What are the Best Article Submission Sites?
We get this question a lot and it’s really a bit of a loaded question, because it brings some baggage along with it. The top article submission sites question that we so frequently get implies that you can just pick a few and submit to them. But does that work?
Quality or Quantity?
This brings up the inherent debate between ‘quality’ versus ‘quantity’. These are really two completely opposite beliefs on how to best practice article marketing. At one extreme is the ‘quality’ camp. They believe that you can just pick half a dozen or so top article directories and submit top quality articles to them and that the quality of the writing will attract people to their sites. In the other camp are the quantity believers. At the extreme are the spammers that just are ridiculous about it, but let’s bypass them for the sake of this discussion. The quantity believers tend to not worry so much about the article quality and typically will outsource the writing and then submit it to hundreds of sites. Though not necessarily always the case, the quality camp tends to think that article spinning is a waste of time and the quantity camp tends to think of it as the best thing since sliced bread.
The Quality Argument
Those that believe in quality over quantity will tell you that a well written article will build rapport in the minds of the reader and a well crafted resource box will send them flying to your site. They also tend to practice article marketing with the belief that the articles themselves are what will bring traffic to their site from click-throughs. The problem with logic is simply that we live in an instant gratification, Nintendo society that just isn’t that likely to read an entire article and then click through to your site. Does it happen? Sure it does – you will get some click-throughs for sure, but is it a sustainable long term traffic strategy? Is that really where you want your SEO budget being spent – to give EzineArticles more unique content and free backlinks?
The problems with this strategy are many. First of all you don’t control the site that you’re putting all of your unique quality content onto. Tomorrow EzineArticles.com could decide to make all of your links NoFollow and the 2,700 articles you have up there could be greatly devalued over night. Secondly, they do everything they can to prevent people from even seeing the resource boxes. Many article directories hide the resource boxes in between Adsense or make the links virtually indistinguishable or a host of other tricks. The fact of the matter is that they make money on Adsense revenue. They want their visitors to click on ads, not your links.
But the biggest problem with this believe is that the numbers simply do not backup the belief. Even top authors with hundreds of articles just do not get very much traffic from the article directories. Gone are the days when you could just write an EzineArticles.com article and throw it up there and compete with page #1 search results. Now, before I get all of the floods of email, let me clarify that point. There are lots of first page EzineArticles.com listings, but if you look closely what most people are doing today is treating EzineArticles as a web 2.0 property. They publish an article and then go out and linkbuild to it to get it improved rankings. Now, that does work, but we’d much rather have those links coming to our money site rather than a site that we do not control and could easily throw a monkey wrench into all of our efforts.
A Better Approach…
A much better approach is to use Article Marketing as a link generation tactic, not a direct traffic mechanism. Notice I said “direct traffic mechanism” because by focusing on article marketing for link generation, you will focus on moving target keywords up the SERPS and that will definitely bring you more traffic – it’s just an “indirect” result of the article, not a direct click through to your site.
Things change over time. Strategies that worked 5 years ago aren’t necessarily so effective today. Napster was huge, not so any more. Myspace was huge, now it’s Facebook. The fact is that things evolve and article marketing, well, effective article marketing has also evolved. With great article submitters available today such as our two favorites – Article Demon and Article Marketing Robot – you can send your article to thousands of directories. And each and every distribution will have a link in it pointing back to your site. In our opinion this is a much better approach than hoping to get a very small sliver of traffic from an ever diminishing source like article click thruough’s.
Another reason that the old style article marketing is not as effective is that Google algorithms change all of the time as well. In the old style of article marketing you would typically write a quality unique article and submit it to EzineArticles.com, for example. You would likely be taught to go target a very long tail keyword phrase in the title of your article to chase a listing. The problem is that Google has changed a lot of these long tail algorithms and it’s not as easy as it used to be. The strategy is just not nearly as effective as it once was.
Benefits of Article Marketing for SEO
When you distribute your article out to hundreds of directories or even thousands, you have some unique opportunities. What most people will do is use an article spinner such as The Best Spinner to spin out different title variations to target different keywords as well as spinning of the anchor text of the links in order to target more keywords and maintain a more natural looking link profile. Generally they will also spin the full body of the article as well, though this is not as critical. The main reason for spinning the full content is for acceptance by the article directories – it is not because of some supposed duplicate content myth – that fallacy has long sense been put to bed (Google has recently announced they will be placing further de-emphasis on duplicate content – but by no means is it a penalty). But being pragmatic about it, some directories will simply not accept duplicate content, so some degree of spinning will improve your distribution acceptance rates.
Summary
Content is expensive. If you’re writing it yourself, well, it takes a lot of time (ask me how I know as I’m just passing 1000 words into this blog post). You can (and should) outsource it, but then the costs add up. So either way you go, content is expensive. Our philosophy is to re-purpose that content and turn it into as many opportunities to create links for us as we can. By spinning it and using various distribution networks to get the content out there, we can be much more efficient with our content needs and much more productive as well.
Just do the math. If you write one article at a cost of $10 let’s say and submit it to EzineArticles for the two links you get in the resource box, well, you just paid $5.00 a link. Now if instead you invested say $20 in a spun article and submit it out to hundreds of directories, you’re likely to get a couple hundred or more links. Let’s be very, very conservative and say you only get 100 links. Still, that is 20 cents a link – much, much more economical per link than going to just a single (or a few) article directories.
Furthermore it is our feeling that the best article submission sites are really article submission services or products instead.
If you’re looking for one-time purchase submission products, you should look strongly at:
- Article Demon – This submitter is a desktop program that is one of our top picks for 2011.
- Article Marketing Robot – This submitter is also a desktop program and is a very close second to Article Demon and even submits to more directories.
If you’re looking for a service, you should look strongly at:
- Build My Rank – BMR is the top linkbuilding service out there right now. While it does have a monthly fee, it only costs about 40% of what the competition charges. We’ve put thousands of posts through this network of PR2 thru PR7 blogs and can attest for its great performance.
Think we’re full of hot air? Leave us a comment and tell us all about it… <grin> BTW, if you really want to find out how to SEO the right way you should check out The Ultimate Link Building Dossier. A 200 page complete overview of SEO and more than 150 pages of SEO linkbuilding resources.
Forget writing content, finding link partners, evaluating and testing the best networks - just let us do it for you cheaper than you can do it yourself. Get a mix of link types, unique content, high PR links, a monthly Press Release - plus reports and rank tracking.
On February 11, 2011 Dave wrote:
Good article, I know you touched on the ‘link or traffic’ point in your ebook, that was a huge ‘ah-ha’ moment for me.
“The main reason for spinning the full content is for acceptance by the article directories – it is not because of some supposed duplicate content myth”
… y’know what? I’ve heard this from you and numerous other people but STILL, there’s something in me that says it’s still a big deal. Good to hear Google have made an announcement about it, maybe I can get this point into my thick skull now…
On February 11, 2011 Troy wrote:
Hi Dave,
The “myth” part is the fact that there is not a “penalty” for having duplicate content. However, Google certainly rewards unique content. That is one of the reasons why quality link building networks like Build My Rank will only accept unique content. Way back when people used to put the exact same article all over their site and just change the title and url of it in order to chase more long tail keywords via URL and Title optimization. Google put a stop to that by only indexing one of those articles (on their own site) and simply not rewarding them for trying to “game the system”. Soon after it became incorrectly known as a duplicate content penalty.
But the fact is, it wasn’t a “penalty” or else Google would have pushed their rankings back out of the top 100 or de-indexed the sites, etc… none of that was done. They simply were not rewarded for spam techniques. Furthermore, it never applied to content distributed to other sites, it was for duplicate content on the same site. Duplicate content exists all over the web. Most news stories, for example, are syndicated out to various sites. Press releases are another great example of duplicate content.
Today, duplicate content is becoming an issue again as there are many “scraper sites” out there that are just grabbing and publishing scraped duplicate content and building a site around it. Matt Cutts – the Google voice of SEO – has stated that this last algorithm modification that was just recently introduced in the last few days was done so partly to address those scraper sites. So it will be interesting to see this debate kick into high gear again.
Thanks,
Troy
On May 7, 2011 geraldine wrote:
This article has given me insights on blogging. I would always go for quantity if you are a journalist. But if your are for SEO, quantity matters – most.
On June 21, 2011 Arnold Watson wrote:
Very interesting information. I am new to network marketing and have just put together my blog site. I have learned that one way to driving traffic to the site is by atricle marketing and this information is GOLDEN!!! Thanks for adding such valuable information.
On June 21, 2011 admin wrote:
Hi Arnold,
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if your upline or whomever you consider your mentor is selling you that you will get traffic from Article Marketing you are in for a big disappointment. Those days have passed. You may want to pick up a copy of our http://articlemarketinglies.com.
Thanks for stopping by
- Mike
On June 25, 2011 George James wrote:
This article carries a lot of weight. If you practice one-half of what the article says, you will do well in your SEO campaign. WE run luxury and exotic car rental company in houston, Dallas and Austin. We used the techniques here and we have gone up by 20 links.
On June 25, 2011 Troy wrote:
You’re welcome Arnold. You should really consider picking up our 60 page eBook on Article Marketing here:
http://articlemarketinglies.com
Also, here on the site we sell a very affordable 111 page ebook with the best of all of our content and it’s dirt cheap. You can find it here:
http://articlesubmissionreview.com/best-of-article-submission-review
Those two resources would go a long ways towards removing a lot of your learning curve and they’re worth several times what you’ll pay for them.
Welcome to the blog!
-Troy
On July 31, 2011 Art wrote:
Being I too am just getting started, I appreciate the quality info. While I love writing, I think the techniques concerning SEO can drive a ton of ‘organic’ traffic if the articles are ‘spun’ properly, and submitted to 100′s if not thousands of directories.
Perhaps a theory, as I am just starting to implement these practices, but I gotta imagine, if a 1,000+ articles targeting long and short keywords are linking back to your blog…
You can and will get rewarded with targeted ‘organic’ traffic, and stay on top!
Thanks…
Art
On August 23, 2011 Barry wrote:
I agree with the above material. I would consider that it should be a one of many ways to get links. I don’t know Google’s algorithm, yet I would have to agree with the crowd that gets a variety of unique links. That are related and higher pr. If you can get a link that Google will like, get it and mix it up then book mark it.
The (build my rank thing) is a very good way to get Google to notice you. It basically says that other people are talking about your site.
Another easier way to get to the top of Google is your domain name. If you can buy a domain that has some age and some pr and it is keyword targeted, you have won half the battle. Put the screws to it and turn it into a money site.
Also don’t forget on page seo. If you can change some things around it can make the difference.
Lastly load up a Google webmaster code to your site. This is easy to do. I have a website http://tvforipad.net that has made it to the second page of Google and the first page of bing while I was on vacation. “Tv for ipad”, gets 250,000 searches per month. I sale an app about every 10-20 clicks. Of course I have a trickle of traffic because almost no one goes to the second page. That is where major link building comes in. When I do get to the top at least 3rd position and get a tenth of that traffic. I will most likely has a good income off of one niche site.
Here is another tip. When doing keyword research to find a targeted domain name. Look at the top few rankings. The top 3-4 rankings for “tv for ipad” are held by Apple. My goal is to at top them, but to squeeze in-between would be cool. Even to have a listing that is under them would work, but the description would have to be a dazzling one. Which it should anyways.
On August 27, 2011 Gabi wrote:
I am new to this article marketing. Based on some recommendations I looked at the article spinners. The quality was just horrible. Not one of those spun article was readable. I am surprised that essentially useless articles will get accepted by the directories.
Needless to say that I am leaning for the quality camp. Have few hand spun articles placed in top directories.
What am i doing wrong????
On November 5, 2011 dabc chennai wrote:
Execellent information for all seo professionals thanks for sharing…
On November 8, 2011 Y. Sidnem wrote:
Submitting your spun article to hundreds of directories will get you backlinks for seo but if you are at all concerned about your reputation, you might want to think twice.
On December 13, 2011 Sudha wrote:
Article spinning offers the opportunity to steal the hard work of others and change it in order to pass it off as their own.