This is a Guest Post written by Thomas Urville, who uses article marketing to promote things like boxing tips. If you would like to write for TechieMania, check our guest posting guidelines.
Anyone who’s been around internet marketing for a while knows all about article marketing. It’s a solid strategy whereby you publish unique articles in article directories in hopes of getting backlinks and traffic to your site.
Here’s a quick overview of 7 of the most reputable article directories:
Ezine Articles
This is the big kid on the block when it comes to article directories. The homepage is PR6. Most marketers look to this site first for all their article marketing needs.
But EzineArticles (EZA) has its detractors too. Since the article approval process is lengthy and strict, some folks would rather take their chances with a directory that has a more lenient article acceptance policy.
EzineArticles accepts articles with as few as 250 words. But best results are obtained if the word count stays above 450. Otherwise, your article won’t benefit from the ultra-strong internal linking scheme that often catapults EZA pages to the top of the SERPs. You’ll get 2 self-serving links at the end of the article.
iSnare Article Directory
Like EZA, iSnare has a pagerank of 6, making it a powerful weapon in your article marketing arsenal. But unlike with EZA, iSnare users don’t wait for other webmasters to come along and syndicate their articles (and backlinks). Instead, they take matters into their own hands and pay iSnare to republish their articles to hundreds of other sites.
If you want a lot of backlinks — quickly — and you’re not afraid to spend a few dollars, iSnare might work out well for you.
However, it takes a long while for iSnare to approve ‘free’ article submisisons, so when speed is of the essence, you have to either pay up or find a better article marketing alternative.
ArticlesBase
This is another PR6 article directory. But it has a problem. Although they allow you to publish a total of six self-serving links (3 in the article body and 3 in the author bio), the links are no follow.
You might think this is a deal-breaker right from the start, but there’s a redeeming feature of ArticlesBase that convinces many marketers to submit content anyway. Articles published here often get resyndicated on many other sites, usually with wordpress autoblog plugins. It’s an easy way to get some link diversity that you’d otherwise miss.
Buzzle
Lots of internet marketers have a love/hate relationship with Buzzle.
While it’s undoubtedly a very strong, PR6 directory that’s loved by Google and the other search engines, they enforce strict rules that make you vulnerable to their whims.
By publishing on Buzzle, you can get great rankings in the SERPs for low-competition keyphrases. It’s a quick and easy way to grab some traffic.
But your articles need to be unique — never previously published — and over 600 words. And you’re only allowed a single link. Plus, the editorial team is strict and unforgiving. They will refuse or remove articles that they don’t like, in a seeming arbitrary fashion.
Article Alley
This PR5 directory is another place (similar to ArticlesBase) that re-syndicates your pages to other sites. They currently have a partnership deal with several other niche directory sites (like A1 Articles, Article Heaven, and Women’s Articles), so by publishing here you have a good chance of getting links from several other domains.
But there’s always a catch, right? You guessed it: Although you get 3 of them, Article Alley’s links are no follow. Text needs to be greater than 300 words. Many users complain about the long approval times before their articles are published.
Article Dashboard
This PR5 directory gives you up to 3 links, but they’re restricted to an author resource box. You can’t publish links within the body of your text.
Also, the approval times are ridiculous. It can take up to 2 weeks to get an article approved and published.
But if you’re after a nice do follow link from a site with a PR5 homepage, it might be worth the wait.
Go Articles
Like EZA, this site is a favorite of marketers. Mainly, it’s because Go Articles allows you to publish articles with very little (or no) wait time. Your submissions are approved and published almost instantly.
However, this PR4 site has a problem: it can be difficult to actually get your pages indexed in Google. Instant publication has its drawbacks.
Though there’s no limit to the number of links you can include in your text, you must supply more than 300 words.
So there you have it, a summary of some of the more important article marketing sites. Do you have any favorite places to get links and traffic by publishing your own texts? If so, please let us know in the comments section below.
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