article directories traffic

So - doesn't this tell you that maybe using the form of promotion you are, is not effective? :rolleyes:

Using quality content to rank your own website is a much better method than using third party software to send out multiple (spun?) article broadcasts to zero value article directories which Google decimated with its Panda update at the beginning of the year.

Please excuse the observation that if your proposed solution to that is to mass-submit articles using software, you'll probably have a very, very, very long way to go.

There are 100+ threads here with titles like "Article Marketing Is Dead". What the people starting them off and supporting them all have in common is that they've been doing exactly that. All those people are right, in one sense: what they're doing doesn't typically work, and it is "dead". What they don't appreciate is that it isn't actually "article marketing" at all - it's just a very misguided attempt at SEO using only non-context-relevant, PR-0 backlinks significantly discounted in linkjuice terms by Google (and that's just the minority of them that ever actually get published and indexed in the first place).

That's exactly what article marketers need to avoid, for the reasons explained in post #2 above.

So you're suggesting that if someone's own website doesn't get indexed, rather than finding out why, and rectifying that, they should use an article directory instead, and get their traffic that way?!

That's exactly what article marketers need to avoid. If an article directory gives better link-juice/gets better traffic than your own site, then you need to work urgently on your own site (including backlinks, perhaps) to make sure that that's reversed, as it should be. Otherwise you end up with a website that can't even outrank an article directory!

Mercifully, Google's series of Panda updates during this year have hammered the article directories so hard for their SEO and traffic potential, that this problem is now "something of the past" and it's trivially easy for marketers to have, and to maintain, websites that easily outrank article directories, so that we no longer have to worry about differentiating between customer-traffic and publisher-traffic in quite that way.

Thanks to the Panda updates, it's now very easy for us to use article directories for their intended purposes without the worry that our potential customers will be drawn there (rather than to our own sites) from a search engine. Which has solved what was a problem for some article marketers, in the past.

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 an article directory copy rather than the copy originally published and indexed on your own site!

You don't want your potential customers going off to an article directory. If you have a 25% click-through rate from an article directory 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 article directory copies are not there for potential customers. They're there for potential re-publishers. And they'll look for what they want - you don't need to "promote" to them (inside a directory) other than with the quality of your writing, as explained here.

Potential customers search with search engines - they don't go to directories for the purpose of searching inside them. Ezine publishers and webmasters, looking for content, do that.

The original copy of the article on your own site is the one for customers to find. The marketers who don't quite appreciate this are the ones who end up starting off all those threads mentioned above, with the titles like "Article Marketing Is Dead": they've been trying to use article directories for purposes other than what they're designed for. :p