Lately I have been reading a lot of hype about how you can improve your business by submitting articles to all of the article databases on the Internet. Most of the talk comes from different blogs and site owners who are paid a commission for promoting various solutions. Considering the two biggest software solutions run $167 – $400, they stand to make some decent money on promoting the products, even if they produce only marginal results.
So I thought it would be fun to test out the process and see if article submission on a large scale actually works. There are some 500+ article databases on the Net, most requiring registration. So as you might imagine, submitting articles to all of the databases can be overwhelming. I am going to share my experience to see if the whole process is worth the time or if it’s just a waste of effort.
To help with the test, I downloaded a 3 day trial of ArticleSubmitter Pro (Google ‘em for more info). This software product helps to automate the process of article submission by doing two things:
- Compiling all of the article sites into one handy location
- Auto-filling out forms such as
- Site registration,
- Article title
- Article summary
- The article
- Author bio
Understand, I am not reviewing the software, the software so far seems to do exactly what it says it will. This is a test of article submission to see if it actually helps optimize search engine placement and traffic.
I am going to use as my baseline the article I posted other day; Abe Lincoln’s Productivity Secret. Since it was linked by quite a few sites as being a good article, one would assume it will be accepted by the editors of the article directories as well. A current search on Google shows it has about 14 links. Considering some of the marketing for the various article submission products boast link rates hitting 300-400, it will be interesting to see after submitting to a couple hundred databases how high this number will climb.
We obviously can’t expect the number to climb today or tomorrow. The editors must first accept the article and then Google and other search engines must spider the article databases to pick up the content. Some of the products claim 3 days before the first results come in, others say it could be a week or more. I started last night, so we might see something tomorrow or over the weekend. If you are curious, just keep an eye on that Google search above.
Let me just say, with such a large number of sites out there, even with the software, it’s still a fairly daunting task to submit one article to all or most of them. Some sites are slow, others are redirected, most require pre-registration. One tool that’s helped me so far is Activewords (I am not affiliated with them – it’s just a good product). Since most of the sites are built using the same software, I wrote a quick Activeword script to fill out the forms and auto register me.
So far, I am about 50 sites down in the list – that is only 1/10th of the way ! So there is plenty more to go. If I were to guess, it will probably take me a solid 6 hours to submit to all of them since this is my first time around.
I love testing, so this should be an interesting experiment.
Any comments?
Technorati Tags: SEO, article submission, web traffic, Google
{ 15 comments }
Brad: I will be insterested in how your experiment works out. I did not even know there was article submission software…. Hmmm… I am feeling a bit behind on things, so thanks for delving into this topic!
I am also interested in what constitutes and article. Many people call my blog posts articles, but I dobn’t consider them to be articles. I guess some are more article like than others. When you submit articles, are these different and distinct from your blog posts?
Could you get the script so that I could blog about it, and get it our to users?
Buzz
[email protected]
Lisa, hmm..great question! In my opinion, an article is basically a formal report which explains a topic in depth. Where a blog post can be as short as a sentence or two.
If, for example on your blog you did a focused 500 – 1000 word post on 5 ways a manager can deal with difficult employees, I’d say that would likely be an article. Where 2 paragraphs describing where on the NET managers can find resources for dealing with difficult employees would be just a post.
Having read a lot of the articles on the sites, I’ll say they vary a lot. Some are flimsey 500 word teasers where the author just wants to get you to their site. Others are almost mini-books, so jam packed with info you can’t believe they are giving it away for free.
Hey, I’m gonna see if I can register for your contest (where’d I leave my best management hack anyway..It’s around here someplace LOL). That’s a very generous package you are offering.
Buzz,
I don’t know how you stay so on top of Activewords posts, but you are
I’ll trade you my script for a tutorial on how you “zero in” so well.
What do you say?
Any updates, Brad?
I’ve been so busy with programming I haven’t paid too much attention. I will say that the submission process was a bit exhausting to submit to all 500+ sites even with the software and scripts.
It’s linked a lot in google though.
I’d say you’d get the most bang for the buck by just submitting to ezinearticles.com
Instead of posting your article to 500+ directories, I will recommend getting it in 20-30 quality article directories. I do my article submissions via wesubmitarticles.com with their package C
Just wondering how it went. Any updates. Wouldnt you get penalised for dublicate content.
Hi Alan,
I got some incoming links for awhile from doing it. But mostly from the big name article directories.
I’d recommend against paying big bucks for software If there was a title that did maybe 5 or 6 directories and reworded common words to prevent the penalizing then that might work. Otherwise, I’d just manually do it.
Hope this helps.
Hi, is there a way to receive your blog feed in my daily email?
I really like your site, keep up the good work.
there are a few softwares that automate the process of submitting articles to various article directories but i would still recommend submitting articles to top 20 directories instead of submitting them to 500 remember quality is more important than quantity , you would only software if you are competing on quantity.
Well if you are looking for direct traffic from your articles you should go for quality and submit to only top 10 or 20 article databases but if you want to use it for link building then quantity counts.
Thats a good point. I normally submit to the bigger directories instead of mass submissions. Bit you might be right about doing more to get more links.
I get some attention on SEO Elite in one of your other post and now I am reading this. I am wondering if it good to use automated softwares for submission purposes? I have read many rants on this on many popular webmaster forums.