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Articles as links The fundamental base of the internet is not the page, but the link. A great way to accumulate links is to write articles and submit them to places interested in quality articles. Where do I submit articles in my field? Some places will accept articles automatically and some require editorial approval. If you know your industry well you should know some places that accept articles. I know within the search engine field I can submit articles to sites like Lil Engine, ISEDB, SearchGuild, and a variety of others.
Where do I submit general articles? There are also sites which take general articles such as Idea Marketers, Buzzle, Ebooks n Bytes, Article Central. The list goes on and on.
How do articles give me links? When you write articles for free you are typically given a by-line or author bio which you can link to your website.
How long should my articles be? Typically it is a good idea to review the editorial guidelines of websites before submitting articles. Most sites like articles around 600 to 900 words since the internet is a quick medium. Some sites like articles up to 1500 to 2000 words so they can split up the content to show more ads. Reading a few articles from the site should give you an idea what they are looking for.
Article resource location tips: A good tip to finding more might be to search for the name of a search engine copywriter. Karon Thackton is found on over 1,000 documents!
In addition to searching out people in your field you may want to use some of the Yahoo Announcement Groups and other article resources. Feel free to submit article resource locations in the comments :)
Submiting articles to Ezines is not something I generally do. I find that if you write an ok article and submit it to a few of these places people will just pick you up. You want to be careful about seeming spamy when trying to submit articles to ezines. A few good Ezine lists would be Ezine Universe, Topica, the Ezine Directory
Additional article resources from Jeremy Gossman are listed below.
http://goarticles.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://amazines.com
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://bpubs.com/
http://businessknowhow.com/
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
http://www.promotionworld.com/
http://promotenewz.com/
Yahoo Announcement Groups
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ArticlePublisher/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_eContent/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeWrites/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freE-zinecontent/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/netwrite-publish-announce/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ReprintArticles-Paradise/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheWriteArticles
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aainet/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Content/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/
Eventually if you do a good enough job with your articles people who syndicate your artilces will have those same articles syndicated from there! Here is another small list of Ezine directories.
<update>here are a few more sites you can submit articles to:
www.purplepages.ie
www.stickysauce.com
www.certificate.net
www.freesticky.com
www.bullmarketer.com
Here is another free XLS articles checksheet which shows over 70 sites where you can submit articles. Thanks Zoran
[update: here is more article submission locations]
</update>
The search for "Google Sells Christmas" will show you that about 40 web pages reference my second article. Before I wrote those articles my site was not popular, now it kinda is.
You can also look at content provider networks in DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory.
Also a while ago somebody spammed me trying to promote "marketing blaster" and "search engine geek." If people publish articles that were sent to them via spam then odds are they will likely want to publish your articles too, so you may want to search for a few variations of those names such as "marketing blaster" or "marketingblaster."
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Aaron...
If I submit the same article to more than one site, and it is accepted by more than one site, am I creating duplicate content issue? Does it matter?
Thanks
As long as it is not on your site the duplication probably should not hurt you too much.
For most search engines I believe the link graph is scored separately from most stages of duplication detection. PageRank is computed offline, and many stages of duplication detection and removal occur after the search query, when the primary set of results are returned, and prior to filtering and result re-ranking.
Hey Aaron,
I keep hearing about Article Announcer and how good it is. It sounds to good to be true and super expensive. Do you know much about it by any chance?
Thanks
Recently I heard a lot about duplicate content issue for articles. Its not possible to create so much articles for these directories. What do you suggest.
What do you mean it's not possible to create so much articles for directories?
So what's the true about article submission vs duplicate content?
Hi Banar. This article was many years old, so advice in the forums is far more up to date. Essentially if you are submitting an article to 3rd party general article databases then no problem if the articles are duplicate of each other. But generally it is best not to have duplicate content in your own articles...meaning that you wouldn't want to syndicate an article you posted to your site onto many article directories as well.
Thank you Aaron, your help is appreciated every day.
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