Internet Marketing

What is an article directory?

Anyone who has been on the internet for a while can skip this section because they will already have come across them. It is included for newcomers to internet marketing who may not know that they exist. An article directory is a website that allows authors to submit content that may then be used in a newsletter or on a website. The rule is normally that the article must be used unchanged and it must include what is usually called a resource box. They can be useful to a website owner as a source of content while benefiting the author with the resulting backlink.

Follow up:

Examples of article directories

At the time of writing, I am using articles from articlesbase, submityourarticle and ezinearticles but there are many others. They are free to use so can form part of the strategy to build a business with no money.

Should I use them?

If you find writing to be an easy thing to do and can write about your chosen subject with ease then stay away from them because your own original content is always going to get better results. If getting your thoughts onto your website is a slow process then they can be very useful as a source of content to build traffic.

What is the catch?

As the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch and this is certainly true with the article directories. So what to look out for?

Quality Some articles are very good but many are not. Good ones will enhance your site but bad ones will drag it own. Proper proof-reading of articles seems non-existent and many have not even been checked with the simplest of spell checker.

Re-hashed PLR

A further example of poor quality articles is when a piece of badly-written PLR is then run through an 'article spinner' to produce a modified version. Both the original and the 'spun' version may contain lots that will possibly interest the search engine robots but will look terrible when read by a real person.

Duplicate content

You will be using content that has already been used elsewhere on at least one occasion because it was in the article directory. It is quite likely to be used in other places too. Some argue that this will harm search engine rankings for your site although others claim that it does not.

Copyright

Once a person has written something then they own the copyright to that work and have the rights to determine how it is used unless they choose to make it a public domain work. That means there are limitations on how content can be used but these are not always followed. As an example, Wikipedia content can be quite freely used on a website provided that a link back to the original article is included. Yet articles appear in directories that have clearly been 'copied and pasted' from Wikipedia because they include some of the text that appears on pages there

Time

Managing the 24 hours of the day that are available to you is clearly important so the time taken to get content articles has to be considered. It will take between 15 and 30 minutes to firstly find and then format an article ready for your site. That may be a problem if you are attempting to build a business in your spare time but could be a problem for people already working full-time

So are they worth the effort?

Only you can really decide that. With work, they can provide additional content to enhance any site but you must be prepared to do the work if you want the results. Original content is always going to be better and that can even be used in article marketing should you choose

A further copyright note

This article is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. That means that it may be freely used provided that it is not changed and a link to the website is included