Hi All, I have over the last 3 months been testing various lists and strategies regarding article submissions. It has done pretty well for us overall and has raised our adsense income $10-$30 a day on average over the last 3 months. I have submitted around 80-90 articles total promoting around 10 different sites - most of them were submitted to around 200-250 article directories. For my submissions I tried the following ways: Article Distributor http://www.after5webdesign.com/software.html - a free program - I just visited the site and see that this software has been temporarily pulled off his site. One of our sites is a new health site, which we started at the same time as my tests began, this site is now a PR5 with around 3000 inbound links(according to MSN). a few of these links are from some of our other sites but by far the most links are from either article submission sites or from blogs / sites that used our submitted articles. This site now has 50 - 100 visitors a day, with most of them are coming in from Google. That said when we start a new site we usually start it up with around 100 fresh unique articles, and expand up to 300-500 articles within 6-8 months, this strategy also seems to keep the engines very happy munching on content. I will continue my tests with our sites over the next months and see if I can raise it even further, it is really a very cheap and easy way to gain permanent backlinks from both submission sites and publishers. Let us hear about your experiments with link building through article submissions too Best regards, Kim
Thanks for the update! Can I ask: were the 80-90 articles the same ones you had on your site or separate unique content?
interesting. would you mind uploading the old version of article distributor somewhere so we could try it out (assuming this wouldnt be a problem as its free)?
I used all new articles in my experiment. I would personally advise against having the same articles on your own site, or at least if you do, let the articles stay on your site for at least a month before using them for submissions to make sure all search engines has tagged your site as the first one with this article. Kim
Sorry, I did not keep the installation file, Tim(the author of the software) has a forum on his site, I saw the question asked over there as well, but so far no solution. Article distributor is a very handy little program, and best thing is that is is free. It has it's flaws, and the autosignup feature that automatically sign you up on the now 300+ sites does not really work well. Also the list of directories in the program is not always up to date, the program uses an XML file to update the list frequently, but this is still an issue. Also this software only works with directories running Article Dashboard for now, so you should definately submit to a few of the big players in article submission besides the directories in this software. I hope you guys find a download link for it, please post if you do All in all great for the price, it saves me several hours per submission. Kim
Thanks, I would still recommend using fresh articles, but if you are on a tight budget time or money-wise then this is a good little tip. Kim
The author of Article Distributor is Tim Myth who is a member of DP as well : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=13249
I'm quite flattered someone found my tool useful. I'm new to this whole concept of having something good enough that someone else talks about it. Usually I have to toot my own horn. Thanks. I can't say a whole lot yet due to the sales contract, but I no longer own Article Distributor. I have sold the source code. I will be working with the purchaser as a technical advisor for an indefinate amount of time, but at this point I can't say much more (mostly because I do not know exactly what they have planned). I will do my best to continue maintaining the submission list for the current and previous versions of Article Distributor, but I am no longer allowed to distribute it. Anyhow, now that that bit of ground breaking news is out of the way (I need to go announce this on my own forum next)... It is not completely neccessary to use fresh articles for distributing to article directories. If you publish the articles on your own site first and make sure they at least get indexed (if not assigned PR), you can then distribute them to article directories and *probably* still be the first result to show up when people search for phrases from your article. This is all tied in to the search engine duplicate content filters (not to be confused with duplicate content penalties). Most SE's will ascribe a higher level of importance to the first or original source of an article, and then start applying factors like pagerank to determine the best source for that article. Thus, even if you publish the article on your site first, if another site with a much higher PR picks up that article, they will be the site that appears in search results instead of you. However, if both you and the republishing site have the same PR, your's will appear in teh results instead of the republisher.
Tim, I hope the tool remains at a decent price if the new owners wants to start charging for it, I just can not see myself spending $400 on Article Announcer without even trying it first... or buy Article Submitter Pro which kept crashing on me when I played around with their trial version. I have used your tool for several submissions and for the most part it worked very well. The autosignup never really worked for me, but surfing to the signup page and seeing the program fill and submit automatically is not too bad Thank you for the explanation on what happened, I was wondering a bit Kim
Yeah, the auto-sign up needed help. There were a few other bugs that I had worked out too just before it was sold. I did run into a huge time crunch originally. It seemed like I was spending too much time trying to make version 2 work while supporting version 1.x. I also have four kids, and had birthdays coming up, needed to do pre-wedding-season checks on my wife's DJ equipment. Install 110 new PCs at my real job. Accept a team of the year award for my team of technicians at work. And begin preparing a legal defense because my wife's ex-husband is suing to change custody again. That last part has been the most stressful because this will be our 3rd time in court with the bastard, officially making it an annual event. He has now quit his job, gotten married a fifth time, purchased a house 180 miles away, and told our two oldest boys (ages 12 and 9, which are his) that he will buy them all kinds of presents and never make them do chores if they claim that their mom beats them. Last time, he filed a false claim with social services himself, but they found no evidence of abuse and he admitted that he lied about the facts. They then informed him that he would go to jail if he made another false report, so now he's trying to get the kids to make false claims. Obviously, we don't beat them. Ok, this post is getting way off track, but if anyone knows any good (but affordable) lawyers in North Dakota, have them contact me. So, now that you know the story of my life... Anyhow, my software page (the page pointed to by the link at the bottom of your articles) reports 768 links in Google. I put the page up the first week of December, so that's 768 links in 5 months which is kind of disappointing considering the number of articles submitted with the software. Googling the exact phrase "submitted with article distributor" produces about 100k results, which disproves any duplicate content penalties, but clearly shows the effects of the duplicate content filter. It also shows the effects of traffic generation by articles to some extent because my alexa ranking is around 50k. Obvioulsy this is not from any of the other features on my site, and if you find yourself asking "What other features?", I'll reply "Exactly!". Obviously some of the people saw and clicked the article distributor link at the botom of your articles and came to my site to get the software. Anyhow, if you examine the back links for the software page, you can see the power of article distribution.