I have seen a lot of questions on this topic so here it is. Please note that this is what I do, but there are numerous opinions and you may find it more beneficial to take other methods. As noted, this is my personal opinion and it works for me. #1: Research Ideally, you need to do a little bit of research before you get started. It's not a must, but I think you will find it useful. Let’s just use a term that came to mind as I was thinking about toys I used to have when I was younger. "swiss army knife". I threw that into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I look at the results carefully. What I quickly see is that there are numerous people searching for various different types of models of this knife. Honestly though, who would have thought that there would be anything but the classic bulky red swiss army knife? Anyway, instead of trying to directly compete and throw up an article on "swiss army knife", I would recommend hitting up some of the lesser searched keywords that may give you traffic and you can easily rank for. For example, "swiss army knife" has 1.49 million competitors. "swiss army knife champ" only has 90,000 and as I look through the search results very few are articles. This is a good sign it might be a good candidate! #2: Be Realistic Although I am thinking of a tangible product you may not be marketing something like this. So what you have to do is a take a step back and think like a searcher for a minute. What would people want to know about a "swiss army knife champ"? Probably a review for my product, but it doesn't have to be a review and may not even be a good one. They may want to know simple details about it, so maybe just an article with the title of "Swiss Army Knife Champ" might be sufficient. #3: Write Your Article Don't skip out on the content! If you want people to read your article, make it informative. Do your research if you have to and don't limit yourself on word count. If you need 600 words to be informative, it will be well worth it even though many article directories only require 350 (definitely stay away from producing an article less than this though). Make sure your keyword stays in your article title! #4: Submit Your Article to EzineArticles.com To be honest, I've tried numerous other article directories and I just don't see the value in them much. ezinearticles ranks far better most of the time and has legitimate readers that reads articles there. I think this speaks a lot of them and what value you get from their service. After you submit 10 articles you can get all articles accepted within about 48 hours. You'll have to be patient until then though! #5: Two Week after Acceptance at Ezinearticles By this time, you should know what kind of traffic you'll be expecting. How is your article ranking in the search engines? If it is up towards the top, I would recommend leaving it because people searching for that term will have a good chance of finding your site. It may just not get that many searches each month. If you aren't ranking well then this is when you should take that article that really isn't doing anything for you and submit it to other article directories. Here is a quick list, but you don't have to limit yourself to these: http://www.goarticles.com/ http://www.articlesbase.com/ http://www.webpronews.com/ http://www.articledashboard.com/ http://www.searchwarp.com/ http://www.pubs.acs.org/hotartcl http://www.isnare.com/ http://www.buzzle.com/ What you may find is that these other article directories rank better than your original article, but this is quite uncommon. Since Google doesn't like duplicate content, it will normally drop all of your articles lower in the rankings than you previously had. This is okay though since now you are merely focused on getting backlinks from those articles. Hopefully you'll be boosting your ranking for your own website on this keyword. Still, the end result is the same with people having an easier time finding your website. A SIDE NOTE: Do this duplicate submission at the maximum only 2-3 times. You won't see much benefit from a link juice standpoint past that from my experience. This is where the debate occurs because others say that it is worthwhile, but i've never noticed a different in my SERP's too much after more than a few times. I just think your time is better spent elsewhere after this point. Good luck!
Being a premium publisher is well worth the money if you do it correctly. It's a little pricey unless you submit a lot of a articles but if you are submitting a lot, you'll be glad you spent the extra cash.
Yeah, I didn't pay to be premium, but I am platinum and am pretty satisfied with it. I hear that ezinearticles has been backed up a ton here lately. When I initially started submitting articles I was getting my articles approved within about a week. That's a lengthy time, but I guess it just depends on if you think investing money there is worth it.
I was platinum for a few months and just thought I'd try the premium... if you're submitting a lot (I submit no less than 5 a day), it's really a huge benefit. Excellent post, Gator, it should help a lot of people.
Even if you don't go premium, you're really not that bad off until you experiment in a new niche. If you've found your area of interest and post articles on a daily basis, then after the initial week, you're having articles approved and published everyday. I'ts kind of like your autoresponder. You space out your messages, but as you gain subscribers daily, someone is always getting messages from somewhere in the cycle.
steve, that's a great point and exactly how I do it too! I do article marketing, but probably not to the degree that a lot of people do it. I submit about 1-2 per day. Since i'm getting approved in about 48 hours, it doesn't bother me to much since I"m getting articles approved pretty well on a daily basis. I'm certainly not discouraging an account at ezinearticles. I am glad someone is supporting them financially! For me, I never give myself a huge budget so I try to invest my money in other areas. Plus, i'm not totally dependent on article marketing like some are... that might make a huge difference as well.
Great article for us newbies. Man, I can't wait until I have some time to try my hand at this. Basically just researching the subject now.
Gator, excellent information here. I see you have mentioned ezinearticles as a premier site for article submission. What is your opinion about sites like hubpages and squidoo lens?
Don't forget to make it readable and interesting that's really what makes it work I have one article that has made me allot of sales and traffic so it pays to promote the good ones
Nice guide, i've had about 5 articles accepted on ezine. They're quite strict about what they will accept.
Great guide, thanks. I have a question, what actions you perform to cope with dublicate content? How many directories do you submit an article to?
Very good post. Most authors fail to see the big picture and feel that submitting just about any articles will accomplish what they need. Good post!
I'm glad you guys like it! hubpages and squidoo are great. I do create link wheels around my sites and both of those sites I do use as well. However, I didn't include them in this topic because they really aren't article directories (like ezinearticles, goarticles, etc). They are closer to blogs. I do produce unique content for each one though so there is some writing involved there too. I just consider those to be a different category than article marketing. Look up information on a link wheel, that's how I use squidoo and hubpages. As noted in my article, I will only risk duplicate content to gain backlinks. So usually on 2-3 articles I have at ezinearticles that aren't performing well (either no traffic coming from them and/or not ranking well in Google) i'll go ahead and add those to other directories. I take the risk of getting hit with duplicate content just for the sake of adding backlinks and hopefully bumping my site up a little bit in the SERPs. Keep in mind, though, I only do this with 2-3 of the poor performing ones. Past that, I don't see a use in doing it. ezinearticles in my experience has always outranked other article directories. So submitting a site there and then rewriting it and submittingi t elsewhere won't increase your traffic by much, if any, in my experience.