Article Directories And Internet Marketing

There is an ongoing discussion about the effectiveness of internet marketing through article directories. While many marketers claim that submitting their content to directories is pointless in terms of traffic and exposure gained, others mean that article directories enable powerful linking and search engine ranking opportunities. So what is fact and what is fiction?

In this article we will discuss internet marketing through article submission to article directories - and also the results that can be expected. It is always good to keep in mind that no form of online advertising is completely flawless, and that there are both positive and negative aspects that apply to each and every marketing method. As an example, advertising through pay-per-click alternatives such as Google for instance, often yields fantastic results in terms of quick and targeted traffic, however, it may also deplete your advertising budget very fast. Advertising by submitting articles to directories on the other hand is completely free, but also a very slow and time-consuming process.

Given the fact that article directories are free to use they have grown very popular among internet marketers. More often than not, these directories have a great page rank, a great visitor count, and are also considered as authority websites by the major search engines. All of these attributes are of course something that many advertisers are looking for when searching for places to submit their promotional links. But what results can reasonably be expected when submitting articles to free article directories?

As a general rule, article writers should not expect instant avalanches of traffic to their newly published article, even if it has been published on one of the more prominent article directories. There are of course some very few exceptions to this rule. According to the home page of Goarticles.com, their most viewed article has currently received over 23,000 views which is an amazing result. More likely, however, is that a well written article will receive somewhere between 5-10 visitors per day. While this may seem like a very poor result for the time invested into writing a full article, one should remember that this number will accumulate and may result in a couple of hundred unique visitors on a monthly basis, which is not bad for one single article. Also, these visitors are most likely highly targeted, which also increases the true value of these visitors. As any internet marketer knows, it is usually better to have 100 highly targeted visitors than 1,000 non-targeted.

Gaining quick traffic is in fact not the main reason why internet marketers submit articles to article directories - it is the linking opportunities. When articles are published in the top article directories, they are almost instantly crawled and indexed by Google and other major search engines. This means that marketers will get a link back to their website very fast. By submitting their articles to several article directories, well, then the number of quality links that point to their website will increase. The number of relevant and quality links a particular website has is one of the parameters that search engines take into consideration when ranking websites in their search results. So this is very important indeed.

The linking opportunities does not stop with search engine indexing. Published articles may very well be republished on other websites and blogs by other readers who need fresh content for their sites. This possibility is a very powerful tool when it comes to building links in the longterm, and many article writers and internet marketers simply forget about this.

So in conclusion, internet marketing through article directories is still a very successful, yet slow, form of online advertising. It is worth an effort and it is absolutely free - the results can also be truly amazing longterm.