Posting to Article Directories? Do, but don't waste your time.

"Work smarter, not harder".I am into internet marketing and one of my main problems is an old favorite of yours, too: HOW TO GET TRAFFIC.
So I am constantly looking out for ways to get traffic. PPC, Forums, Social Networks, Videos, Ebooks, etc etc.About a year ago I finally decided to have a go at Article Marketing. I never looked into it too closely as it seemed a fairly old idea which passed by me without me doing anything and so perhaps I had missed my train.
But I am curious by nature and so I had to have a stab at it, just to see what it brings. I mean, I have many article submitting programs, tons of PLR articles, Article rewriters, Article spinners, gigabytes of the stuff so why not see if I can get anything out of it?I did a few but I had many question and few answers and the more I looked into it, the more questions came up.
Is it better to submit many articles to just about everyone or just few articles to the best Article Directories out there?
How many words? Some directories will not accept anything with less than 500 words, some authors spend much time split checking the wording on the about box, some spend hours selecting the right categories as some directories will delete anything that's in the wrong category and so on and on.
There was too much to know. So I did what I usually do. I started my own article directory (this one!) and took a bit of a back seat, getting other people's articles in to see what they do and what works.After 18 months, here we are, I haven't yetsubmitted many articles of my own but I find I have learned a bit about how it all works.I now run half a dozen directories, two for general articles and the rest about niches (cars, dating, legal etc) and have gone through 50.000 articles.
Some of the stuff I have found will no doubt surprise some authors, and some Article Directory owners too.Running a directory will pose some of the same questions that authors face, but from the inside it is somewhat easier to see what works and what doesn't.At first, when faced with 100 articles to go through I checked them for spelling errors, uniquenness, spam words, word count, links too far up in the article body etc etc and let me tell you it's a nightmare.It might take 5 minutes per article if you do all that, and I did, for a while.
Then it was 200 articles a day, then 300 to go through.Some people are posting machines. I got a custom script made to check articles for word count. Anything that's not 300 words get deleted before I even get to see it. Hopefully it'll lessen my work a little!.But what if some of those articles were actually very good 100% original? Will I be throwing away some gold with the mud?So I stopped checking them for word count.
Instead I added a script that if an article is short, the page will display fewer ads, hoping to keep a nice balance between content and adsense. A page with too many ads and too little contente is not going to be a page that'll attract many visitors.For months I spent quite a long time checking these articles coming in, some days even 500 articles.Not much revenue at all, people never click on ads, they get immune to them.One good point I thought, a site with 25.000 pages will give me 25.000 backlinks to anything I put in the footer.
And it does and the backlinks do show up in the SE. PR value? zero. traffic value? possibly one stray visitor a month.Not much good then, so why am I doing all this? Ah yeah, I had forgotten that I wanted to learn about article marketing.So I soldiered on, about two hours each day or more, I even read up on speed reading, and used software that'll chew any text to spit it out word by word into you, at 300 words a minute, you just watch them flash by and in the end you enter a different dimension where you don't see each words any more but it's like watching what can be described as a "textual movie".. scary stuff!
In the end I opened up the gates a little bit. I quickly checked the headings for obvious nonsense, searched the whole database for obvious spam word and then let everything through.I then discovered that when checking the articles if I found some article with obvious problems, (for instancethe author might be copy and pasting it from MS Word and all those strange characters will appear in the article)I could check out ALL articles by that one author and there will be a very good chance that there would be many moreweird articles posted by the person, sometimes I'd find 30 bad articles.So, select them all and wooosh, all author's articles gone in one clean swoop.
Must remember this when posting myself uh? Make one or two mistakes and you get all articles reviewed, if more bad articles are found, the moderator isn't going to go through all of them with a comb: you get the lot removed.This applies also to people adding many links to the body of their articles. These articles get approved as I don't even read their body but when I find one, I might review a few from the sameauthor and if more are found... wooosh, they all go. Tough luck dude, next time read the rules.
 
But recently the main site started lagging. With 30.000 articles under its belt, the server was beginning to feel some strain.The hosting people even suspended my account, they said that they were pleased that the site "took off" but it was a bit too much for a shared hosting so it was eitherget a VPS or get off our server!It was a bit af a tough decision because the site isn't making much in the way of revenuebut I worked out that it may (just!) manage to bring in enough to pay for its own VPS.
 
So the novely came and wore off as the site still lags a bit.Then it hit me. The answer to all submission rules, the word count, mispellings etc.The main point is always the same simple one: does the article bring in traffic or does it justsit there collecting dust?I had a look at the stats and found that there are articles briging in Google traffic and there are articles doing just nothing.So I went into the database and run a couple of quick searches through the articles.
The site has been live since Jan 2008 socould it be thet there are articles that have been sitting there for over a year and never received any traffic? I was startled. 5000 + articles received ZERO views in over a year!!A further search revealed that in all I had 17.000 articles that averaged ONE view in over 6 months.After deleting all this dead weight, the site is now breathing again and traffic coming in will find a moreresponsive site.So that is it, this has to be the only posting guideline.
 
I won't care what the article looks like, so long as itmeets Google's on TOS, any article will be given a chance.However, if after a while the article doesn't do anything it'll be deleted. Let's say it must generate at least 2 views each month. 
I am not asking for a lot.I am sure that there will always be the odd chap that won't agree with having their articles deletedbut that's life, you can't please everyone.
 
If everyone is being fair, an article that produces no visitors is no good to the Author and as far as backlink value goes, I have sites that have been linked up to all my article directories, they have about 50.000 backlinks and their PR hasn't movedso it's fair to say that submitting this PLR rubbish doesn't bring any value whatsoever.Rather than posting 100 or 1000 articles a day that produce zero hits, your time is better spent by writing up one single article, much like this one.I have spent only 30 minutes writing this, I haven't even re-read it,  it has been posted on purpose with warts and all.
Its purpose isn't to get on top of the search engines but just to show that it WILLbe picked up by the search engines and people will find their way into it, THEN they will read it.
So it doesn't even matter much if it is nicely polished and its grammar is immaculate as visitors will find that out AFTER they are reading it, but its purpose was to show that it WILL attract visitors as it is 100% unique.
And this brings me to the beginning of this article and what I have learned so far about article marketing.It isn't anything new. It is what Google and everyone else has been saying all along: write up your own content and the traffic will come.

About the Author

Mark is the main person running Articlelogy.com.

He felt compelled to write this article after analyzing traffic from his Article Marketing Site and finding that some articles can bring in 100 visitors a week while some others can't manage to attract 2 visitors in a year.

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Tue, 1 Dec 2009 10:36 PM, by admin
As of today, dec 1, 2009 this article is now #6 most viewed article on this site. It goes to show how far you can go by just waffling away some unique content. It has even beat that "please your girlfriend" post that seem to do so well. A bit of a mystery for me is the "Secret Weapon of Creditors" article. Or even number 4. Number 11 is incredible to prove how people just waste their time posting PLR. Here's me babbling in italian (on an English based site) about my vegetable growing patch and beating everyone but ten articles on Google traffic.
Really, I am thinking of stopping what I am doing to just start typing away rubbish on my own blog every day just to see if I can beat to kingdom come each and everyone of these 8.000 "writers" who are now so busy posting to my site every day.

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:18 PM, by admin
it basically proves that spending one week (1 hour a day x 5 times = 5 hours = 20 articles) typing away about anything that you know of, will get you 100 visitors every day. Do this for a month and you multiply your visitors x 4 = 400 visitors a day in a month.
Not many authors on this site achieve this, most of them can't average 10 (!!!) hits a day after years (!!!) of trying and thousands of articles..
I am not putting anyone down, just putting it out there that since getting visitors is actually very easy, I am trying to get them to do this the right way so we all benefit.

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:10 PM, by admin
it doesn't even have to be a high quality article... I mean.. look at this one!
This is hardly an "article" as I am just talking aloud about the stats I am getting with this site.
Yet it got 600 visitors in 4 months and it took me 15 minutes of my time to write it, if that. The stats of this "article" work out so far at 5 daily visitors for those 15 minutes I spent typing away, this averages at 20 visitors a day by spending an hour typing away.
It beats the zero visitors most plr articles get.
And don't forget that the more you write the better you get at it as opposed to just reshuffling old plr that brings you no knowledge, no chance at improving, just doing donkey work.

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 8:32 PM, by Guest
Kindof confused by your article, are you saying to take your time and write one high quality article rather than trying to pump out a 100 crappy ones?

Sun, 7 Jun 2009 12:39 PM, by Guest
very interesting mate, keep up the good work, Bryan beepy1968@yahoo.co.uk

Sat, 23 May 2009 7:34 PM, by Guest
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