Submitting your blog posts to article archive sites is widely recognized not only as a good way to create credible links to your website, but also as a means of getting more people to read your prose. In January of this year I started submitting articles to the major article directories. I will save you a lot of pain and suffering by telling you what I have learned from each of you during this process. They are listed below in order of popularity.
Ehow: With more than 20 million unique visitors per month, this is one of the best sites in the world. I enthusiastically joined but have not been able to post any articles as there is apparently a bug in your system. On the other hand, more than a hundred users asked to become my “friend” in the first days after I signed up, even though we don’t know each other from Adam! I still can’t understand what benefits they get from adding friends, but it’s probably because you can spam them! I should note that you will not be able to publish your article as it is on Ehow, as its format requires you to enter step-by-step instructions on how to do something. You can adapt much of your material, of course, but it’s a lengthy process that can end in frustration if the aforementioned mistake rears its head. So far, my participation in eHow has not generated tangible benefits!
EzineArticles: The forerunner of all article archives! Your readers are still millions, and putting your articles here will give you quality backlinks overnight. The main difference between EzineArticles and the competition is that your articles will always be reviewed before being published. Your accepted shipments will be distributed by default.
Associated content: A highly regarded credible archive, with the finest appearance. At first, humans review their submissions and take a long time to do so, but after some are accepted, inclusion is immediate. My first article was rejected for plagiarism, citing my own duplicate article that I had posted on EzineArticles! Eventually I had their error corrected, but while you’re still in test mode, I recommend that you submit the Associated Content first, and once it’s approved, then submit the rest, to avoid any issues. Associated Content RSS feeds are hosted by some of the major news sites, including USA Today.
SquidooDespite being part of a site that has millions of visitors, my Squidoo content took longer to be crawled by Google, and some of it was destroyed. Squidoo, although it is often referred to as an article site, is actually a kind of social network. You sign up and create unlimited “lenses”, which are pages where you place any number of items through a wide variety of widgets. The only widget that serves our purposes here is RSS that you can use to display your posts, but since it’s dynamic content, it won’t generate a ton of backlinks. The number of people reading my glasses in two months is in the single digits, probably because there are several million glasses to compete with. Unless it’s for the backlinks you can put through some of the widgets, I can’t recommend wasting your time with Squidoo.
Zimbio: This is one of the easiest to work with. Add your RSS feeds through your member interface and then simply choose which posts you want to include. You will only be asked to select a suitable category and your content will appear immediately online. You have the option to edit the download text, which can be a good idea to avoid having duplicate content (see the bottom of this article). For the full text of the article to load, make sure your RSS feed is not set to use an excerpt only. Despite its limitations, Zimbio should not be ignored as it has millions of monthly readers.
Searchwarp: It looks pretty outdated, with ugly colored icons and logos, but don’t let that stop you from becoming an active member as this is a credible site and the articles you submit here will be quickly crawled by the major search engines . . Initially, all your uploaded files will be reviewed by Searchwarp staff, but they usually give you a quick approval unless it’s a weekend or holiday. Searchwarp bills itself as a community of writers, and for the privilege of posting, you are expected to participate in a number of ways, all of which will add to your “community engagement score.” You need three points to submit a new article. The main activity to accumulate points is to review the articles of other members and assign a grade to them according to a variety of criteria. Posting a comment gives you more points, but learn from my mistakes by not criticizing even the worst articles, as that will engender threats of retaliation and insults, as it happened to me. If you must let the author know how much it sucks, use the anonymous comment option! After a series of submissions, your articles will be automatically approved. Searchwarp allows site visitors to copy your articles and put them on their own sites, if you enable that option per article. Searchwarp is like a social network for amateur writers and therefore requires the most amount of time to participate.
GoArticles: You have only a fraction of Ezinearticles visitors, but your backlinks were crawled overnight. Unlike the other top article sites, this one never subjects its uploads to any scrutiny from its staff. You also earn money from content contributors by charging for preferential positioning.
An important point: if you are going to participate in any of these sites is that duplicating the content of your own site in this way will have consequences for Google. Contrary to popular belief, Google will not penalize your site’s pagerank rating, but will instead seek not to include duplicate content in search results, likely resulting in the omission of your site’s version in favor of one of the Top ranked article archives. The solution is to produce two versions of each article: one to appear only on your site and one to distribute. Each version should differ significantly from the other, although it does not have to be a total rewrite.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if other sites republish your material, they will rarely honor the terms of the article site syndication agreement. Even if they keep your bio, I have often found my articles with different titles and additional paragraphs added. Content theft is of epidemic proportions on the web, and all of these article files have a disclaimer that absolves them of any liability. It is up to you to find and contact any violators. One way to locate violations is to search for exact phrases in your article.
For all of these sites, your article page views will likely be quite low and clicks back to your websites via your bio links will be even less. Several offer monetary rewards based on the number of page views their posts get, but it will be just a pittance, even if you end up being a top author. Post in article archives for the quality of the backlinks they generate and for the pleasure of others reading your words.