Content Distribution

You’ve written a great blog post and you want people to read it. Unfortunately you don’t have much traffic to your site. The first thing you have to do is keep writing that great content – eventually people will come – but why wait? You can do many things to increase traffic and one of the most popular methods is article marketing – also known as “bum marketing”. Put simply, this method involves getting your content out to authority sites with a link back to your in order to gain traffic to your site. Of course we’ve all heard of this and utilize this method already – right? If not, you need to start doing it right now.

What’s the best way to do this? That is an impossible question to answer, but I am going to give you several effective channels for you to distribute your content so that it gets out in front of eyeballs and gains backlinks at the same time. There are a lot of Web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, HubPages, Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, and tons of others that should be utilized, but the primary focus of this article is on article directories.

Most of these methods are free. The first one is of course EzineArticles and should always be your first point of article distribution. If you don’t already have one, sign up for an account and write an article. EzineArticles has much more strict guidelines than most article directories and it is a good place for you to learn good form when writing your articles. They review the articles and will kick it if it is deemed duplicate content – meaning don’t use PLR – write you own stuff. They will also kick it if it appears to be keyword stuffed. EzineArticles makes a bunch of money from Adsense (from my understanding) and they want quality articles on their site.

Okay, you all know about EzineArticles and sites like them – for a good list of article directories listed by traffic and page rank, you can take a look at this: List Of Top 50 Article Directories which is always updated (as of this writing). I would suggest that you pick at least 5 of those and submit unique articles to each of those sites. Of course writing 5 unique article is time consuming – if you don’t have much money – just do it. If you want, you can also outsourse it or buy a good quality spinner (most suck) like The Best Spinner (my affiliate link – and I use this product) which can make multiple unique and readable pieces of content off of just one article.

Now I am not going to go into how to properly write an effective article or resource box (try this link for more info: EzineArticles), but these are critical things you need to pay attention to if you want to gain the maximum results from your efforts. Poorly written content with out effective keyword density optimization and lacking proper anchor text links to your site will not yield the best results – so read up on those points and make sure they are given special attention when creating an article marketing campaign.

Some other sources that I have started to use are Scribd and DocStoc. There are other similar sites, but I like these the best. These are document sharing sites and they are much like an article directory, but the way you submit and “share” articles differs. The best way is to experience them yourself – have a look around familiarize yourself. I have started to use these sharing sites and sometimes they rank high – and they rank fast. It will take more time to tell the power (or not) of these sites, but I suggest you utilize them as part of your overall article marketing strategy.

The last thing that I suggest you take a look at is an article distribution service. Now, there are good things and bad with these. The simple fact is that most of the places where your article is “distributed” to are sites that do not carry a lot of authority. On the upside, once you submit your article, it’s hands-off and you can gain literally hundreds of backlinks over time from the single submission. There are quite a few services available and I have tried many – my favorite is hands-down Unique Article Wizard (my affiliate link – and I use it). I have gained thousands of links to my sites using this service and the nice thing is that it submits articles over time (as determined by you) so that you don’t get a glut of links all at once which doesn’t look natural. The other great thing is that Unique Article Wizard has a free plugin that will distribute your content to those people using their plugin – vastly extending the reach of your backlinks. In fact, during the time that I solely focusing on IM and left this site dormant, I was filling it with new content daily from the UAW plugin – so a lot of people gained backlinks from this site and many others like it just a single submission of their article. Anyway, if this is something that you can afford, it is a great additional tool to supplement the above article directories.