I am writing a handful of articles at the moment to try and use to increase my website traffic. The obvious way is to stick them on sites like ezinearticles, articlebase, etc and try to get some traffic and backlinks that way, but my question is: Since they are unique, original articles (written by me from scratch, not rewritten or copied) would I get more benefit for my website if I used them as content rather than hawk them round the article directories? Opinions???
In the long term it's better to build your own site with good content. If you need some instant traffic and better SERP in no time then go for the article directory. It's a trade-off, you have to decide for yourself. Personally I like the build and develop my own site
Peejaydee...Your concern is absolutely right. To retain the credibility to your hard work, use it as content on your web pages. One more idea is...post your unique articles on your blog (if your site has the one (or) create a blog).
If I could offer my advice, I'd say write the best you can for your own website. Then, hire someone else who can make a well enough article to pass directory standards, and that's it. After all, you only want the links- not necessarily the traffic that would come from article submission (which is usually low). Check the BST forum for some writers- most can be had at $6-$12 each article for average or sub-par work.
Thanks folks, that's kind of what I'm thinking. I've seen very little traffic from article directories but other publishers picking up the articles has provided a bit of regular traffic, albeit not huge. Most of my quality traffic comes from Google and Wikipedia. I think I'll probably put them on my site rather than the directories as my niche is not a massive search earner and so one way to put my overall site traffic up is to increase the number of quality pages that the get indexed. I think I don't really want to do this as my articles need to always be of a decent standard given the subject matter otherwise I risk undermining the whole ethos of the site.
No, no. You don't use these articles for your website. You use them to submit articles to directories. It isn't like anyone really reads them anyways, so they are only for links. It's perfectly fine to do.
I understand what you mean, but in my opinion, the articles you put out there in the directories are adverts for your site and therefore need to be every bit as good as the ones on the site. If the article is sub-standard the reader will look for a better quality article as an indication of the quality of the site it's linked to. When I find a poorly written article, I have no intention of following the link to see the same nonsensical writings on the target website. It's the traffic I'm after, not just the backlink count. Take a look at A Badly Written Article is Anything but a Good Advert. It's an article I wrote on just this subject quite some time ago.
If you have really quality stuff that you wrote yourself, best use it for your own site. If you can throw something together quickly, or can get someone to write cheap articles for you, those are the best to submit for article submission.
I write a good article, use a content spinner and take 10 or so versions of the article to put on blog, wordpress, squid, hub, weebly, and the top article directories and one version on my site. Serves both purposes, quality content, and link building
Save the quality articles for your own site. Submit some quickly written articles to article directories, but don't spend huge amounts of time on those articles.
In my opinion, no it doesn't. I've a had a play with content spinners and they seem universally bad. I wouldn't use the output for any site page and I'm sure a lot of the better quality article directories would not accept a spun article, given that they can be spotted so easily. If you look back up the thread, one of my earlier posts tries to make the argument that the directory article needs to be just as good as the original article, since it's an advert for your site, like it or not. A poorly written, or poor quality article/advert will have an adverse effect on your site/business.
Well may be this is what you need, though I haven't tested the service of RB but looks alright to me.