The ONLY article site that matters

You beat me to it.

The most important site for submission of your articles is your own site - and without fully understanding this point, (explained in detail in this thread, among many others), it almost certainly isn't going to make too much difference where else you post them.

I think everyone here who's achieved any real success with article marketing recently understands this fully.

It's just one of those situations you sometimes get in forums where someone starts off a thread with a ridiculous and clearly totally inaccurate statement. These things happen ... it can't be helped: there's no "quality control" of forum information, you know?

Fortunately there are always experienced, successful article marketers like AnniePot to jump in and correct the misinformation.

The only sites that really matter to me at all are the ones most frequently visited by potential syndicators and my targeted, hungry niche prospects.

I always post on my own websites first of course, then usually EZA, but mostly on context-relevant websites, authoritative blogs, niche ezine publishers, magazines, professional journals, newspapers, etc.

Articles that are read by real live targeted eyeballs can directly drive massive convertable traffic to your conversion/sales funnel.

It would be much funnier if they did, I think. A lot of the people syndicating content from EZA aren't really internet marketers in the same sense as we are, so they perhaps wouldn't be in the Warrior Forum in the first place. Like so many article marketers here who comment so often, I do get quite a bit of syndication of my work from EZA to relevant sites in the niche, but I don't really expect my direct competitors to be syndicating my articles, you know?

Tongue-in-cheek comment, slightly, but I've often noticed, when people complain that they can't get their articles syndicated from directories, if they let you see them, you find that they tend to be "sales articles" which are "written for clicks" with a "prominent call to action in the resource-box" and so on. Not so many people are going to syndicate those, obviously. (Well, I say "obviously" but to some it isn't obvious at all.) You don't so often get articles syndicated without writing them for syndication.

It depends why you're doing it, doesn't it?!

If you're looking for traffic and backlinks, then you're absolutely right, of course: guest blogging on relevant sites is incomparably better than submitting to directories.

But if you're looking to post your work where it's available for syndication to multiple sites/ezines in the niche, then for that obviously an article directory is far better. And that is, after all, what article directories are there for, and why they came into being, so that webmasters and ezine/newsletter compilers can use them as a depository of content available for syndication.

It's "horses for courses": there's not much point in using an article directory if what you're looking for is backlinks and traffic, because their backlinks are non-context-relevant, PR-0 backlinks, and the traffic you want going to your own site anyway, not to a directory where you'll lose most of it.

Because, as so patiently explained to you over the last year or two by so many people in so many other threads, Kev, you can do both, and get some additional benefits that way.

You can establish your own site as an authority by always publishing your articles there first, and gaining for your own site the cumulative, long-term SEO benefits of having done so, and then get additional, highly targeted traffic, opt-ins and sales at your own site by having copies of those articles subsequently syndicated to other relevant sites in the niche.

And exactly as so many experienced, professional article marketers here are doing, we build up our businesses with something additional to concentrating only on our own sites - and that's the reason for posting on other sites as a later addition.

No cost, no detriment to your own site, just plenty of extra income from the work already done.

And sometimes - because that way one's articles tend to be syndicated to relevant sites - those additional relevant backlinks (unlike article directory backlinks in themselves) can also really help to establish your own site as an authority site, which is quite a nice bonus.

There are many ways ... but for me it's not so much about "better ways" because one can do all of them, anyway. (All the ones that are worth doing, that is: I'm not talking about mass submission to dozens or hundreds of different article directories, obviously - there's precious little benefit in that because the backlinks are pretty useless).

Paul describes some of those "other ways" here.

Once I have a niche site up and running, like you (I think) I often have kind of fixed information on the landing page that I don't really want to disturb/change, and I'll just put my additional articles (as I go along and write more) on other pages of my site, to accumulate all those initial indexation benefits. I'm not "hiding" them, and I'm not showing them only to Google and not to visitors, but they're not necessarily the first thing I want my traffic to see when they land on my site. If someone stays there long enough to realise that somewhere among those article pages is the original copy of the article they just read on a site they browsed or check regularly, or in someone's ezine which they received by email, then they've stayed there long enough to be a very welcome visitor and I'll have a good chance of opting them in and/or selling them something.

I've once or twice commented in similar discussions that although I do submit my articles to EZA, it's the last place to which I syndicate them (you can see the other things I do before that, toward the end of this post). I hope it's not the last place to which they're syndicated, of course (I'm submitting to EZA only to make them available for others to re-publish further - I'd hate my potential-customer-traffic to go to EZA for obvious reasons), but it's the last place to which I syndicate them myself.

I think that comment arose originally as a facetious reply: someone said something like "EZA is the last place I'd want my articles to be published" and I said "Same here: it's the last place I publish mine, too".

I do actually sometimes submit them to GoArticles and/or ArticlesBase as well, to be honest, though I get very little (if anything) back from it. But I keep reading here that some Warriors do get articles syndicated from GoArticles and/or ArticlesBase, so I suppose you never know ... and it only takes a minute to do. (I always change a comma or semi-colon or something in each copy, just so that I can tell where they've been syndicated from when I find myself getting traffic from new copies of them. It's just my "punctuation trick").

Ah ... not quite ...

I don't make them hidden pages. I certainly don't make them prominent pages, either, but I don't make them hidden. Because ... most of the SEO textbooks I've read have told me that one thing search engines really don't like, that can make them label you as "up to no good", is if they think you're trying to show a search engine one thing and a visitor another. So, what I take from that is that if you want the cumulative SEO benefits from all the initial indexation, your visitors have to be able to find them as well as Google's automated little inspectors.

I know that a lot people get a bit paranoid about "Google penalties" for this, that and the other ... but I do believe that search engines may deprive you of some of your SEO benefits if they really think you're trying to fool them by showing search engines and visitors "different stuff". And I do believe that the people trying all this nonsense like "hidden links" ("printed" in the same color as the page background so that a search engine sees them and a visitor probably not), and pages just added in but not linked to from any other pages may just be shooting themselves in the elegantly high-heeled foot.

So, without wanting my visitors particularly to navigate to those pages at the expense of other pages, I do actually enable them to, if they want to. (And if people really do want to read through my extra articles, they're almost certainly going to become customers anyway. Is how I look at it).

I do this; yes. I can't see any downside there.

I think you both missed the point. I get 50,000+ targeted visitors in one day, from each syndicated article. :rolleyes: