Is An Article Directory Your Best Article Marketing Option?
Given the amount of resources that an online business puts into article marketing, we all hope for good value for our expenditures. Regardless if we write our articles in-house or outsource to a professional writing service, online marketers want to recoup those expenditures as quickly as possible via increased traffic and revenue.
Most of us who use content syndication use article directories most often to distribute 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. Consequently, we can expect a higher proportion of those niche website’s visitors to choose to read 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.
We can get some additional benefit by providing each directory with a unique version of our article. We can accomplish that efficiently using article spinning. However, even when we go to the trouble of spinning so that each article directory gets a unique version, those niche sites that get our articles from the same directory will 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.
Happily for those of us who rely heavily on content marketing, there is a new, mostly automated system to handle such distribution. This alternative is a content distribution consortium of publishers and content providers. I provide a detailed description of this automated content distribution system elsewhere.
Tags: article directory, article marketing, article spinning, article syndication, content syndication