List of Article Directories

Great list with PR, thanks for sharing with us.

Certainly possible, if the articles you submit to directories are written with a view to syndication.

My own list is EZA is first position, and GoArticles and ArticleBase joint second, a very long way behind it.

Personally, I've had a lot of syndication of my articles from EZA, and a little bit from GoArticles and ArticlesBase, too.

I know that some others here have done a bit better than I've done from GoArticles and ArticlesBase and perhaps a bit worse from EZA.

I suspect some are better for some niches than others.

It depends what you mean by "potential readers".

Broadly speaking, two different groups of people read EZA articles.

(i) Potential customers: these are people who find your article by putting one of its keywords into a search engine and clicking on the SERP's. This is pretty difficult, though (and especially nowadays!) because they don't rank well - and one doesn't want potential customers finding one's articles that way, anyway - at least, I certainly don't;

(ii) People looking not in Google but inside the directory (e.g. using EZA's internal search): these are researchers, webmasters, ezine/newsletter-compilers, and so on, but they're not potential customers.

How one uses an article directory depends on which group one's writing for, because what each will respond to is pretty much mutually exclusive.

In the "writing for clicks" model (this is "article directory marketing", which I used to use but will now no longer touch), one is writing for the first group - potential customers. This approach is characterised by producing a large quantity of shorter articles, typically more "salesy" in tone, with a "call to action" in the resource box (all the things that will ensure nobody much syndicates it). It's what Warriors here widely refer to as a "rinse and repeat" model, i.e. you have to keep on and on producing it over and over and over again because it doesn't really produce residual income. In my opinion, it isn't really building an asset-based income, either - it's more like creating a job for yourself. I do see that one could effectively outsource and automate quite a lot of it and try to build it up into a steady, secure income, but I strongly suspect that doing so raises, for many people, several new difficulties in addition, and that the overall success-rate of this model is pretty small.

In the "writing for syndication" model (this is "article marketing", not just "article directory marketing"), one is writing for the second group, potential syndicators, and in contrast to the paragraph above, creating one's articles more in line with the sort of outline described in the link above. It's a radically different and (for those of us here who've tried it) a far more profitable, stable and secure approach characterised by building a real, asset-based business based on continually increasing residual income from work already done.

In a sense, it all boils down to one essentially simple, straightforward Big Key Question: when a potential customer finds your article by putting one of its keywords into a search engine, what do you want him to find: an article directory copy or the copy on your own site?

Those interested in making a living this way need to stop obsessing about "the page rank of directories" (it's close-to-useless information: the "PR" relates only to their home pages, anyway, which isn't where your articles are published, of course).

So, in short, you can get some traffic from article directories, but it would be much better to get that traffic directly to your own site anyway: there'll be a lot more of it, that way.