Article Marketing

[BobGW]

Hello,

Our nearest ecommerce competitor has quite a few links from article directories like ezinearticles.com and similar sites.

I know these sites are bottom of the barrel in SEO, but I've been thinking of writing a few 500 word articles and posting them on some of the strongest of these article directories.

Maybe I'll stick to ezinearticles.com since I only like to get links from sites that are going to stick around. What do you think - which of these article directories going to be here for the long term?

Mainly what I'm asking for here is a top 5 list of the best article directories, or perhaps a better article marketing strategy.

I loved that whiteboard friday on Article Marketing. I'm going to watch that again.

Thank you.

[BobGW]

Thanks Ryan!

[RyanKent]

Simple online contact works fine, but it depends on your niche.

Let's say you are a computer programmer specializing in building WordPress sites. You can join wordpress.com, wordpress.org and numerous other communities by simply registering on those sites. Then read questions asked each day and answer some of them.

Each time you offer a valid answer, you are not only helping the person who asked the question but numerous others who will see your response later. You will become known in the community.

At times you will see a question regarding a topic you have covered on your site. Link to the topic and expose your site to the community. Sometimes you will find that you have repeatedly answered the same question. That may be a signal to write a great article covering the topic.

Forums, blogs, etc. all offer ways for users such as yourself to generate content.

[BobGW]

OK that's clear, that is kind of what I was wondering. So how exactly do you contact a site that covers your niche- do you use phone or email? What exactly do you say? What works?

[RyanKent]

You will find your answers by looking at the below article:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet

If you read that article without reading this far you are probably asking "Why did he offer that link? It has nothing to do with writing articles and sharing them on directories?"

That was the first article I read from Danny Dover. It was a well-written, helpful article. I believe Danny may have worked for SEOmoz at the time, but this site has an open community. If you take the time to write a similar, high quality article then you can have that article published in this site's blog. It could be your twitter link at the bottom, or perhaps a helpful link to your profile or site at the bottom of the article.

Whether your niche is vitamin sales, coffee or cars there are plenty of sites which discuss your topic. Write a great article and let the world know about it. Keep most of your content on your site but once in a while offer your article to a site that covers your niche. You can then become a bigger part of their community, a known contributor, and gain recognition for yourself and your site that way.

The entire concept of creating 500 word mediocre articles for the primary purpose of SEO, then sharing these average quality articles with various article directories is something that is primarily being done for the purpose of manipulating search results. Even if it works today, you are always going to be one panda update from making a "I don't understand why my rankings dropped" post.

That is where I would offer a very different opinion.