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I used to tell people the best thing to do for article marketing is to send your articles to major article directories, like Ezinearticles. But things have changed and now I am not so sure this is the bet advice for people with limited time and resources. The approval process at Ezinearticles is really slow sometimes. They can be really fussy about what is acceptable or not in their articles. Have you read the entire terms of service and understood them? It is all even slower if you are a non-paying member. But be real, who is going to pay to submit only one article to one site just to get it approved faster? When it comes to getting backlinks from your articles submitted to "EZA" you're only getting backlinks from one IP address so after a while the backlinks obtained from your published articles are becoming less and less effective. "EZA" also seems to have different policies for different level members when it comes to adding hyperlinks in your resource boxes, which is unfair because it causes a lot of grief for my students who are just starting out with using their service. Another drawback is that Google has appently started giving less value to links from article directories. What can a budding article marketer do? When WordPress became the default content management system and publishing platform for new sites, there was also a lot of ways this "new" technology could be used to syndicate articles easily. With WordPress you can create a user account with the ability to only publish articles. With that user account in hand you now have the ability to receive free articles and publish them on your site if you want. In order for you to have free articles to receive, someone has to be writing them and sending them out. That is when special services like My Article Network come to the forefront. This gives you the freedom to syndicate your articles and some of them let you put your affiliate links in the articles. What makes this especially good for you is that you can write excellent articles and make money whenever someone reads them and buys a product from your affiliate link you have embedded within the article. Not only does "EZA" (and other article directories) prohibit placing your affiliate links directly in your articles, they are not especially helpful with syndication. Many authors who have had their articles republished discover that the links have been left out. But since no one is monitoring that, you are the one who must become involved it you want to correct the situation. That is a time consuming hassle. It does seem that the major article directories are dying a slow death. Why? Because they are not much help when it comes to syndication and that means they are not keeping up with the times. When companies like this do not keep up with the needs of their users they experience a loss of trust and value and over time are less desirable to use. However, since these major article directories have been around so long and their content approval procedures are so strict, they do really well in the search engines and they get your articles ranked well still. Posting duplicate content to many places simultaneously can get those links discredited. Since there's so much of this duplicate content getting propagated only a few of these content pieces will get indexed, and only a small minority of the links will be applied towards your sites. Article syndication services like isnare are less effective too, because they post duplicate content to a whole bunch of places. When you post duplicate content to a lot of places at once, many of those links are discredited and worthless. When you syndicate your articles, you can receive backlinks from hundreds or thousands of sites and IP addresses. That is much better than from one single site. Two of the better services that you can use to propagate unique versions of your articles are My Article Network and Unique Article Wizard. You should check them out if you want to use article marketing to your advantage. |