Starting Article Directory

I think it is like with any other website. At the beginning it would be hard to get people to sign up, nobody wants to be the fist one to say or write something.

When we started our article directory about six months ago all the submissions came from article submission services. Now we have done little bit of marketing and authors are slowly starting to sign up. Some of the authors who where submitting articles trough submission services have now signed in directly and edited their profiles and submit directly now.

Once you get your site out there and people are getting to know about it and will see the benefits of submitting their articles to your site then it should gradually start taking off.

Just make sure that if you might have future plans to scale up the domain (other than just an article directory), that you have an out!

Hard or not, if you add incentives and use the giant database of Warriors you have here, I'm sure you could structure some sort of WSO and offer some sort of promotions for your contributors. While people are always looking for a great place to get backlinks and traffic, you should give them a reason to pick your directory over Ezine. Maybe front page features? Having high PR helps. Some sort of integration with some social networks?

Good luck, this would be an awesome project for an internet marketer!

-Amy

Hey Marhelper,

I've started a couple different article directories and had no problems getting them off the ground - and that;s without the help of article submission services. You don't need them to fill your directory with junk articles by the mass-load. And yes, that happens.

And no, I don't have anything against submission services per say, just when they submit quicker then my company can moderate.

Personally, I think you have more control over your own directory when you start off fresh and slow. You can control better by moderating those articles. When they get submitted in mass bulk, that's hard to do unless you have a large staff. The content and what type of directory usually ends up dictating how that directory will do in the long run. You can thank the PLR sellers and Bum marketing for a lot of the bulk submissions.

I did very simple things to market the directories I've owned. I wrote a few articles (not many actually - mabe 10-15) and submitted them to the major directories like EZA, goarticles, etc ... I put the directories in my sig files with a small advert in about 3 active forums, was helpful to people in these forums (which does get people to check out your links in the sigs), and I bought two ad spots on one other directory that had good PR and was active in the SEs. These ads were only up for 2 months.

Believe it or not, my very first directory had over 7000 articles in it within the first 6 months, and I was a bit picky or selective as to what articles were going to be accepted. Trust me on this one - if you want a very good successful article directory that just doesn't become a typical "article depository" or "article farm", you will want to be selective too. You will get better quality articles submitted to your directory eventually, but most of all you will get more people that come by and use your articles on their sites and blogs. When this happens, your links will spread around more and build up.


Hope this helps, and wish you luck with this adventure ...