Is An Article Directory Your Best Article Marketing Option?

Considering how much time and money 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 hire an expert professional writer, we need to recoup our expenses by increasing our traffic and, ultimately, our sales.

Article directories are the most frequently used distribution point for 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.

Secondly, many webmasters who monetize their sites with advertising will add our articles (including our links) to add to their own sites in our niche or a related niche.  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.

Visibility of our links to the search engines, thereby improving our position in the search engine listings, is the third advantage of submitting our content to article directories.  Unfortunately some of the benefit of our search results will be limited and temporary, because repeated publication of the same article on a number of sites will be considered duplicate content.  Once the search engine robots have done their job properly, most of those duplicate external links will have disappeared in terms of their SEO value.

If we handle of syndication to article directories properly, we will provide unique articles to each directory to which we submit.  If we spin our content, then we can accomplish producing multiple unique versions of the same content.  But even if we submit a unique article to each directory, the individual sites that take their content from that directory will still be duplicate content.  So this approach to spinning is a huge improvement over distributing the same article to multiple directories, it leaves room for improvement in maximizing our benefit from our article marketing efforts.

An alternative to using only article directories is to also distributed unique articles to individual sites within our marketing niche.  This can be an extremely tedious process as it involves considerable research time in finding those sites, establishing contact with the webmasters and persuading them that it is in their interests to publish our articles with our links on their sites.

Fortunately there is a semi-automated option to make implementation of this peer-to-peer exchange much simpler.  This unique approach is a content distribution consortium of publishers and content providers.  I provide a detailed description of this automated content marketing system elsewhere.