How Do I Prepare My Articles on Blog For Syndication

Publishers need content.

Ezine compilers need content.

Webmasters need content.

That need (for publishable content) is why article directories exist. That's what article directories are: they're depositories of freely available syndicable content for publishers to take (within the directories' terms of service, of course - which will always include "taking and publishing your link(s)/resource-box with the article").

It doesn't make any difference to those publishers whether it's been previously published on your own blog. They don't know that, and they don't care, and they don't check, because it doesn't interest them either way. It matters to you, though, that they're published there first.

You're confusing two different things.

There's no (real/serious/measurable) SEO benefit from the article directory copy. There is (and sometimes hugely so) from the sites to which it's syndicated from the article directory. Because those are relevant sites (otherwise they wouldn't want it). And that means their backlinks carry a lot of link-juice for your site. Quality and relevance are what determine link-juice.

But the SEO benefits (though they can be great) aren't the primary objective.

You're not putting articles into an article directory because you want/need them to be in the directory for its own backlink/traffic. You're putting them there as a stepping-stone to other places where you do want them to be published. You're announcing their availability to be re-published by putting them there, because that's what an article directory is - it's a directory of content for people to re-publish. That's why it exists.

The primary objective is to get your articles in front of targeted traffic (potential customers). And the publishers who take it have the targeted traffic. They get content for their website/ezine, and you get traffic. That's the deal.

Two different sorts of people read articles published at EZA.

The first group is people who use it as a directory, i.e. they go there specifically to look up articles on thyrotoxicosis because they have either a website or an ezine on thyroid disease and they want content for it (which is why article directories exist).

These are the people for whom we're submitting our articles to EZA.

They can re-publish our article, with our backlink(s) on their website or in their ezine. They get content without paying for it, and we get some targeted traffic and (if they have a website) a really valuable backlink on their site (it's really valuable because their site is relevant to ours: they have words like "thyroid hormone", "Graves Disease" and "Hashimoto's Thyroiditis" on their site, and we have all those words on ours, too, and Google loves that and it makes our site look really good to Google, as far as that backlink's concerned, so that gives the backlink real value to us, which the article directory backlink certainly didn't have).

These people are not themselves customers.

The second group is people who read our article in EZA because they originally put the word "thyrotoxicosis" into Google (as they do when the doctor's just told them they have an overactive thyroid and may end up having surgery for it), and up popped our EZA article in the SERP's.

This is bad news for us: it means we screwed up. What we wanted to happen was that the copy of that article on our own website would pop up, not the EZA copy.

The reason for that is that we have (let's say) a 25% click-through-rate from EZA. In simple English, that means that we lose three out of every four of those people. Only one in four of them ever gets to our own website. We're throwing away 75% of that traffic. It feeds on EZA's AdSense and EZA's "back button" and EZA's other articles (maybe) and EZA's other distractions.

We could and should have had all that traffic at our own site instead. All those people were potential opt-ins and potential sales, but we lost three quarters of them, if we wrote the article and gave it to EZA without first publishing it ourselves.

So we need to make sure that as few as possible of those people go to EZA (and as many as possible come directly to us without passing Go and without collecting $200). Fortunately for us, Google majorly helped us to achieve this, not so long ago, with their "Panda update" which devalued the article directories greatly (by their own admission), thus making it easier for us to rank our own sites. And one of the ways we ensure that outcome, cumulatively, over the long term, is by always publishing our articles on our own sites first.