More Places to Submit Articles

Continuation of Lesson 14 from You Can Make Money Writing

We continue our look at places to submit articles with some distribution points that are not the usual directories. This part of the lesson needs more updating than it will get here, so be sure to subscribe to my newsletter (the form is to the right and on the homepage). In it I will mention any good places I discover.

Blogs

In one way, distributing articles has become even more useful as a marketing strategy since I wrote the first version of this book. I discovered this by accident when I subscribed to free "Google Alerts" (http://www.google.com/alerts) one day. I filled out the form to be notified every time a new incidence of the "Steve Gillman" was found on the internet.

By the way, this is a great service provided free by Google. You can type in any word or name or phrase and they will email you every time their "spiders" find a new incidence of that online. I use it so I know when others are using my articles. I then check to see if they are using them correctly (link working, article unchanged).

Back to the story. Soon I was getting several notifications daily, but almost all of the new pages online with "Steve Gillman" on them were actually blogs. As many as ten blogs daily were posting my articles, and still are. Many are not great blogs, but this surely generates some traffic and more backlinks for those search engines to give me credit for.

So you can see that even as the optimization value of article directory links has declined, the rise in the popularity of blogs can make up for the loss. You can also contact blogger directly to see if they would like to use your articles. Start with the ones that have used your articles previously, since you know they like your writing. The bottom line is that writing articles and distributing them is still a powerful way to get traffic and make money.

Directories in Other Languages

Over the years we tried making websites in Spanish (my wife is from Ecuador) without much success. With few article directories in other languages, our primary marketing strategy was useless. English may still be the best way to go for websites and articles, but the internet is always changing.

As of 2010, my wife's self-help site in Spanish; http://www.tusuperacionpersonal.com is doing great. It get's thousands of visitors daily, just based on direct search engine traffic. Even better news: now there are one or two Spanish-language article directories out there, so we can promote it in that way as well.

I haven't investigated to see if there are decent article directories in many of the other languages of the world, but you can search in Google. Just guess at the most likely terminology in your language of choice for "article directory," or "places to submit articles," or "articles about..." (if you're looking for a specialty directory).