sharparticles.com

Briefly, in simple terms, article directory marketing is more or less limited to "attempts to use article directories for their own traffic and their own backlinks".

I know it may sound a bit strange, but there are people (actually many of them) who imagine that "doing article marketing" means "submitting articles to article directories in an attempt to benefit from traffic finding the articles in the directories themselves and from backlinks provided in the resource boxes in the articles published in the directories themselves".

It's a pretty useless way to try to earn anything, and a very useless way to try to build a business, for all the obvious reasons.

First, when potential customers find one of your articles by putting one of its keywords into a search engine, you obviously want them to find an article on your own site, not one in an article directory - but there are people who haven't quite worked out that "I have a 25% click-through rate at XYZ article directory" is just another way of saying "I lose 75% of my traffic when it goes to XYZ directory", and - albeit pretty unaccountably - they imagine they're actually gaining something from that.

Secondly, all article directory backlinks are non-context-relevant, PR-0 (or even "PR-not-available") backlinks; 100,000 of those backlinks and $3.50 will get you a cappuccino at Starbuck's. And yet there are discussions going on, in this very forum (I saw a post only last night which illustrated the point!) about how to get an automated software-submitter to post your article to 2,000 directories rather than to 500, as if that would be a really good thing to do :rolleyes: ). Inexperienced people reading this stuff (which is typically posted by those with financial interests of their own in "spinning" and/or in "auto-submission" software, which can sometimes be dragged out of them by asking the right questions persistently enough) don't understand why such quantitative approaches typically won't help them much, because the backlinks they do get out of it (never as many as they imagine) won't be relevant ones and will be worth almost nothing: one backlink from a relevant authority site in their niche (often easily found through article syndication) is typically worth more than 100,000 of those backlinks, but people either don't understand or choose not to believe that. Unfortunately, there's a whole industry of people with vested financial interests in their not discovering it, and the way they sometimes try to achieve that is by propagating and perpetuating appalling misinformation and myths about "duplicate content". Historically, of course, pandering to and reinforcing people's fears has always been an easy and "viral" form of propaganda, and - whether honest or not - it tends to be effective.

Article directory marketing was been pretty much dead since I've been online (granted, that's not very long compared with many members here), and Google's latest algorithm change (the so-called "Panda update") was perhaps the last nail in its coffin-lid, by devaluing the article directories almost into oblivion (as even some of their owners have been commenting over the last few months).

Article marketing, on the other hand, described here by Paul, involves getting high-quality articles in front of highly targeted traffic (typically without even doing the targeting onself). It can (but doesn't have to) include using article directories as a small part, but that's using them as directories, for the purpose for which they exist, i.e. as depositories of syndicable content.

For anyone else, "looking in" ... this thread explains a lot of stuff about "spinning" and why most professional article marketers think it's a waste of time, and based on fallacies and mistaken beliefs about "duplicate content".

This one explains why it's seriously bad news to create backlinks to article directories.

This one explains a bit more about article directories and writing for syndication.

This one is about "unique content" and a bit about link-juice, I think.

This one is about writing for syndication.

And in this excellent little article an expert writer/marketer explains "duplicate content" to perfection.