D o w n into the Penguin Vortex…

Note: Since the Google Penguin and Panda algorithm updates many people have been asking whether article marketing is still a good way to promote your website.

For more information on that question, see this article, Article Marketing After Google Panda & Penguin Algorithm Changes… by Peter Nisbet.

For a much longer and deeper analysis, I refer you to Surviving Google’s Penguin Update by Steve Shaw of SubmitYourArticle.com – both writers emphasize the importance of quality content that is written for the benefit of the reader.

Good Quality Article Marketing Still Works!

There is plenty of evidence available to show that posting good quality articles to the top article directories and having them link back to your site is still a good way to boost your incoming traffic and your search engine ranking.

To find out which are the current top-rated article directories, by traffic and page rank, see:

http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php

As a rule of thumb, these sites are regularly among the highest ranked directories on the Vretoolbar list:

• Ehow.com
• Squidoo.com
• Ezine Articles
• Articles Factory
• Go Articles
• Articles Base
• Article City
• Buzzle
• Article Alley
• Idea Marketers

By posting high quality articles on a few the top directories you are much more likely to get high quality backlinks and traffic to your site than if you post a badly written article on hundreds of lower ranked directories – that is how you get penalized by Google!

Manually Submitting Your Articles

The big advantage of manually submitting your articles to article directories is that it is free! You simply go to an article directory, register there and click the “Submit Article” button and post your article yourself.

The submission process takes about 15 minutes to complete. Every article directory has its own submissions procedure, which you will find on the directory website. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the rules because failure to do so means that your article will be rejected. You will have wasted your time and will have to start
the entire submission process all over again.

Using An Automatic Article Submitter

The process of submitting articles to article directories is rather slow and tedious. You can speed up the process and leverage your time by using an automatic article submitter.

An automatic article submitter saves time and gets your article delivered to publishers with much less effort work on your part. However, you need to pay as much attention to the quality of the article submitter you choose to work with as you do to the quality of the articles you write. Why? Because a good quality article submitter will be much more selective in targeting good quality article directories, blogs and newsletters than a free or cheap product that will blast your article out in one go to numerous poor quality, low ranking directories.

I recommend that you use SubmitYourArticle – a tool that I have used for several years now. There are several different membership levels to choose from, depending on how many articles you would like to submit and how widely you’d like your articles to be distributed.

Once you have set up your account and chosen your pen name, the system will guide you through any one-time set-up  procedure that you need to do.

When that is done, you are ready to submit your first article. Go to the article submission page and fill in the various fields such as the title, article body, the resource box(es) and a short description of your article. Choose a category and keywords that you used in your article.

Now click the “Submit” button and the article will be checked by a human editor to make sure it conforms to the editorial guidelines that good quality publishers demand of an article before they publish it.

Once the article has been approved, it will be distributed to the approved article directories and blogs in the SubmitYourArticle.com network, which includes many of the top quality article directories mentioned earlier in this article.

With SubmitYourArticle.com you can create multiple versions of each section of the article, from the title to each paragraph, and at the sentence level. These means that numerous different versions of each article can be created so that each directory receives, in effect, a different article.

You can also decide how fast or slow you want your articles to be “trickled out” to the networks. A slower, more “natural” pace of between 30 and 90 days is to be recommended rather than blasting out the same article to hundreds of directories on the same day.

Lesson Eight: Autoresponders

Best wishes,

David Hurley

P. S. If you really do not have the time or inclination to write your own articles, let me write them for you! Click here for details.