Article Submission Guidelines & Tools

Continuing the series on article marketing, I will now turn the attention to article submission – how to submit all your articles for maximum effectiveness.

Being Selective With Article Directories

I’m going to post a list of article directories in a separate post. Like my list of dofollow social bookmarking sites I shall update it on a regular basis so it can serve as a useful resource long term. So in this post I’ll discuss some of the issues surrounding article submission so that I can keep that post fairly clean.

The first thing to mention is that not all article directories will accept all articles. There are plenty of generic directories that have categories for just about every topic that you can think of but there are also many specialised directories that will only accept articles on a particular topic such as business, health, environmental issues and so on.

It is imperative that you only submit your articles to appropriate directories because as I have said before, if you are using article marketing to promote your blog and you are using your own name on your articles you need to ensure you play by the rules or it makes you look bad. It does not look good to submit your toenail clipping article to a directory that is about business for example! There are enough directories (like hundreds if not thousands of them!) to not need to blindly submit to innapropriate places.

Correct Category Selection

Along the same lines, you also need to take care to submit your article to the appropriate category. One of the time consuming aspects here is that all of the article directories have different ways of presenting their categories so it can take a little time to look through all the options to pick the best one.

Always pick the most specific category you can find. For example if you have an article about grooming persian cats it would be better to submit it to ‘cat grooming’ or ‘persian cats’ rather than just ‘cats’ or ‘pets’. Of course where a very specific category is not available try and find a broader one that matches.

Article Submission Frequency Guidelines

If you make use of an automated tool to speed up article submissions it can be tempting to submit to hundreds of directories every day but resist this temptation because it does not look natural to Google and some of those links may be discounted or penalized in some way.

Think about your overall link building efforts – you should probably be aiming for no more than about 50 manufactured links per day (as opposed to natural links that you have no control over) but this will include other campaigns such as social bookmarking.

Article Submission Tools

I don’t know of any web based tools that work like social marker for article submission (let me know in the comments if you know of any) but there are some software programs and web based services that do it for you. I have spent quite a bit of time with two of them – Brad Callen’s Article Submitter and Unique Article Wizard.

Brad Callen’s Article Submitter

This was my first choice because I had heard good things about Brad and more importantly, the price was right – free, well for the standard version at least. There is also a gold version that submits to more directories and now a platinum version that fully automates the process.

I struggled to use the software effectively. You enter in your article information and then select which directories you want to submit to from a big list then you click through each one to do the actual submission manually. The problem I found was that most of the directories on the list simply didn’t work – it must have been an old list that was out of date. However I don’t know if the paid versions are any better.

Unique Article Wizard

As I mentioned in an earlier article, Unique Article Wizard costs $67 per month so it is only cost effective if you intend to use it on an on-going, regular basis. It has three major advantages over Brad’s software and manual article submission:

1. You don’t need accounts at the directories – these are all handled for you which is very handy because it can take hours to join them all.
2. The submission is fully automated – this is the biggie for me. Once I have taken time to setup the article for submission I just tell it how many to submit each day and it does the rest without me doing a thing. I get a daily email with an updated status report.
3. If you spend the time to write 3 versions of your initial article the Unique Article Wizard uses a special algorithm to turn those three into hundreds or even thousands of unique versions whilst keeping your original writing – no machine-created content.

Managing Submissions Manually

Of course many of you will simply choose to go through the free option and just submit your articles to the article directories manually. To manage this properly without getting into a mess I would suggest that you use some kind of spreadsheet to keep yourself organised.

First of all you will need a list of directories to submit to. I’ll start building one of these in an up-coming post but for your own purposes you will need to keep track of your login details for each one which of course means that you first need to setup accounts at those directories.

Secondly you will need to keep track of which articles have been submitted to which directories. Some directories will accept articles straight away and then verify them later on but many will require manual verification by a human editor before the article will be accepted which usually means a delay of a few days.

What I tend to do here is have a page which lists the directories down the side and then across the top each column represents an article – I give each one a unique number and then simply put a cross in a box as I submit the articles to the directories.

Tweet This Post Stumble This Post