The Article Writer Mailbag, Take 9
This week is “Mailbag Week” where I answer some of the questions recently asked by my beloved readers, customers, and colleagues.
Q. I want to submit my articles to article directories. Care to share some tips?
A. Gladly! In 2005 and 2006 I submitted over 700 articles to various article directories. Let me give you The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of this business (with apologies to the late Sergio Leone).
The Good — Article directories are an easy and fast way for you to get published. Carefully select the write directory, include your back links, and soon your article may be picked up and distributed to many different websites. If the links are left in place (a big IF, by the way) you stand to get some links pointing to your site. Good sites include: EzineArticles, ArticleSphere, Article Dashboard, and Go Articles.
The Bad — Article directories are an easy and fast way for you to get published. Oops! I just said that. Then again, that is the problem with article directories — anyone can be an author. In addition, if you post your article on some popular directories and you post a copy of the article to your website, the search engines may value your submitted article over your website version. You may get the back links but you won’t get Google PageRank.
The Ugly — Oh, there are a number of them out there. Directories where you submit articles and where they remain. Unapproved. Worse, some people think article directories are a great place to get free content. Well, they are. However, they are not places to go to steal content or at least they shouldn’t be. Don’t be surprised if and when you become a regular contributor that your author information is missing or credited to someone else. Do you have the time to check up on all of your submissions and track down content thieves?
I rarely submit articles anymore having had my fill of the whole process. Yet, if I had to do it all over again I would, but I would be extremely careful who got my articles and how many of them I submitted.
Mailbag | Matthew C. Keegan, 2 Aug 07
By Spanish Soul, August 2, 2007 @ 7:54 am
I have had similarly bad experiences with article directories you mentioned. Many of my articles had the linkback removed… etc. I did not try the sites which you said were good ones, maybe I will look into them in the future.
By Matt, August 2, 2007 @ 9:14 am
Thank you for your comments, SS. I’ll be sharing some additional details about article directories next week, not by specific directory, but taking this topic and expanding it.
By Joint Venture Partner, August 2, 2007 @ 9:26 am
700 Articles in 2 years! Wow that’s a lot of articles.
How much traffic have you got from those articles?
By Matt, August 2, 2007 @ 5:56 pm
Hi JVP. I cannot say for sure, especially since I no longer measure traffic from the article directories. At one time I would say a significant portion of my traffic came that way, but that is no longer the case.
It also seems that many of these same articles are buried away, not as easily accessible as when they were first submitted.
By BlogaDollar.com, August 3, 2007 @ 7:31 am
Everytime I come on your blog, I find
great information. I really wanted to say that today ’cause I never have
the time to comment. So I stopped by and left you a praise comment fast.
Keep up the good work.
All you do here always serve me in a way or another in my blogging
activity. If you want to know, I currently make $1,500 to $3,000 every
month since september 2006, and I operate a blog called blogadollar dot
com wich is about "make a lot of
real money online" and aims to be a REAL-LIFE case study, where I
reveal all day after day. If you want to see it, go to blogadollar dot com.
By Kersson, August 5, 2007 @ 1:43 am
It has been a very informative post. Becoming popular is not an easy task. I think, article directories are the best way to become popular mostly when you are a beginner.
By Matt, August 5, 2007 @ 5:03 pm
Article directories have their place and as you indicated, Kersson, you can get a decent amount of attention when utilizing them.
I will post a more comprehensive article on August 7th about this subject, so please check it out.
By Daniel Vukadinovic, August 6, 2007 @ 11:23 am
I suppose blog posts can’t be counted as articles, right?
By Matt Keegan, August 6, 2007 @ 11:52 am
Daniel, blog posts are treated as articles. Generally, they need to be of a certain length — usually 250 words or more to be accepted by most directories (400 or 450 words with some others) and long enough to escape Google’s supplemental penalty.
A blog article that is 500 words or longer is best; if it isn’t of an advertising nature then it should be acceptable to the article directories.