Writing articles is one of the best ways to gain some online exposure for yourself and for your web properties. As I have pointed out in a previous post, Why Article Marketing is Worth Doing you can write articles on just about any subject and submit them to many different article directories – some of which are considered authority sites by Google.
That means that not only can writing articles enhance your own status as something of an authority on the topics you write about, but when you embed links in your articles they become a great source for backlinks to your website(s). That is one the most important factors for boosting your search engine ranking.
But there are two fairly frustrating parts about writing articles that often torpedo the best intentions of many marketers and small business people. First, they take a significant amount of time to write. And, second, they can take a lot of time to submit to article directory sites.
Outsourcing your writing
The most popular solution to the “I-don’t-have-time-to-write” syndrome is to outsource the writing to people who are eager to do it for you. Often these people are experience writers who have already been exposed to the type of articles you require. And usually you can find someone to do it for a very reasonable cost.
The source we currently use is TextBroker.com and I recommend them highly. Like most freelance sites they act as a middleman between writers looking for work, and marketers or publishers looking for specific types of content.
Once you open an account you will have to deposit a small amount of money into it in order to actually place orders. Placing an order involves submitting an idea of what you want the article to be about, the keywords you want to focus on, a couple of resources they can use to find information on the topic, the length of the required article, how quickly you need it done, and the quality level (between 1 and 5) you are looking for.
Once a project is submitted, if it is left “Open”, then any writer with at least the desired quality rating can take the project on. For example, if you want a “level 4″ article, then any writer with that rating or above can claim it. Once the project is claimed the writer will submit the finished article to the system where you can accept it or ask that it be revised.
We’ve had literally hundreds of articles written by these folks and sent very few back for revisions. We often make small editorial revisions, but that is to be expected in any project.
For a 450 word level 4 article you will pay around $10. We highly recommend TextBroker.com.
Article Submission with SubmitYourArticle.com
The other painful part of the process is submitting your articles to article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com and many others. Since there are hundreds of these sites, and since at least 10 of them are fairly highly ranked by Google most article marketers recommend submitting to at least several of the better sites.
Even submitting one article to five or six sites can take a long time. If you intend to go at article marketing in a serious way you could be spending your whole day doing nothing other than submission.
That’s where an article submission site like SubmitYourArticle.com comes in. These guys will submit any number of articles to several of the major sites, as well as (in their words) “hundreds of other websites in our distribution network.”
The important thing about SYO is that they get your articles into the most important, highly ranked sites. Not all distribution systems do this. Also, like many article distribution sites SYO has integrated “spinning” capabilites which they call “Article Leverage”.
The one downside to the SYO service is that if you need to submit articles on behalf of different authors you will need a different account for each author.
Other than that (reasonable) limitation, SubmitYourArticle.com is the best article distribution service I have found.
