Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Promoting your website with articles
Over the weekend, I put together an article for a client and submitted it to article directories to give his site more visibility in websites and ezines that deal with the area that my client's product serves.

I used an article submission tool, Article Announcer, to find and submit the article. I'll have to admit that the submission didn't go as fast as I had hoped. I had experimented with a related tool, Ezine Announcer, last week to submit my newsletter to the Ezine directories and found those submissions to be a lot faster.

I can't fault Article Announcer for the slower process, though. Unfortunately, a lot of the article directories seem to have a lot more hoops for authors to jump through that can't be easily automated. Still, without Article Announcer I would still be hunting for directories that had suitable categories and probably would have found only a fraction of the number that were preloaded into the software. So I spent a LOT less time than if I had done it myself, and should be able to do future articles even faster now that the hoops are done and all accounts are set up.

I'll review both software products on my site in the near future, but I'm sure you're more interested right now in the results. As for Ezine Announcer, my newsletter subscriptions jumped dramatically right after I submitted, but now seem to have settled into a higher than normal rate (but not as dramatically higher) now that my ezine has moved off the front pages of the ezine directories.

With the article submissions, I entered the title of the article, with quotation marks, into Google to see where it was appearing. On Sunday, Google already showed three pages it was on. On Monday, it showed 20. Just now, it showed 142.

Now, granted, not all of those pages have a link to my client's site (the title appears in the navigation bar or on the newest articles page for some of the sites). But, considering that only a fraction of the directories have even reviewed the article yet (some had waiting periods of up to a month), there's a lot of visibility that the article is getting with publishers who may pick the article up.

I'm hoping for 50–100 links to my client's site from this article, which is not bad for about a day's worth of work, especially when you consider that a similar amount of time devoted to reciprocal linking would typically provides me only about a third of that number of decent link. And to make things even better, links from an article will appear in places where people who are potentially interested in the product actually see the links instead of buried in some reciprocal links directory.

So far, so good.
Jeff