The Best Article Directories
Lesson 4 from You Can Make Money Writing
The best article directories are ultimately the ones that
deliver the most traffic to your site from the articles you submit
to them. This can be hard to measure though, because you get
traffic in several different direct and indirect ways from placing
your article in a directory. Here are some of those ways:
1. Direct traffic from article directories.
People browse the articles there, read yours, and click on
the link in the "author's resource box." That's direct
traffic, and you can usually find it in your site statistics,
under "referrers." I typically submit my articles to
about a dozen directories at the moment, and EzineArticles.com
delivers more traffic than all the others put together. It may
be worth as much as hundreds of dollars to me each month - just
from the visitors coming from this one directory.
Not all of those visitors are just browsing the directory
to find those articles though. That brings us to the second way
you get traffic from a directory:
2. Indirect traffic from search engines.
If you search "cheap international plane tickets"
on Google, the first two pages of results will have one or two
article directory sites with my article on that topic. Readers
click through to the article, and then hopefully click over to
visit EverythingAboutTravel.com (my site). This indirect traffic
can be significant if you have articles which are well optimized
for good keywords (more on that soon).
3. Direct traffic from other web sites.
When my site-reports show a referral address I don't recognize,
it's usually a web site that's using one of my articles. They
get my articles for free from the directories (as long as they
don't change them and the link to my site is active). Visitors
browsing their sites find and read my articles and click through
to my sites.
As explained in Lesson 1, these sources of traffic can be
essentially permanent, as long as the website owner feels that
your article adds value and traffic to his site.
4. Indirect traffic from other sites.
An example: People search for something like "cheap homes"
using a search engine. They find my article "Cheap Homes
For Sale In Great Towns" on a website that is using it,
and go there to read it. Then they hopefully click on the link
in the authors resource box, which takes them to HousesUnderFiftyThousand.com
(my site).
This is more likely if the sites that have your articles are
"highly ranked," or "important" websites.
This is because they are more likely to be found in the results
pages of the search engines.
This use by others is what you ideally want from article directory
submissions. It is a kind of "viral" spreading of your
articles (and therefore the links to your site) around the internet.
Whether from the other website's browsing visitors or from searchers
who find your article on their sites through search engines,
the more readers the better.
5. Direct traffic from search engines due to better site
exposure.
One of the best things you can do to get your site found in
the search engines is to create incoming links from other good
sites - the more the better. This is exactly what you accomplish
every time you write an article and submit it to article directories.
Even if your article was never read, this would be a valuable
strategy for making your website more "visible" to
the search engines, and therefore to the searchers.
In recent years the search engine algorithms have changed,
and they tend to discount the importance of links from article
directories now. Don't worry about this too much. You still get
those links from other websites when those sites use your articles.
This is where most of the real optimization value has always
come from anyhow.
6. Name recognition traffic.
You may develop a reputation as an expert on a topic after
a number of articles (some directories even allow you to have
an “expert“ page about yourself). You also might get
people to remember your website name. Either way, this can result
in people actively seeking out your site. It also means they
have more trust in you when they are there.
Some websites will even invite you to be a resident "expert"
on a given topic. SelfGrowth.com does this, for example. Your
articles may be listed on your "experts" page of their
site, and you may be able to link to interior pages of your site
as well.
We continue this look at finding the best article directories
to submit your writing to with the following page... Some
Good Article Directories
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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