the higher traffic home page of the directory. After they drop off the home page, the article view count will fall.
The best advice I can give is to avoid submitting garbage content. There are those who are run their articles through a spinner, or piece of software that will rearrange words in an effort to make it look like a new article. Sometimes, the spinners produce garbage.
The idea is, with a huge number of articles out there that the spinners can produce, quantity will make up for quality. But once someone chances upon one of these articles and finds that they are nonsense, why would they want to click over to your site? Always keep your final readers in mind. You are writing for people.
Perhaps the idea is that the sheer number of back links pointing to one’s site by all these articles will cause a site to rise in the search engines and will make up for the lack of people actually reading the articles. But the directories that allow spun articles most likely have a lower credence with the search engines, so this assumption is dubious. It’s a sort of “black hat” method of search engine optimization, at the very least.
If your article fails to appeal to the reader, there is another important thing you’ll be missing out on — the chance that he or she will distribute the article to other people with your link attached. That will be more traffic that you are missing out on!
Quality is essential to article marketing. The other factors of article marketing have no match for a quality article. If you submit a higher quality article to fewer article directories, more people may still end up reading your quality article because it is an article worth reading.
There is a way you can legitimately speed up your article writing, and that is to use a voice dictation package. Dragon Naturally Speaking or Dragon Dictate for Mac gives great results with very little training and may well be the best way to quickly get your thoughts out to the masses.
So write quality articles that speak to the reader. Give him exactly what he wants. Do not take shortcuts, because there are no shortcuts in article marketing.
Article marketing can be a time consuming process, but if done right, it can pay off in the long run.
I have done article marketing for a long time. They give me traffic, perhaps as much as 50% of my web traffic directly and indirectly, but it does not multiply my traffic.
I allways base my articles on quality. Sometimes I make one comprehensive article and submit it to a major directory. Then I make a shorter and rewritten version, but still of high quality, and submit that to some more directories.
I also tend to make a mega version, also rewritten, and put that on one of my own web pages.
December 8, 2012 at 6:27 pm Knut Holt
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February 8, 2011 at 12:04 am Louis
I wanted to thank you for an exceptional and informative post which I enjoyed reading very much. I have only just started to use article marketing to boost my internet site visits and Google pagerank – all is going especially well but any added information on this topic is allways beneficial. Thankyou again.
February 2, 2011 at 11:00 pm free articles