Since releasing my article marketing videos at the beginning of the year (and yes, I’m still planning on releasing all of them here) I’ve had a "flood" of questions pertaining to this topic.

I have addressed many of them by email as well as on various forums, yet I’ve never taken the time to address them on this blog, until now. So, I’ve decided to address some of them over the next few posts.

On to the first question…

"Can mass article submissions / distribution using software or submission services get me a flood of free traffic?"

Not everybody is going to agree with me on this, but if you are looking for a "flood of traffic" I think your time is better spent elsewhere.

Article submission services where you submit a single article for distribution to hundreds of article directories are really better suited for you to receive backlinks to your pages, not to drive traffic to your site. And since they distribute the same article across hundreds of article directories, the chances are that many of them will land in Google’s "Supplemental Index", which means that the links will carry little weight as a backlink as well as in the search engines.

However, some of the mass submitted articles will stick and create inbound links from reputable directories (hopefully), which will in turn give you a better placement in the search engines (depending on your anchor text for your links etc.)

OK, so what’s a better alternative? How can I better use my time and resources?

A good question. Here are some ideas:

• Use the money you were going to invest in article distribution (whether through a service or a software) and have unique articles ghostwritten for you (see my article on hiring a ghostwriter).
  • Submit these unique articles to a handful of Tier One article directories (see below). Using one unique article for each article directory (in other words, don’t submit the same articles to each site).
  • Use the ghostwritten content and develop pages on Social Networking sites such as Hubpages and Squidoo. Yes, (contrary to popular belief) Squidoo still works provided you use good content…
  • Use this high quality content by submitting them as linkbait to Social Voting sites like Digg (whenever it’s appropriate)
• Outsource link directory submissions (hire someone to submit your site to link directories) OR invest in a semi-automated software solution such as Link Directory Submitter.
• Invest your money in software such as Jack Humphrey’s Web2Submitter to automate your social bookmarking and submissions to web 2.0 media.
  • Be sure to bookmark every page of your site with the most popular bookmarking sites. All of these methods ought to be used to diversify your link profile for each of your pages.

However, some of the most immediate things you can do as far as traffic goes is to leverage Web 2.0 and the submissions to the Tier 1 Article Directories.

How do we know what Tier 1 Directories are?

Even though, high Page Rank directories are great, this does not always translate to higher search engine ranking. So, what I do is to focus on the directories that come up when doing searches on Google.

Here’s a Tip: Start paying close attention to Social Media sites and Article Directories that pop up when doing long tail keyword research on Google. They generally pop up when doing searches using quotation marks "" (exact phrase match). These are the sites that you ought to focus your time on. You do this by: writing articles for submission to the more "popular" directoires; bookmarking to the popular bookmarking sites; or by developing pages on networks like Squidoo.

In any event, here are the ones I consider 1st Tier  Article Directories(+/- a few):

•     EzineArticles - PR6 (www.ezinearticles.com)
•     GoArticles - PR5 (www.goarticles.com)
•     SearchWarp - PR5 (www.searchwarp.com)
•     ArticleDashboard - PR6 (www.articledashboard.com)
•     Buzzle - PR6 (www.buzzle.com)
•     ArticleCity - PR6 (www.articlecity.com)

Tags: bum marketing, article submission service, directory submission, article marketing, web 2.0 marketing, affiliate marketing, squidoo marketing

Written by: StevenR -  AffiliateMarketingDiary.com : Your  Resource For Internet Affiliate Marketing
Original Article: Flood Of Traffic With Article Submission Services?