How Many Directories Should You Submit To?
Article directory submissions is a necessity in today’s online marketing arena. But how many directories should you submit to?
If you listen to Chris Knight at EzineArticles.com, you should only submit to one article directory. Naturally, his. Others will tell you to submit to every article directory you can find so that you can maximize all of your article marketing opportunities. I disagree with bits of advice and I’ll tell you why.
EzineArticles is not the only article directory that e-zine publishers and editors use. There are hundreds, even thousands, of article directories online and a few article submission services as well. On the other hand, once your article has been picked up by about 100 e-zine publishers and webmasters then you don’t get that much benefit from it any more. So which ones should you use?
There are two things you can do to market your articles through article directories. The first of these is to choose a submission service like iSnare. ISnare claims to send out your articles 40,000 or so directories and websites, but most of them aren’t going to be interested in your articles. You send send your articles out to their list for a few dollars per article and it’s worth it for the most part.
Before you do that, however, I recommend that you select a few article directories - 5 or 10 - and manually submit your articles to those directories under your user name. The benefit you get by doing this is you get to see your articles appear under your account name whereas iSnare submits all of its articles under a generic account name. This makes tracking those articles impossible. But if you manually submit your articles to 5 or 10 directories then you can track your articles in those directories and see how many people are publishing them. Once an article reaches its maximum effectiveness - you see more than 100 downloads of that article - then you can take it out of the directories, rewrite it, and recirculate it. You’ll get a lot more mileage out of every article that you do that with.
Ezinearticles is becoming more difficult to deal with. I submitted an article that was accepted, then a few days later they took it down saying it had too many keywords. (Well, duh!) I revised the article and they accepted it again. Now they say it is overly self-promoting. I emailed to ask what they expected me to do as they have previously accepted other articles from me and my articles have appeared on major sites such as AOL and CNN.com (those placements have nothing to do with ezinearticles). I am a professional writer and I think their recent behavior is unprofessional. If they don’t clear this up soon I will stop submitting to them.