More Article Marketing

I’ve been one busy bee over the last few weeks; so busy, in fact, that I didn’t have time or energy to update this blog and for this I am sorry. So what was I so busy with, you ask? Well, a large part of it was article marketing for my clients. And I’d like to share some more article marketing ideas now.

One of the most frequently-asked questions I get regarding article marketing is to how many directories should the article be submitted. Well, here’s my take – it depends. The key factors, in my opinion, are budget and overall marketing strategy.

More directories = Higher Costs

Once the article is written and paid for, it just makes sense to send it to as many directories as possible to get the most out of it, doesn’t it? Well, sort of… I agree, it does make very good sense to submit to more than one directory. But keep in mind that submitting articles to directories takes time. In my experience, it takes about 3-5 minutes to hand-submit an article to a directory. It is not a big deal with you only work with a handful of article directories.

But if you plan on submitting to 10-20-30 or more sites, then you can do the math and see that it becomes time-consuming. Whether you do submissions yourself or hire someone to do them for you, your costs (time or money) will go up as you increase the number of directories (or the number of articles).

More Directories Doesn’t Mean More Good Directories

The main reason reason why article marketing is so popular is because it allows to quickly build links back to your site. Typically, an article directory allows up to 3 links per article that lead back to your website. The logic is simple then – to get more links, submit to more directories! Except, of course, that search engine algorithms do not treat links in the same way.

Spammy, irrelevant backlinks and other low-quality backlinks do more harm than good when you are trying to improve your search enging ranking and have to be counter-balanced by even more high-quality content on the site you are linking to. Unfortunately, too many article directories are “fly-by-night” operators. Well, here’s what Google has to say about low-quality backlinks:

…keep in mind that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time, and may disappear from our link graph relatively quickly. They may even already be being discounted by our algorithms.

As a matter of fact, it is surprisingly difficult to find a large number of good and relevant article directories! There are lots of lists out there, but when you start evaluating each directory, many fall short.

Link-Building is MORE Than Article Marketing

If all you plan on doing for link-building is article marketing, then you will need a lot of links from a lot of directories to start seeing a difference. Hopefully, your link building plan includes more than just submitting articles to hundreds of directories.

Related posts:

1. 3 Article Marketing Myths That Cost You Money
2. Get Great Articles Without Going Broke
3. Virtual Assistants Can Write Too