List Building Toolkit

Which article directories should you use and which are the best? The answer: It depends on the kind of article you’re passing and the type of written work you’re writing about. The line is drawn in between for the simple reason that there are article submission sites that focus on poetry and literary works, while some are pureley business-related, like newbie marketing. You will also find your business articles completely ignored on other sites and your poetry works on a particular site inclined towards a specific genre.

Article directories have been one of the greatest venues for writers to gather scattered and countless information and thoughts into one vehicle worthy of your ideas. While it is of great advantage to submit from a directory to another, here are some significant points to look at prior to submitting your treasured works to article submission sites. Read on.

The stability and longevity of an article directory

Specifically, you want to deal with an article directory that is still up and running for a period of 5 years or more. This gives you the confidence that this particular article submission hub will give you the kind of traffic you want for your articles. One more thing, you need to check site reports stating if any of the URLs in a particular directory is delivering direct web traffic to your site or what they call as referrers. Always remember that directories that only existed for months may less likely give you the traffic you desire. Hence, it is still best to go for a trusted article directory that is in operation for years.

The popularity of the site

With the first and major consideration, online popularity and visibility is important. The popularity of an article directory is considered a proprietary measure that most major search engines use as a basis of providing highest page rank. Once an article submission site has a page rank of 5 or 6, you’ll be assured that you have an excellent one to help you boost traffic and links as well.

The legitimacy and authenticity of the article directory

There are various ways to unearth article directories’ legality. Once you’ve submitted your articles to these submission sites, these directories should get back to you within 24-48 hours upon submission through electronic mail. If there are cases of bounced messages, the site is fraud. Second, there must be a general information or background about the site’s operator; this is one way of ensuring that you’re dealing with professional people willing to help you in every way possible and doesn’t have the intention of concealing something from you. Finally, legitimate article directories have thousands of authors listed under its site. If a particular directory only has figure lesser than a thousand, it might probably be just testing the waters, and therefore, not a good article submission hub to start with.

In a nutshell

Article directories are considered one of the best sites to expose your written works. Thus, you need to choose the best submission site in order to generate great numbers of readers to your articles, and visitors to your site in the long run.This is most required especially with SEO. Remember, it is an excellent option to submit an article to a top submission directory, than have your articles placed on some low class, fleeting and fraud directory sites. Make a wise decision today.

No matter how good your copy is, and no matter how smart and creative you are, without traffic, you are dead.  The fancy graphics don't matter, the best products don't matter either if you are not getting anyone to see the website.  Traffic is always the end game for anyone trying to publish ads or sell anything on the web.  It seems like its a mystery to most, as most products sold on the web focuses on content, PPC (which is not bad, but also very hard to get right), or management products to help with productivity.Very few really work on the nuts and bolts of where you get traffic from.

The number one source of free traffic will come from natural search engine ranking, and the consistency is hard to beat.  Why?  Once you build your site up on a few keywords that get decent search volume, this traffic will be consistent.PPC and other methods are also fine, but are also subject to other risks ($$$ cost) that really have to be managed.  Basically you need links and content - this is the key to getting higher rankings on Google.

One way to get links is through  submitting niche articles related to your site to an article directory.Once your site topic is decided, you will want to write at least 20 articles that are 300-500 words in length.  Before you write the articles, make sure you have signed up for an adsense and adwords account even if you are not going to use them.  Google has some terrific free tools for researching keywords and how often they are searched.  You don’t need to spend days researching keywords BUT you really need to pick 3 or 4 keywords to focus on for your articles that get decent traffic in the search engines and are related to your topic.  Another tool you can use that is free is PPC Web Spy (just google it) – it allows you to see what keywords people are bidding on for their PPC ads on Google – again, they have probably done extensive work since they are paying for the ad clicks – no reason you cannot just benefit from their work and use some of those keywords.

Once this is done, make sure you write at least 5 articles per keyword grouping (2 for each article) with links to your site using those keyworeds.  Do not try to tackle too many keywords at once - you need about 200-300 links realistically for each keyword to move up - depending on how popular they are it may take more.  This is where any article directory comes in handy.You then sumbit your article which is then redistributed for you by the directory to others looking for content or to learn about a subject.This really does make getting links easier and faster in the long run - it just takes a bit of time to start working.  In addition, you may want a tool to help rewrite your articles so that many different versions are distributed to thousands of sites.  This is a key to quicker ranking on the engines as the same thing distributed over and over just does not do the trick.

In addition to articles, you will want to submit your site on all the major social networks like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, etc.The more of that the better.  You will want to create an account on all of them - very time consuming but needs to only be done one time.You can do a search on Google or other engines for a list of the major ones.Once this is done, you can also use tools to automate posting to all of your accounts at once which saves a huge amount of time.

Almost anything you want to do on the web can be found for free, but there are tons of stuff that will save you huge amounts of time for a small fee.  I usually opt for the time saving tools - in the long run its really worth it as there are only so many hours in the day.  Its always a trade off of time and ease of use vs paying for it.  Some stuff I do with free tools, some stuff I pay a monthly fee to use because it saves me so much time I could not achieve any goals without them.

Assuming you write articles and then submit to social networks, you should start to see some results in about a month.  Longer term, even once you get ranking, you need a plan to continually feed articles to directories – not as often as the beginning, but you really want to do at least 1 per month per keyword to keep fresh links coming into the search engines.  Over time, the content you distributed that Google finds links to disappears as sites go offline, content is deleted and replaced etc.  Once you get a stable of articles written, often you can just do a complete rewrite of an older article and then submit that again - its often faster than rewriting a new article.