Is An Article Directory Your Best Article Marketing Option?

Considering how much money or time an online marketer dedicates to article marketing, we want to get the most value possible from our efforts.  Regardless if we write our articles in-house or outsource to a professional writing service, we need to recoup our expenses by increasing our traffic and, ultimately, our sales.

Most of us who use content syndication use article directories most often to distribute our content.  There are three advantages to using a good article directory.  First, a top tier article directory attract a lot of traffic.  That means a lot of people have an opportunity to find our article there.  An attractive title will encourage a lot of those visitors to read our articles and, perhaps, click through to our website.

Second, webmasters of other sites within our niche will pick up our article with our embedded links for publication on their own sites.  While these niche specific sites will have less traffic than the directory, that traffic will be more targeted, so our article will be relevant to those visitors’ interests.  Thus, a higher proportion of those viewers will be drawn to our article.

The third advantage is that the search engines are very likely to notice the links to our site from the syndicated article, and, as a result, our search engine listings are probably going to improves.  However part of that improvement will be limited and temporary, because most of the repeated instances of publication of that same article will be considered duplicate content. 

If we handle of syndication to article directories properly, we will provide unique articles to each directory to which we submit.  We can accomplish that efficiently using article spinning.  However, even when we go to the trouble of spinning so that each article directory gets a unique version, those niche sites that get our articles from the same directory will be duplicate content.  Thus, while spinning our article prior to submission to multiple directories is a great improvement, we can still do even better in squeezing value from our article marketing efforts.

Another alternative is to add to our syndication plan a system by which we can distribute unique, spun versions of our articles directly to individual sites within our niche.  Unfortunately this can be a time consuming challenge in identifying potential publishers for our articles and then convincing those webmasters that they can actually benefit from publication of our articles (and our contextual links).

Happily for those of us who rely heavily on article marketing, there is a new, mostly automated system to facilitate such distribution.  This alternative is a content distribution consortium of websites and content writers.  I go into the specifics of this content marketing system elsewhere.

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