Now, I am no expert on article marketing, but our website has definitely benefited in a small but steady way from a small flow of clickthroughs and linkbacks over the years as a result of submitting some of our pre-written articles. I get better returns from other forms of marketing so would not personally spend long on this, however, you might want to try it.
Simply submit some of your pre-written work into some of the top article databases and monitor the results for yourself. Whether it is beneficial will depend on your industry sector and article subject so it may be more beneficial for you than me.
When I say pre-written, I mean we wrote them and put them on our own blogs first until they were indexed. This is important in my view as Google knows where the article originated from and gives that location the higher weight in terms of search engine ranking.
You can check to see if an article has been indexed by copying a line of your article text into Google… for example… here is a line from a recent article on our Media Music Now blog … “For a few months, I have been hearing about the Dr Who adventure game”. (you need to use the quotes)
It shows my article on the first page, so it is now safe to put into article directories.
I had thought about compiling a list for you, but then found this list, which is pretty good so I decided to link to it.
http://www.fridaytrafficreport.com/top-21-the-best-article-directory-list/
This only scratches the surface, but it is a good starting point without being overwhelmed.
Although I rate this list, I have never used a syndication service as it suggests as I know Google prefer natural methods. On that basis automatic syndication is not something I have used.
Good luck, and feel free to share this post and your results.
P.S. If you are doing this, I assume you have a website that you own to link back to? If not, get in touch with us 
by Adam Barber on November 10, 2009
Building links to your website or blog plays an important part in search engines ranking your website highly in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Link building is a time-consuming job, but, if you want create yourself a website or blog that will become a valuable asset for you and your company as well as a quality resource for your visitors, then it has to be done.
The trick is to concentrate your time and efforts on finding quality industry sites, blogs, forums etc. that you can add value to by contributing your knowledge and expertise and also reflect this in the content you publish and distribute from your site. Give people what they are looking for and over time, readers and other professionals in your industry will naturally choose to link to you.
Here are 15 useful tips for you to try.
- Write informative and useful content that people will want to link to. The type of content that often gets people’s interest is “Top 10 Ways to…”(or Tips), “How to…” or a list of industry related resources that people will want to bookmark or link to as a reference.
- Submit your articles to EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleBase, etc. When you submit to these sites, your article can be used by others providing they keep the “About the Author” section intact, which contains a link back to your website.
- If you have a newsworthy announcement, for example, the launch of a new service or a revolutionary new product, write a press release and submit it to press release sites such as PRWeb, PRLeap, PR Newswire. There are free press release sites too, such as 24-7PressRelease.com and 1888PressRelease.com, although the paid services provide better placement and distribution.
- Submit your site to DMOZ. It is free to submit your website but worth mentioning that there is no guarantee you will be listed. Industry volunteers review each submission manually and it can take anything from 3 weeks to 6 months before being reviewed, even take longer if submitting to a popular category.
- If within your budget, consider submitting your site to the Yahoo directory. Last time I checked it was $299 for a year’s inclusion, however, it is worth mentioning that again there is no guarantee you will be included.
- Contact your local Chamber of Commerce to see about having a feature done on your company’s services with a link back to your website.
- Approach business partners and see if they might be willing to link to your site. Anyone in a related industry is worth considering for link building.
- Create a Squidoo page and starting creating a valuable resource of information and articles in your industry, not forgetting to link back to your own site.
- Have you recently bought a product or used a service that you were happy with? Leave them a testimonial to thank them for the service and say what you liked about their product or service. Many testimonials you leave will have a link back to your site.
- In the age of Web 2.0, you should really have a blog that you post to regularly and make sure you submit it to blog directories i.e. Blog Catalog, Technorati, Blog Hub and Best of the Web Blogs.
- Get noticed by other bloggers in your industry and link out to their blog. Chances are they will be checking to see who is linking to them and may consider linking back if you are saying relevant about them or the industry.
- Participate in conversations on related blogs, social media sites and forums in your industry. By providing useful and interesting comments and opinions, it will encourage readers to visit your site and they may just link to it.
- Are there any industry professionals you can interview? Creating and publishing interesting interviews with professional individuals or companies in your industry is a great way to engage your visitors, provide useful content and encourage them to link back to you.
- Run competitions on your website with prizes for the winners and runners up. People will want to link to this if the prize is a worthy one.
- Build a collection of tools that your visitors can refer to. For example, a keyword research tool for sites about SEO, or a mortgage calculator for financial and mortgage websites. Rather than publish their own list, they may just link to yours.
This is by no means an exhaustive list and you may not benefit from doing all of these, it is just a case of taking them on-board and seeing if you can apply them to to your online marketing and link building campaign.
The best way to find out if these things work for your website, your industry and you, is to do some and then monitor the results by checking your web stats and see how many referring links you are getting.
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Please feel free to share any of your own tips and thoughts on link building by leaving your comments below.
