Understanding Article Marketing for Link Building

Hi LX10,

Answer 1 : Submit original to Ezinearticles (Top article directory). Spin that article and then submit to other article directories like :-

articlebase
goarticles
articledashboard
buzzle
and many more

Answer 2 & 3 : It's not about working or not. What you really want is targeted visitors for your site.

Cheers

Yup.

It's entirely. That's for sure.

The thing is, those other ones are filtered into something called the "supplemental index", and the backlinks from that index count happen to contribute just the same as the backlinks from the main one.

A very widespread and equally mistaken belief.

It's very worthwhile to test for yourself rather than taking other people's word for these things.

I might not be Alexa, but I'll bet my answer is a close match to hers.

1. Submit the same article to multiple directories which have the highest potential of getting your article syndicated to other websites and blogs. The article MUST be on your own blog first.

2. If you are simply seeking backlinks, create another article to submit to the article directory "second-tier" group. (I tend to avoid this step most of the time and stick with step 1.)

Barry

Hi Terry,

You can indeed do this.

You'll gain backlinks. Not great backlinks, but backlinks.

It will barely get you any more views, or traffic, at all, in my experience.

The few people who find the additional copies typically won't find them through a search engine (though I don't say that's 100% impossible) but only by searching within the directories concerned, and such people tend not to be customers (they're more likely to be researchers and competitors, and there won't be many of them outside EZA anyway, in my opinion).

It can't harm anything by being "duplicate content" because it isn't "duplicate content" as Google understand the term (which is what matters): it's "syndicated content".

It won't help much in the sense of "direct traffic", but can help indirectly in that the backlinks count (for what they count for, which is something but not huge) and to that extent it can elevate your own site in the SERP's. But the benefit from doing it is primarily a backlink benefit, not a "direct traffic" benefit. And the backlinks have the same value whether the additionally syndicated copies are in Google's main index or its supplemental index.

The extra targeted traffic and high-PR backlinks I get come from other webmasters syndicating my articles from directories (almost always from EZA, in my case - I check).

I have articles which I've put myself only on my site and in EZA which have ended up with 50 - 60 additional copies on other people's sites (though the "average" is much lower than that!). Those bring me in a lot of money from gradually increasing targeted traffic, opt-ins and customers for my own sites. And backlinks, too - sometimes pretty decent ones, because they're contextually relevant.

This, rather than the article directory copies themselves, is what makes all the difference to me, and what helps my own sites dominate the SERP's, and is how I'm building a real business through article marketing.

Well, a big subject (and a surprisingly contentious one, sometimes). Very briefly ...

Option 1 above:
Advantages: speed, simplicity, some backlinking benefit;
Disadvantages: very little additional traffic.

Option 2 above:
Advantages (over Option 1): for me, none. For some people, apparently, additional traffic (but I question the extent of spinning and care required to achieve this). But clearly no additional backlinking benefit because the backlinks from spun content are absolutely no different from those from syndicated content;
Disadvantages: very time-consuming indeed to do it properly (and I'm putting it mildly) - by "properly" I mean in a way which produces a real traffic benefit. To me, that's time I could be using in ways that produce future income (like writing new articles), unproductive activity of no value to the internet or anyone else at all, can be bad for one's reputation (many people, not altogether unreasonably, regard it as a form of "spamming the internet").

It interests - and sometimes amuses - me that in discussions of this subject, mostly in this forum, with spinning enthusiasts, the argument which they can be relied on to adduce, 90% of the time, isn't actually a traffic-based argument at all - which would, of course, be far more difficult to refute. Ironically enough it's a backlink-based argument! If you ask the average "spinner" why they're doing it, the answer they characteristically give (as you can see here, in many discussions of the subject) is "backlinks". This just doesn't stand up to examination for a moment.

I can get all those identical backlinks (if I wanted them and didn't prefer to get better ones instead) without spinning at all.

We had a related thread a couple of days ago, and I can't add much more to what I said in it - and here it is.