Aug 28 2009
Exploring the World of Article Submission Sites
Part of my plan to push my earnings up to the next level and to start treating this gig more like a business is to build links to my already exisitng sites. For my newest sites I have researched my keywords, created some quality content and put a lot of effort into my on-site SEO but so far that isn’t cutting it and I need to get a lot of inbound links in order to make these sites pay off the way I am hoping they will.
Article writing is something I had signed up for ages ago and gave up on without even really giving it a chance. The idea is simple: write an article, submit it to an article submission site and put a couple of links back to your own site in the ‘author bio’ section. I don’t even remember which website I was registered with a few years ago but I decided that if I were putting in the effort to write an article, I would prefer to have it on my own website rather than an article site. I failed to realise the potential of those inbound links.
One of the reasons I didn’t have a lot of faith in article sites was because there are so many out there and I didn’t know which, if any, would really help me out. Nomadic Matt’s ebook suggested a couple of article sites including Ezine Articles and I decided to check them out. Knowing that other people have had success using them goes a long way towards motivating me to write submissions. I also know that Lissie is making money with HubPages after a lot of perseverance and my friend Mike has recently started to submit to articles sites including InfoBarrel and has seen an increase in Adsense earnings already (InfoBarrel allows the you to keep 70% of any Adsense revenue generated).
Seeing other people doing well is something that motivates me and knowing that these guys feel like making contributions to each of these sites is worthwhile makes me feel a lot more confident about spending time on posting articles. I have even joined Mike in an article writing challenge. He is aiming to have 50 InfoBarrel (of at least 450 words each), 80 articles on HubPages (he already has 50) and 10 articles published on Ezine Articles by the end of September. I love a good challenge and am going to attempt to produce 50 InfoBarrel articles of my own, 30 Hubs and I need one more article to get to 10 on Ezine Articles. With just over a month to do it in, it will be hard but this is the sort of stuff that gets me motivated and I’m curious to see how I do.
I’m even more curious to see what sort of impact writing these articles will have. I have a rough strategy in place for what type of articles I will write and where I will link them to and I will go through that in another post. But I am very new to all of this so if any of you are experienced in this sort of thing, I would love to hear your advice!
Ok… back to work. Three articles down, 78 to go. Yikes.
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Kirsty - I’ve also held off on writing articles, but after reading Nomadic Matt’s e-book (and this post!), I’m inclined to get organized. You’re right, it’s a proven system that helps increase traffic, which in turn leads to higher ad revenue.
If possible, I’d like to see a “before and after” post. I think it would be beneficial to people like me, still on the fence, not sure whether it’s worth the time to churn out article after article.
Best of luck!
Alan
Maybe you should also consider Squidoo for building backlinks. Actually I started with Squidoo in preparation for builing backlings for my blog. Then I discovered hubpages and I do like their layout / general approach more. Squidoo is full of heavily promotional (tons of affiliate links) lenses (= articles). However, I do like my backlinks from those few lenses I have.
The tools given to you at both of these article writing platforms do help a lot. Especially for travel related articles (I write mainly articles around travel and skiing related themes) you can easily upload photos and include youtube videos. Thus you can pimp up your article in no time without any hassle.
To my experience traffic seems to be way better at hubpages. And they do get indexed by google extremely fast. I experience SE generated traffic at my hubs within 2 days or so.
I am now in the process of slowly starting to include the backlinks to my main blog (I went only online with it a few days ago). Hence, I cannot share first-hand experience about the impact of the first backlinks (my blog got indexed by google within about 2 days or so but I do not know if the one backlink from which I included soon after publishing the blog did matter for indexing).
Cheers.
Here are a few more of the big ones that may be worth your while.
GoArticles
Article Dashboard
Article Base
Articles Factory
Article Alley
Amazines
Some of these are easier to submit to than others. One thing you will notice about articles is that the ones that get picked up by sites will drive more traffic than the ones that don’t. Not direct traffic, but traffic related to the article. Make sure your articles have 2-3 links depending on what’s allowed by directory. Make sure the linking text is for 1-3 word terms you want to rank for on the page you are linking to. Most of your articles should link to internal pages you are trying to monetize rather than your home page.
In time, you may also want to use a directory submission service to pad out your link profile. You will need to use a service, because anything less than hundreds of links over time will not move the needle when using directories. Even then the effect is minimal. The only directory submission service I can recommend in good conscience is VileSilencer. They’re expensive, but will submit to decent directories. You can find much cheaper services but the directories they submit to are atrocious, as most have domain names that are nothing more than strings of random letters.
In addition, some good reciprocal link exchanges will definitely help. Best to keep close to your topic and with reputable sites. Reciprocal links still carry good weight in my experience.
I’ve seen on Matt’s site that he uses blog carnivals. I think that is a good way to get good links. I guess Hub pages and Squidoo may help as well, but being that they are all on the same domain, returns will diminish at some point as your articles increase, but looks like it has worked out well for Lissie.
In my opinion, none of these are the best method of link building. That requires one way links from quality sites. A few good ones are capable of outweighing all the above methods combined.
I use hubpages to both make money directly and for backlinks LD so the diminishing returns don’t apply so much.
Kirsty take care with Ezinearticels - I wrote a long hub on the topic cause they are picky as hell and if you don’t get approved to God status (platinum) after your first 10 submissions you get stuck in “basic-plus” hell which currently takes over 2 weeks to get articles approved in! Its worth doing lovely articles for the first 10 and making no mistakes with their, often nonsensical requirements, then hopefully you will go straight to platinum - I havent got it after 70 articles!
@Randy - I and others can’t get squidoo lenses to index - if they aren’t indexed then they are usefless for backlinks - it seems to be an issue with Google’s trust of the domain.
My list at the moment is
ezinearticles
hubpages
infobarrel
should add some more articles sites as suggested above as well
I am just sticking with Ezine, HP and Infobarrel for now. I used to write an article and try to submit it to every article directory possible, but I think ezine now has a lot of trust with Google. Ezine ranks well for some many keyword phrases.
The fact that it takes a long time to get articles approved is good in a way because it gives more credibility (at least for Google) to the site.
I think it is better to think in 10 article chunks. Thinking that you have to write 70 articles sounds like too much, so there is the danger that you do nothing.
@Lissie,
yes, the indexing of Squidoo lenses in google is somewhat weird. I guess there might be quite a random element in it. One lense of my lenses got really indexed fast (within a few days and it receives somewhat constant SE generated traffic) whereas another one is stuck in noindex hell. At least in my point of view both are of the same quality and with 100 % original content (and quite long).
Nevertheless I think, one should give squidoo a try, especially since you can publish material very fast and can pimp it up with a lot of tools at hand (youtube videos etc.).
why do you do so much writing? OUTSOURCE! Elance has tons of people that will get you passable stuff for these directories.
Yes you have to outsource. It’s imperative if you want to scale even at low levels. I’d say go ahead and write a few because it will definitely teach you that even though you think you can save money by writing yourself, you will be better off spending the money. Bear in mind, I understand how hard this can be when money is in short supply. Lack of funds will limit your outsourcing volume for a while. Try to tune some of your landing pages with outsourced articles, so that perhaps a single affiliate sale will pay for all of the article expense. You may also want to approach some blogs individually with your articles as well, rather than just firing off to directories.
This may be a bit of stale info on Squidoo, but I remember somewhere around 2005-2006 that Squidoo was severely penalized on Google because so many were using it for gaming Google’s index. Google then let it back in, but the links never had the same amount of juice after that. I remember the threads on WMW at the time.
I have posted the same content of article in different article submission site. is it right? or Do i need to use different contents for each and every site?
[…] After a great weekend trip to Toronto, I’m back in my parent’s basement attempting to pump out as many articles as I can before my head explodes or I go insane. Writing articles for submission sites is probably one of my least favourite jobs, so my goal of writing 80 articles before the end of September seems a long way off at the moment, even though I’m off to a good start. […]
I agree that article submissions are a great way to build links and search engine rankings. One well distributed article can result in hundreds or even thousands of links. Plus it provides a bunch of direct traffic. Use this strategy on a large scale and it adds up to a lot. I like how you can target very specific keywords with your links. This makes them very relevant and gives extra rankings boosts for those keywords. If you struggle with producing a lot of articles, this is a great area to employ freelancers.
I’ve just started to dabble with article submission sites and was really wondering how many articles is enough to start? Do most have to be completely original?
Isnare, articlebase, article marketer, Hubpages and squidoo are good site for article submissions. It’s really good way make money with hubpages. Thanks for information about it.
I too have posted the same content of article in different article submission site. is it right? or Do i need to use different contents for each and every site?