Joel Orr's World

I love to write, and I do a lot of it. So when I heard that submitting articles to free-article directories was a good way to get high-quality - and free - traffic to my websites, I started exploring.

Just Google "article directory" and you will find lots of them. You submit your article; they review it according to their published guidelines; if it passes, they publish it - along with your "resource box," which give your contact info and a link to your site.

So to get targeted traffic, you submit these articles to directories.

Then editors and e-zine publishers find your articles, and if relevant to their needs, publish them. You get incoming links - important for raising your rankings in the search engines. You get exposure to - possibly - lots of people. And it costs you nothing but the effort of writing a meaningful article that makes people want to know more about you and what you're offering.

The directories make their money from ads, usually; that's their motivation.

What's the downside? If you're serious about using this approach, it's a lot of work.

You can buy software to partially automate the task; but it's not cheap, nor easy to use. I checked out the leading ones and found them less tiresome than individual submissions, but still tiresome (e.g., ArticleSubmitterPro).

Then I discovered ArticleMarketer.com. It's a web-based service, inexpensive, and it works. Takes me about 3 minutes to submit an article. Within a few days, the article has been submitted to dozens of directories. A few days later, it's in hundreds of locations.

And I get traffic.

You can try it out for 3 days for free, with limited distribution. 3 months of unlimited use, with full distribution, is $39.95.