Hi Netwarrior

They're depositories of content which is freely available (within each directory's terms of service) for publishers and webmasters to re-publish. By putting your article in a directory, you're announcing its availability for inclusion in ezines and on other people's websites (with your backlinks included!) so that you can get targeted traffic from publishers who have the traffic/subscribers but need the content.

In short, you're offering people a "content for traffic (and a backlink, if on a website rather than in an ezine)" deal. That's how they work and why they're there.

Technically, you do also get a backlink from the directory itself, but that's a worthless one (it's not a relevant one, unless the article directory is specific to your niche - and it's PR-0 too - regardless of the page rank of the directory's own home page which isn't, of course, where articles are published).

No ... absolutely not, and you shouldn't do that at all - it's a big mistake.

The last thing you want happening is for any potential customers who find your article by putting one of its keywords into a search engine to find the EZA copy rather than the copy originally published and indexed on your site!

You don't want your potential customers going off to an article directory! If you have a 25% click-through rate from your article to your website, you're losing 75% of them ... if they come straight to your site, you're not losing 75% of them. Pretty big difference?!

The EZA copy isn't there for potential customers. It's there for potential publishers. And they'll look for what they want - you don't need to "promote" to them (inside EZA) other than with the quality of your writing, as explained here.

Customers search with search engines - they don't go to EZA to search. Publishers go to EZA to search, but they know how to search and what they're looking for. The original copy of the article on your site is the one for customers to find.

Good luck! The information below will get you started (use it wisely!) ...

Always publish all your articles on your own site first, before ever submitting any of them anywhere else at all. In this thread, a whole succession of professional, experienced, successful article marketers explain all their shared reasons for doing so. This is absolutely fundamental to any kind of article marketing: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...eza-first.html

There's no benefit at all from "spinning" articles. It's explained in detail in this thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...necessary.html

And it's also explained again, differently, here (and in many other threads): http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-articles.html

Don't get confused between "duplicate content" and "syndicated content". This little article clarifies the difference in very simple terms: Article Marketers - Lay the Duplicate Content Myth To Rest Once and For All | Internet Marketing and Publishing

Using article directories for their own backlinks is a fallacy, as explained here. And here.

If they interest you, these few recent threads are worth a read-through, to appreciate the current position with article marketing (actually including "how to use article directories").

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-articles.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-articles.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-articles.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...explained.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...-question.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ifference.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...mith-myob.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...e-wonders.html

Great reply Alexa. I agree with the previous poster too – that’s all you need. If I had read that starting off I may feel inclined to print it off and stick it to the side of my monitor

Couple more points which may help you...

Posting on your website first is not enough!

It’s not only important to post articles on your website before an article directory; you have to ensure it’s actually INDEXED on your website BEFORE submitting to an article directory.

As an example, Google will index a page on Ezine Articles much, MUCH faster than a page on your own website. Even if you post an article on your website on Monday, and the article directory on Tuesday, there’s still a good chance that Ezine Articles would be indexed first. Then you’re left standing in a puddle.

Where to start?

Here’s a list of my top 5 article directories that I will submit to daily while on a campaign:
1. Ezine Articles (Duh!)
2. Go Articles (No Brainer)
3. Article Dashboard
4. Article Base
5. Idea Marketers

I choose these not only because they have decent PR but also because creating accounts isn’t a pain in the rectum like it is with some article directories.

I’ll also say that if you have the time go for 10 a day to really get a good diverse range of ip addresses.

Whatever websites you choose, add them all to a folder in your browser. Then once a day (or whatever) you’ll be able to right click on the folder and simply ‘Open all bookmarks’

Just stay consistent with it and you’ll get results!

Unfortunately, people steal articles from EZA without giving you any credits whatsoever. I spotted a few websites with my articles with the author's name and resource box removed. I contacted the webmasters asking for deleting them, and fortunately they did delete my articles, but how many other stolen articles are there and who has time to track their articles every day...

Hy Alexa,

its worth o read your expert knowledge of article syndication.But how I find related websites that would share with me? Websites who want my content and give me backlinks?

Google search?

best wishes
marco005

I have tried both--backlinking EZA articles and not backlinking them--and my results suggest that Alexa is right. With a few backlinks that EZA article will climb in the ranks a lot faster than you might expect, and it could easily outrank your own article on your site.

The problem is that once a reader gets to EZA, it is easy to find links to other articles and stay within the EZA website rather than leave to visit your site. The end result is your traffic is diverted to other articles by other writers rather than your own website and you lose traffic.

Oh yes,

link bait is one method to share on my own website with lots of theese share buttons from digg and so on.
But, this all is social traffic, so google will smart priced me when I will make money with adsense...

This is not a great solution idea.

best wishes
marco005

Article Directories add link juice in two ways. First, web-crawlers (bots) crawls the link which we paste in the article. Secondly, When a reader reads your article there are fair chances that he will click on the link.

Once your article was approved by Ezine, they will crawl your link to get indexed and ranked on Google SERPS. But after your Ezine was live, better spin the content it with TBS or Spinner Chief and distribute them into other article directories like GoArticles, Articles Base, Amazines, etc.

Thx Lex... u rock, girl.

This is funny thing happened when I was complete newbie for internet marketing.

One day, I found that one of my EZA articles has published on a Blog (with credits). What the hell this shameless man is doing?

@stellaandreapar,

thanks, I will search with; "my keyword" and ezines or ezine publisher or
"my keyword" directories or so.

For my two of my niche websites, I have found about four related niche directories who I can submit my articles (first on my own website, first indexed). This will be give me little better backlink credit ( I hope) .
Write an email to the related website publisher is worst, statictics says, that every one "ONE" from 120 emails you wrote gives you a response.

But it is simple; A bigger,older website with higher pr think so; Hy why Im should be give you (new website without pr) my link juice. Thats the problem of all stella.

PS: I there not an wordpress plugin for the author, who sends an publisher an email before they grab my content, an email with big letters; Only with backlink to me?


best wishes
marco005

@Alexa

You explain so much, Now at least I understood more about articles and how do work.

thanks you rock!

Hi!

It doesn't work like it used to. I've got a lot of backlinks and traffic from their "repost" feature. When people are allowed to copy their content if they keep the URL's.

Daniel

SImply write the article, and promote the link by pinging it, submitting it to search engines and by social bookmarking it. This will drive traffic to your article.

Hy,

I will use a footer plugin for wp. This plugin will get custom footer copyright messages in my wordpresss blog feeds. Look at this; Show Custom Message at the bottom of RSS Feeds.

And at the buttom of every written blog article I will put my copywrights there, I hope it helps.


best wishes
marco005

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Subscribing. Great thread!

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great thread... let us keep updated with these info

Article Marketing - I'm going to take this to a new level and throw in everything else you need to do which goes above and beyond link building.

The only way that article marketing works, is by cheating. I said it, c-h-e-a-t-i-n-g.

For anyone who thinks that manually submitting articles to the top directories is going to provide a decent income, don't read this and keep believing what it is you want to believe.

Before you even start building links to your site...

On-site optimization - You need to make sure that you've not only placed your main keyword in your title, but also 2-word or 3-word keyword phrases within it, including your main keyword again, as well.

This will not only help you to rank high for your main keyword, but also for 2-word or 3-word keyword phrases.

For example, if you own a site about flowers:

Meta title for home page: Flowers, Lily Flowers, Beautiful Flowers, State Flowers

You always want to target the heaviest searched keyword and keyword phrases to your home page. This is because your home page will rank higher, more easily, compared to inner pages, on Google.

Your meta title for your home page is now set up to rank for: Flowers, Lily Flowers, Beautiful Flowers and State Flowers.

Use Google Adsense Traffic Estimator to discover how many times per month, the longer tail keyword phrases are searched for, locally, within the United States, and target the highest searched keyword phrases towards your home page.

Flowers - 13.6 million searches per month.
American Flowers - 10 thousand searches per month.
State Flowers - 22 thousand searches per month.
Popular Flowers - 15 thousand searches per month.
Beautiful Flowers - 27 thousand searches per month.
Lily Flowers - 50 thousand searches per month.
Exotic Flowers - 15 thousand searches per month.

You can easily discover more keyword phrases if you use the Google Adsense Traffic Estimator Tool.

Now to the the meta description for your home page:

Meta Description: View magnificent photos of flowers, lily flowers, beautiful flowers and state flowers. Learn more about flowers, lily flowers, beautiful flowers and state flowers.

Now your meta description for your home page is set up to rank high for the heaviest searched keyword phrases for Flowers, and your main keyword, Flowers.

You also need to fill in your meta keywords.

Meta keywords: flowers, lily flowers, beautiful flowers, state flowers

Meta keywords isn't really important anymore, but use them.

You need to make certain that your main keyword and keyword phrases are within your content on your home page.

Home page text: You've discovered MySite(dot)(com)! View magnificent photos of flowers, lily flowers, beautiful flowers, state flowers and so much more. Learn more about flowers, lily flowers, beautiful flowers, state flowers and dozens of others.

Now your home page has your main keyword and keyword phrases within its content.

You are now fully optimized to rank your home page high on Google for Flowers, Lily Flowers, Beautiful Flowers and State Flowers.

Set up your meta tags in the exact same way for your inner pages on the topic of other flowers/other keywords and keyword phrases for that particular page.

These are the steps of building your site. It's not an overnight project. It can in fact take months to create a useful site. And useful it needs to be. Your site isn't a one shot monthly project, it's a lifetime work of art that you should be proud of and continue to add content/new pages to it at least once per week.

After months of creating pages on your site and setting up your meta tags and content for those pages, you're ready to start Article marketing.

Let's drive back to the beginning... Choose A URL with your main keyword within it, Flowers. This is very important. FlowersareFlowers(dot)(com) would work beautifully. Because now you have your main keyword in the URL twice and it's not overly long - yet still catchy and makes sense.

Keep reading because you're gaining such powerful knowledge...

Article marketing time...

As I said before, cheat. You have to. How else are you going to pass your competitors?

Purchase The Best Spinner. Once you get the Best Spinner, spend an hour spinning random sentences to get a feel for it.

Now you need to use at least 3 article/blog submission services which allow you to upload spun content and 1-2 submission services that "strictly forbid spinning". Don't worry about strictly forbid spinning. I'm going to teach you how to spin so well, they either won't notice, or simply won't care. And you need to make sure that the network of sites each service is using are not the same as the others. This way you're submitting your article/blog comment to as many different IP address sites as possible.

Spinning your content using The Best Spinner:
After you write your article/blog post (Or steal it from EzineArticles... I never said that!) You need to manually, or highlight the entire sentence, set up spyntax on every sentence to create as many different sentences for each original sentence as possible. For example:

Original sentence: There's so many different people who love to look at pictures of flowers.

Step 2: {There's so many different people who love to look at pictures of flowers.|People have always been intrigued to look at picture of flowers.|A lot of people enjoy spending time to browse pictures of flowers.|Looking at pictures of flowers is a hobby to some people.|A countless amount of poeple take time to view different flowers online.}

Step 3: Repeat step 2 for every sentence.

Step 4: Once done with step 3, go back to the beginning of the article/blog comment and spin every word as many times as possible making sure it still reads correctly and makes sense.

Once you've completed this after 1-3 working days depending on how much time you spend on it, you'll have created well over 1,000 articles/blog comments from a single article/blog comment. How long would it take you to do this manually? Hmmmmm?

Before submitting this article/blog comment to your submission services, make sure, if it's an article, to first manually get unique versions of it and submit it manually to the top 10 article directories which have the highest Page Rank. Then, submit it using all services.

Submit to to the most relevant categories in each service and then to the next most relevant category, etc.

For the services that require only "100% unique content", manually get about 10-20 unique versions, as well, and queue them up for submission within these sites.

Be sure to target your main keyword to your home page about 75% of the time while targeting 25% of your other keywords to your inner pages.

Doing exactly this over the course of one year has landed me on page on of Google for a single-word keyword searched over 5 million times per month, and many long tail keywords for my home page and inner pages, as well.

That's Article Marketing 101.

You're welcome.

Forgive me for my mis-spellings... I did have a couple Bud Lights and this took a while to write and I don't feel like double checking everything!

It is article marketing...?

You must be confused...

Once your site is set up, you can write highly knowledgeable articles all you want. But, when was the last time you Google searched for any keyword or keyword or keyword phrase and found an article on an article marketing site ranking high? Never...

Article marketing can only drive so much direct traffic to your site from people reading the actual article.

Article marketing is 99.9% about Google finding as many backlinks to your site as possible which are surrounded by unique content.

Even after the Panda update, Google isn't smart enough to "catch" this kind of link building as cheating. It's all unique. But takes a lot of hard work and hours, even a day or 2 to set up one article for submission.


That doesn't count for the $3,000 worth of products I sold from my site today that I make 18% on...

From December 1st through December 15th, I sold over $60,000 worth of product from my site for Christmas x 18% = $11,700 dollars in 2 weeks.

I don't know what else to say about celente's comment.....


I've also already made 185.34 on adsense clicks today and I stil have a few hours until 2AM once it resets.

Celente might be a trooper and advanced user on this forum, but it's too bad they spend all there time on here and not enough time learning/being successful on the "outside" of this site.

Someone's status doesn't mean anything. This is why anyone can rank high on Google for very competitive keywords doing exactly what I've said no matter which site is ranking right now.

Just like celente can spend way too much time on here with over 3,000 posts giving weak information to people making them think it's gong to be super useful... no offense celente... it's true... And I really mean no offense...


And there's currently 3,567 people browsing my site, at 12:05am i nthe morning...

I'm actually offended by celente who's been on here for so long who "kicks my post in its ass" because they don't know what they're talking about and I'm not sharing my successful tips anymore on here...

Wow, I know it may sound as though I am blowing sunshine up your skirts here, but I am amazed and grateful that you guys are here and so knowledgeable and helpful. I had tried starting with Ezine articles and such, but I never seen the traffic from the articles. I now know its because I was submitting to Ezine before I submitted to my own site.

Just wanted to chime in and say thank you all for writing all of these wonderful responses!

Personally I prefer to guest post on quality Blogs. No hassle and article less likely to be stolen. Hubpages and Squidoo Lens are very good for visitors and quality backlinks.

All the best,
Koolsteve

Since there has been a discussion about article marketing, just wanted to point out that even Matt Cutts doesn't quite understand article marketing.

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

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Let's keep it civil guys, there's no need to be calling anybody "morons". Let's just call it how we see it without the personal attacks okay?

RoD

Moron. No. Newbie to this forum. Yes.

Do you know how many times my spun articles are picked up from other sites and spread around to other sites by people spreading them around, a lot.

Do you know how many times someone has commented on my articles/blog comments and thanked me for actually providing a quality article/blog comment for them to read, many.

Not only do I drive a huge amount of direct traffic to my sites from these articles/blog comments, but because I spin them at the most advanced level, whichever keywords I'm shooting for, raise up on Google.

Edit:
A friend of mine I went to high school with owns a rather large office building. He designs websites, which he's really good at. He also offers marketing services and has traveled all over the United States to seminars.

I saw an ad for his business in our local news paper, and said to myself, "Wow, someone I personally know does exactly what I do". So I contacted him by phone and ended up meeting him for lunch - I hadn't talked to him in years.

After I explained what it is I do, he didn't want any part of it. He said, "I don't want you to do any kind of that work to my site".

Well, too bad for him, because I already knew which main keywords he was stuck for on the bottom of page one on Google and of course I knew his domain.

So I spent 2 weeks of my own time doing work on his site behind his back, without telling him.

After 2 weeks, I sent him an email and told him to type his main keyword in Google in 30 days.

I didn't hear from him for over a month - and then an email came.

"What the heck did you so and how did you do it? I'm #1 on Google and I couldn't break from position 7-8 no matter what I did."

He then offered me a job to do work for his clients... but I'm simply too busy promoting my own site.

Where as anyone else doing this manually, does in fact get direct traffic from their articles, and some of these articles might be getting picked up and spread, as mine do too, but their site is no where to be seen on Google's 1st page for competitive keywords.

I've been bashed before on other forums from people who have thousands of posts and "know it all". The only thing you know about Internet marketing is how to be the exact same as millions of others making little or no money from their sites.

Post them on your site, then to a few of the major article sites mentioned in this post after they've been on your site for 6 to 12 months. Better to build up your own rep than help ezine build up theirs. Besides, a lot of those sites get smacked when Google comes out with new updates, along with your articles. Better to invest that effort into building your own site.

HI Alexa,
Thanks very much for all the info - I am making article marketing one of the main two focuses of my marketing in 2012. I am new to this and between you and Tiff Lee I am learning quite a bit.
Forgive what may seem like a stupid question - and I HAVE read everything so please read my question fully before assuming I haven't.

I understand how there is no point spinning (now that I understand article marketing properly) but do spinners have a place in rewriting content that you may want to include within the article you are writing so as to keep it unique rather than tracts of duplicate material.

I ask this because when researching material I find information that I think is useful. I then spin it and the rewrite it as if it was PLR so that I am writing from my own understanding of the material and also making it unique to me.

Am I wrong to do this, or is it an acceptable way of making material my own?

Thanks
(and before anyone jumps on me, please read what I am asking, not what you think I am asking)

Thanks John,
I certainly understand what you mean, and yes I was modelling my rewriting efforts on the same basis as Tiffany. Although in the past I have rarely written an article beyond 700 words, I am now making the effort to do so. Plus I only wrote for fun before and now am centering my sights on dollar bills! (Euros are so 2008!)

I agree with the posters who are talking about article quality, it's all about your writing quality. Frankly, I don't post on those sites anymore, I post on my own and link to them in social networks. Not building anyone else's site when I could be building my own.

i am a beginner, so hard to understand what of all of you discuss

Wow! Lots of information regarding writing articles. And it looks that most everybody is negative about article writing. What I will do is just hire somebody to design my website for me and keep on reading about traffic building. That is the reason I am here: to learn.

Not all article directories are the same and some actually do provide backlinks with no interference of link juice. Although Alexa is right on most counts. Just thought I would mention not all have been built as poorly as ezine articles and the rest of the content farms.

Article marketing well it can get you a backward link and yet the google guys state poor quailty content and yet I wonder about one mans trash is another man treasure.

So what may be trash to them may be treasure to another and this is the reason why use ablility or length of time on site is important. So let say their is a trash article on marketing so like this:

article marketing is writing an article and marketing it

Yep that would be trash article lol and yet if their is alot of time spent on that page what then???

So the page is trash because of the trash content? nope becuase time spnt is taken into ranking site.

Where is the donate button to donate some money to Alexa?

Alex Smith, your posts are awesome, helpful and detailed. It really opened my eye today.

I wouldn't put effort ranking your articles in the eZine directory. Once they are approved, you are good to go.

Put your effort ranking your OWN site, rather than ranking your outside articles.

If you really want to get more exposure, you should write more articles to different article directories, not just eZine. That way, you will have a more natural looking backlink profile.

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It's not so much of spinning article and building backlinks to these directories. What you want to aim for is the high pagerank article directories and submit a unique article to them. I'm not saying to submit 10 articles at ezine, ONLY if you have 20 keywords then sure go for it that way 20 backlinks count. If you want maximum rankings i would submit a unique article to pr2+ article directories. If you want a list i'll be more then happy to supply you one and it should make your life a lot easy.

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