Article Submission Software Vs. Manual Submissions

Article Marketing Question Of The Week. Today’s question comes from John:

I’ve submitted over 100 articles to Ezine Articles alone. Now, apart from linking them to my website, I haven’t done much else with them. The thing is that so many marketers give conflicting advice, so I don’t know what else to do with them. Do you manually submit to other directories or use some directory software?

When I submit articles to other directories, I do so manually. There are several reasons for this. First, I only submit to directories that I have tested and found send me traffic or syndicate my articles. Otherwise, you are simply establishing backlinks to your site and you can do that once. Continually getting backlinks from the same site will not really improve your ranking. Having the one is actually enough. So having said that, I only submit to a few key directories.

The second reason why I do not us submission software is that all your submissions will be the same. One of the points of submitting articles to directories is so that you can have valuable backlinks point to your site. I’d like those backlinks to have different keyword anchored text – so you really have to submit articles and resource boxes manually in order to implement changes. Finally, different directories have different guidelines. If I am submitting my article to a site that allows links above the fold in my article – I am absolutely going to do that to my site or one of my products, etc. You will not know this using automated software.

I’ve heard that mass submitting to directories isn’t accurate.  If it is okay to use these submitters, do you recommend submitting to Ezine Articles manually or through the submitter.

I have tested this with various submitters and found that the biggest inaccuracies are with category selection. Each directory has different category choices. It is not a universal list across directories. So if you submit your article under “internet marketing” but they only have “business” as a category – that is where your article will go, and it can be a lot worse than that.

People looking for internet marketing information would have to wade through all the business articles found on that directory. That’s not likely to happen. This is also not good SEO either. So if you have to go in and manually change the categories for your articles, you might as well submit the entire thing by hand. The whole point of using submission software is that you don’t have to enter individual sites at all. If you’re doing that to “fix” stuff – then have you really saved any time?

If you really still want the benefits though of streamlining the submission process with minimal errors, then I would recommend SubmitYourArticle. Out of all the article submission softwares or services that I tested (and i think I’ve tested everything out there), this is the one service that was the most accurate and offered great customer support. Also – I did see good article syndication results with this service. So I think the beginning article marketer may benefit from this service.

Also, is there more I can do with my articles with regards to social media? I understand I can link to my social media accounts from Ezine Articles but wondered if there is more I can do.

You can absolutely do many things with your articles – my favorite thing is re-purposing them into products. But in regards to social media, one of the best things you can do is set up your articles and other content to autopost to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of your other favorite social media sites.

That way all your followers will know when you’ve posted new content without having to visit your site or article directories AND you will create really great backlinks to your site. Social media sites get a lot of Google Luv:) You can do this using several free services online such as Twitterfeed or I can set it all up for you in about 24 hours. http://tinyurl.com/2dcm8fs