17/09: Wise Use Of Article Directories | Tips For Authors and Publishers

Article marketing is still an effective means of promoting yourself and your sites online and from a publisher's point of view, the huge number of free articles available with reprint rights can be a boon to you as a blogger or webmaster.

If you are a blogger you will sometimes come up against that brick wall known as "writer's block" and this can be a good time to resort to your favourite article directory for some much needed content. 

Due to my current circumstances I have queued several articles from article directories to be published both on this blog and over at my web hosting directory over the next few weeks. This takes away the time pressures and ensures that my sites do not stagnate too terribly while I am dealing with my real life :-)

The problem is often finding articles good enough to publish because there is a lot of very poorly written dross out there to wade through and the last thing you want to do is tarnish your reputation or that of your site by posting poorly written articles or horribly inaccurate information. Even some of the better known directories are not averse to publishing rubbish, so it is up to you to find the gold amongst the rubble. My own free article directory, although small, is tightly edited so the quality issue shouldn't be too much of a problem if you can find something on a relevant topic for your needs. I tend to gravitate towards the article directories listed here. 

Once you have found some good articles, be sure to follow the terms of the directory you have pulled them from - usually meaning that you must leave all author credits and live hyperlinks intact, exactly as the original author intended. This is a small price to pay for the use of someone else's work.

The duplicate content issue should not be something to worry too much about. Publishing articles on your own site from article directories is not going to cause you any issues or difficulties, if you are selective and use them alongside your own original content. 

As an author or writer of articles, either as a beginner or more established author, there is plenty of information out there to help you make the most of your article marketing efforts. Again, some of the information is onerous and not neccessarily accurate, but there are some good guides out there, both free and commercially available to help you with writing and submitting your work to best effect. You can grab a copy of my free article marketing report and also pick through a selection of article marketing tools and software here at my digital info pages.

In short, don't be afraid to syndicate a few third parties on your blog - give them credit for the work and everybody stays happy. They garner links and you get good information, often on subjects that you want to write about but on which your own knowledge may be a little lacking and you keep providing your readers and subscribers with things they want to read about.