Article Marketing (My personal experience against the attrition rate)

If you don't know by now article marketing is effective. The internet is essentially information whether via article, forum discussions or some sort of blog, and of course hybridization of social media.

This threads' purpose is to bring to light the fly by night article directories that are listed in the thousands appearing on directory critic and the myriad of other directories.

What were my results with article marketing? Amazing! I have signed up to over 1800 article websites over the years and have written dozens of articles. They resulted in mass circulation as well as increase in SERPS and brand awareness.

The problem is the rate of attrition (the rate at which these new and old article websites get redirected, bugged, or parked). I'm going through my list and when I say literally 80% of the sites that I used a year or two ago no longer exist. This means only 20% of my efforts mean anything today. (hard to swallow) Does this mean we shouldn't use these new websites until they are proven? (perhaps) But it's difficult to foretell the future. In the meantime it is best to submit to the old, established article directories and bookmark those posts vs submitting to all these fly by night article directories (or do both if you have the time).

SERPS for one of my sites topped out at 2k uniques a day (only marketed via articles to test their effectiveness). Today, the same site receives 400 a day, due to the heavy loss in backlinks from the parked/redirected/bugged article websites.

I can see the natural progression/ transition from article marketing to hub pages as they are less likely to get parked/bugged/redirected as they are owned by a larger more successful company such as squidoo, or wordpress, or blogger, etc.

For now I think I'll be focusing on the top 5 article directories, because in the not-to-distant-past I submitted to hundreds/thousands, but the numbers clearly show at least 80% of the article websites launched in the past year will fail. Summary: Ezine or (insert old authority article directory) plus social bookmarking + hubpages is looking like the way to go....or do we accept the attrition rate and continue to submit to the new sites?

 

I had a lot of bad experiences with article directories, too. I do article marketing in Spanish for my clients. With the time I could develop a list of reliable Spanish article directories, after lots of work.

 

As with all websites, many comes and go, link building and article marketing must be done all the time, would be foolish to believe that once you get a backlink or article live it will live forever.

 

I agree, this is a work to be done constantly.

 

That's why the top article directories are still so popular, even though some of them become nofollow.
Personally I use adsense revenue sharing sites more than article directories now. I just hope that those sites stay longer.

 

I agree what you say.

 

You are right, the lifetime of the directories is a problem, that´s why you have to choose them well.

 

GameFriends.com, thanks for observations. They quite much with mine's also. Similarly, I cut my submission list to 4-5 best services.

 

Could you please let us know to which directories you are referring when you are saying "top 5 article directories"? Ezine is no1 of course but which others would you recommend?

 

can you share with us the directories that you are using?

 

It's more than 5, but what you can do is go here: http://www.directorycritic.com/article-directory-list.html?sort=date_added and try to register to the oldest ones (shows they aren't going anywhere most likely)

If the site has been around since 06,07, and 08 chances are it's in it for the longhaul.