Submit articles : Is it worth it?

I read in various webmaster related sources that submiting articles is a good promotion techinque.

Is that true? Have you ever done it, and do you know where to submit an article?

Submitting articles: Could you elaborate on that, please? :)

Here is how it done :

You write an article with content relevant to your site's. After that you submit it to sites that have an articles section. They give you a backlink in advance.

Yes I have read that it is a good method to promote your site. I agree that it is good but I am not sure how many hits it would give you, I guess it really depends on the amount of traffic the site you submit the article to receives. Either way you will get some hits and you can also put the articles on your website so you'll have more content.

I know some people who submit tutorials to sites like good-tutorials.com and they receive thousands of hits to their websites. I think it is a good way to receive some traffic.

Can you tell us some info on that?

What type of articles your friends writed? And what type of site does they own?

I think it will help establish good backlinks with the anchor text you chose.

It all depends on the type of sites you submit your article to. If it does not complement your site, it may not be of much use.

If interested, please read this article on my site . This talks about website promotion through articles as well as the impact due to the Google duplicate content penalty.

Note to moderator: If posting links to own site is not allowed, please feel free to remove the link.

I will agree with you nramkr.

In other words, articles are like CPC campaigns. You should target to keywords that match your audience.

Otherwise you still get traffic, but no conversions, as the people who click on your links look for something else that you give.

By the way, posting own links its ok when it is appropriate (relevant to what we talk). I read your article, it is nice.

Feel free to post it here if you want :)

Hi all,

Those of you who have submitted articles; how has that worked for you?

Do you believe most people honor the terms of service and maintain the signature/bio at the end?

Have you gotten some conversions or just a lot of looky lous?

I never had real results from articles. I just got some extra hits

Maybe you didn't write something relevant to your site's topic.

Articles are one of the best ways to promote a site.

That's what I do, though I've only submitted one so far.

~Crystal

Articles build your credibility. Good articles help to convince the visitor that you are an authority on the topic. Even if it does not result in a sale immediately, it has long term benefits including prospective customers knowing about you and your site by word of mouth.

That's a great definition nramkr. It seems that you really know the subject.

Check your new title :)

Thanks Nikolas. That is a big complement you have given me.

You are welcome my friend :)

Is it possible to buy good articles?

Can you explain? You mean to buy unique articles from a content writer?

Yeah like articles which are worth of posting on digg which will be sucessful etc.

Then you should contact YMC. She is the best content writer around :)

I have used her help many times not for articles, but for the content of my sites.

Now regarding digg, you can't say that an article worths or not. Digg is like lottery. You have to be lucky to get your link in the first page, there is nothing to do with quallity there (a quick view in their home page will easilly convince you....)

 :-[  :-*

Between the webmaster forums and writing forums I look at, it would seem that this is a hot topic on all of them. Debate is whether in the long run it would be more effective to put the content on your own site rather than on one of the article sites. On the webmaster forums the opinions seem rather split. The writing forums have a more decided opinion on keeping it on your own site, but admit sometimes article directories can be effective.

My opinion (based on observation, not proven by testing) is that writing an article for someone else's blog or website directly with a cross promotion or payment agreement has a better return for article writers because:

1. You know who is using the article.
2. You know the bio & links will remain intact.
3. You eliminate dup content issues.
4. You lessen the chance of the article being ripped and used by the auto content generator folks.

I have seen several conversations on Digg as well. General consensus is it's great for hits but not conversions with the exceptions of forums, directories, and to a lesser extent other article sites.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the most important aspect of article submissions....backlinks to tier 2 pages.  How it works is that the link you have to your page at the bottom is NOT your website name.  You may add that link too, but hte important one is the exact page you are trying to rank higher for in the search engines.  The article you submit needs to contain anchor text the same or similar to the page name.  So if the page you want to rank higher is "brown dogs" then you say Bill is the author of dogs.com, which contains the related article brown dogs (which in anchor text).  You'll find that your brown dogs page jumps in ranking after a few people link back.

That's a very good point, but I start thinking that google don't give weight to links that coming from duplicated web pages.

So I guess this will work best if you submit your article to a small ammount of directories, or if you have some extra time to submit different versions of your article....