Article Submission — Get your Lens and Site Publicised with Articles

Just about everyone these days knows that the only way people will find your content is if your site has lots and lots of links pointing in towards it. But most people have no real clue as to how to get lots of links pointing towards their site, squidoo lens, blog or whatever. Some people are vaguely aware of submitting sites to directories, of using social bookmarking. A few may even have heard of article submissions... But they don't really know the power of these techniques.

Personally I think that article submissions are by far the most powerful way of getting the word out about your site, service or product. Not only can you use articles to publicize yourself and your product and to build-up a 'brand' and an 'image' but you can also use articles to get free in-bound links to your site. Yes, free high-quality links pointing at your lens, site or blog.

Article sites get lots of fresh content because people submit articles there. The search engines love fresh content which means that article sites are linked and indexed very, very, quickly indeed. This means that links to your site (or whatever) coming in from your articles are found quickly. Article sites also tend to have high page rank which means that links from these sites to your web pages bring with them PageRank juice and means that not only will your pages get indexed, but they will also rank higher in the search engines!

So, how does this article writing thing work then? Well, in general you write a short (usually 300 to 1000 word) article on a topic that's related to your web page. You then submit this to an article directory. The directory itself hosts a huge number of articles and makes these available to anyone who wants to copy them and use them. The article site makes money by placing lots of ads along with the articles.

But what's in it for you, the author? Well, most sites allow you to write a short boigraphy or piece about yourself. Typically you can include three links in this 'about the author resource' and these links can be to anywhere, including your own website, lens, blog (whatever). These links are live and anyone copying your article must include the resource box. This way, each article you write will give you three good links to anywhere you desire.

Let's look at it this way. An article might take you 20 minutes to write (often it can be much less, especially if you know an area well). You can easily write 4 articles in a week and submit them. That means you get 200 articles written each and every year. That's a minimum of 600 links into your site! Of course, articles get copied and posted elsewhere so you get more links because of this. And you can modify your articles, change it just enough so that it's different then submit it so another article site. Maybe you can get four or five uses out of a single article. See how the links start multiplying?

Even better, these links point to individual pages so you're not just giving good page rank to your home page. You're actively encouraging the search engines to dig deeper into your site. This is excellent for building links to distinct pages.

Articles are great, articles are wonderful and I use them very extensively in my marketing.

The only question remaining is where to submit your articles to. There are hundreds of article submission sites available. But some are very poor quality, some take forever to approve your articles and many just never get back to you. Typically I only submit to about a dozen sites and of these here are my top four:

ezinearticles.com
celtnet articles
articledashboard.com
goarticles.com

They all have very fast turn-around and they either have good PageRank now (all are improving their PageRank) or they are actively promoting themselves and the articles in their databases via RSS feeds and Social Bookmarking, which increases the chance of your article being seen and increases its overall page rank (and thus the page rank of the site the article is pointing to). However, they are all different in terms of what they allow and the types of links you can build (see this page for a brief comparison of features).

Now is your turn to join the big internet players and start promoting your web pages using articles today.