Where to Submit Your Articles
Lesson 14 from You Can Make Money Writing
The following lesson on where to submit your articles starts
with an expanded version of Lesson 4. But after reading through
the other lessons, this should make more sense to you now. More
places to submit articles are covered as well. But first, we
once again ask the question: What makes a good article directory?
The answer will be different for different authors. For example,
buzzle.com is a great one if you want to submit poetry and articles
about poetry, but their business articles seem to be ignored.
They have a general directory with many categories, but they
have developed an audience that is more inclined to read certain
types of articles.
Other article directories are for specific niches. If you
have a website on meditation, a great place to submit your articles
is selfgrowth.com. They cover all self improvement kinds of subjects.
Other directories are just for articles about internet business,
or just articles on outdoor topics.
In general, a good article directory is one that delivers
traffic to your website. This can be direct or indirect, though.
For this reason, we have to get into a short discussion about
search engine optimization.
Finding Good Article Directories
More than half of the searches in the internet world are done
on Google now. If you want your articles found by searchers,
you want good placement in Google's search results. But in addition
to getting traffic from those who find and read your articles,
you also submit articles to increase the exposure of your website
in the search engines. This is why you should know about Google
PageRank.
PageRank is a proprietary ranking between 0 and 10 that Google
uses to help determine which sites show up in their search results.
Higher is better, meaning they consider your site more important.
How do you get a higher PageRank? The single best way is to have
many of incoming links from sites with high PageRank - like the
links you create every time you submit an article to a good directory.
IncreaseBrainpower.com (one of my first sites) achieved a
PageRank of five quickly because of all the articles I submitted
to directories with high PageRank of their own. Without my high
PageRank, if Google searchers typed in "improve iq"
they wouldn't see my page in the first page of results as they
do now - it might be on the tenth or hundredth page, where no
one would see it.
You can see the importance of good quality links then. You
can understand why even if not a single person reads your article
in a directory, that submission can still help your website.
You could spend days trying to get other sites to trade links
with you, as many people do, but it is easier to just submit
an article to a dozen websites. How do you know which directory
sites have a high PageRank?
Go to http://toolbar.google.com,
and install the free Google tool bar on your browser. With this
you can see the "PageRank" of any web page. As explained
in lesson five, you can see what ranking your own pages have,
and compare them with PageRank of the other pages that show up
on the first page of the search results for certain terms. This
tells you (roughly) how well you can compete against these pages
for given keywords, assuming you are doing okay with your on-page
optimization too.
For choosing article directories to submit to, you can first
check out the PageRank of the homepage of each directory. For
example, I no longer submit to directories with a PageRank 2
or lower. Here are some of the things to look for in a directory.
A Good Article Directory...
1. Has Direct Traffic
Experiment by submitting a few articles to a directory. Look
at your website reports a few weeks later, to see if the site
URL shows up a few times as a "referrer" (ask your
website host for help if you don't know how to do this). Such
direct traffic is always a good thing to have, but it isn't all
there is.
Also, be aware that the statistics program used by your website
host is not perfect. It's possible that it misses the originating
URL of some traffic, and maybe even all of the traffic from some
directories.
2. Has Good PageRank
Even if I don't see any traffic, I continue to submit to any
article directory that has a PR (PageRank) of 5 or higher on
its home page, and most that have a PR of 4. These are good links
to have to your site, just for the sake of the search engine
optimization value. Even PR 3 directories are okay if they have
other things going for them.
3. Is Easy to Use
I used to submit to one article directory that had required
fields for a title, subtitle, a "primary search phrase,"
other keywords, name of the website, category, subcategory, and
more. I dropped it, because it was just too much trouble (and
time). There are good directories that are easy too, so unless
there are good reasons to stick with them, we drop the difficult
ones pretty quickly.
4. Automatically Announces New Articles on the Homepage
Some directories automatically announce your article on the
homepage when you submit it, giving you good exposure for a few
days until it works it's way off the bottom of the list of "new
articles." Other randomly rotate homepage exposure of articles
in their database. This latter system may be better if you only
plan to distribute a few articles.
5. Automatically Submits Articles to Other Directories
Some are part of a group of associated directories, and your
article is automatically posted to the others in the group when
you submit to one of them. That can help.
6. Is Easy for Webmasters (Publishers) to Use
You want others to use your articles on their sites and so
create more incoming links to your website. They won't use them
as often if the directory makes it too difficult. Test it by
taking another author's article for your own use (you don't have
to actually use it). If you have trouble figuring it out, others
will too.
7. Has Good Statistics
There is one more reason that I use some directories: they
have good statistics. You don't need to have this with all your
directories, but some give you access to a page listing all your
articles submitted so far, and how many times each has been viewed.
Why is this helpful to know?
It tells you which topics and titles work. Since a "view"
is most likely registered as soon as the reader clicks to open
your article, it unfortunately says nothing about whether the
readers like the article (they might be reading two lines and
leaving). However, it does tell you the topics they are looking
for and which titles work best.
Use that information! I have seen an article of mine on getting
a particular carpet stain out generate 100 times more readers
than an article submitted at the same time on some other subject.
Of course I try to put together another carpet-stain article
when I see that. If your articles with questions in the title
are being viewed twice as often as similar ones that don't ask
a question, start doing more question-titles.
In any case, if some of the article directories you use have
good statistics, put that information to use. By the way, http://www.articlesbase.com
has good stats.
Not all of these factors are equally important, and if a directory
is strong in two areas, this is enough. A list of decent directories
can be found in Lesson 23.
As discussed in a previous lesson, to find a good article
directory, you can also use a search engine. Type in "list
of article directories" to find general ones, or "article
directory" plus a subject area to get niche directories.
Downgrade of Directory Links?
Google has downgraded the importance of links in article directories
in determining PageRank for websites. As a result of this several
of my own websites dropped from PR 5 to PR 4, including www.IncreaseBrainpower.com.
Fortunately the same thing happened to most others, so there
was no real effect on search results and therefore no decrease
in traffic for our collection of sites.
But what about the value of new article submissions? Does
this mean submitting articles to directories is no longer a great
strategy? Not at all. It only affects one aspect of an article
marketing strategy: the direct optimization value for the site.
But those links still count for something, even if they have
slightly less optimization value.
What about the other factors? I still find my articles in
the search results all the time, which means there is still that
indirect source of traffic to be had (they come, read and click
through to the site). The PageRank of the directory is what's
important here. For example, when I do find one of my articles
in the search engine results, it is usually located on a directory
site that has a PageRank of 4 or higher on its home page.
Finally, you still get others using your articles on their
websites, and those links may have as much value as ever. They'll
almost certainly be of more value than links from exchanges or
from the less-important directories.
We continue this lesson on where to submit your articles with
a look at some places beyond the usual article directories.
Continues here... More
Places to Submit Articles
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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