One age old technique for building up back links is article distribution, however I honestly think it’s time to take article writing and syndication out back behind the shed and whack it over the head with a shovel.
That’s not to say article writing and distribution is entirely useless however in its most common form (hiring a overseas writer for $3 and distributing the resulting articles on free sites) I don’t believe there is much if any benefit left.
On the advice of Dan Thies over the summer we experimented with article distribution, we hired a very good writer in Montreal and paid her $10USD/per article to write up 500-600 word articles, these articles were fully researched, unique, informative and well written.. In fact one of our articles even made it into an airline newspaper, which they kindly sent us a copy of.. However beyond a few spam sites picking it up and stripping out the html link back to our site I can’t say we gained anything from it…
The reason I think its time for this old dog to be put down is because of the general confusion it causes, sure article writing and distribution works, provided you have established relationships with other webmasters and can exchange new or old content, but the good old days of being able to post articles to free directories and getting real tangable benefits have come and gone..
Why is that? Well we own a small article directory of our own that we purchased and I can tell you straight up the majority of articles being submitted are by a handful of individuals who are likely hiring themselves or others out as article submitters, this is also why when you look at most directories list of authors you see many names with thousands of articles.. As well the quality of most articles being submitted is soooo low that I think most websites actually looking for good content don’t even bother looking at article directories anymore as it takes about as much time to sort through the crap as it does to write your own content… Really it’s just a case of an idea that worked being abused and as time marches on it becomes less and less effective
Some so called “guru’s” say if you write quality content then over time you will establish a readership or a number of sites which trust your content and while that may be true in most cases your efforts would be better spent building a reputation on forums with people interested or already established in your niche..
However if you simply MUST submit articles to promote your website here is one relatively sucess way of doing it:
1) Hire a great writer, it may take you awhile to find one but when you do treat them like gold.
2) Target your content towards trafficed terms, if you write about something few people are interested in then you have a very limited audience that would even pick up your article, so you really need to laser target your niche, that doesn’t mean you only write for big traffic items but if some people are interested in it and some websites are carrying information on it then you at least have a market.
3) Hire someone to submit the articles, but make sure you use services that allow you to create your own accounts this way your articles won’t be included in some mass submitters account, if you do all the submission yourself the wasted time simply makes this a no win scenario so leverage the low cost of labour for your own benefit.
4) Create a google alerts account and with each article you submit add some sort of tag whether it be your name or a sentance and set your Google Alerts account up to notify you whenever a new page with this text is indexed, what this does is let you track roughly how sucessful your distribution is both on article directories themselves and for sites picking up your content.
5) Once Google Alerts starts notifying you of sites picking up your content, attempt to contact these sites and ask them if they would like a customized version of your article, what this does is allows you to form a relationship with other webmasters and when you rewrite your article for their website you are more likely to be able to include deep links back to your own site.
Anyways that about covers it.. Till next time..
