How to Market an Article Directory
Glen Allsopp / 
12 Comments / 
March 27th, 2007 / 
Subscribe via RSS
Theres thousands upon thousands of Article Directories out there, more than likely with the intention of building traffic and making money from them, so this blog entry is dedicated on how you can make your Article Directory unique and give it that marketing angle you might just need to bring the links and traffic. This was inspired by a thread I started on DigitalPoint forums and also a submitted website (ArticleVibe), hopefully this series of blog posts inspires you to look for new ideas to market your sites that are in competitive markets, you may also be interested in subscribing to our RSS Feed if you havn’t already.
I’m going to be honest and say that looking for a Marketing Angle for an Article Directory certainly didnt come to my mind straight away, and I honestly got a pen and paper out and jotted down a few ideas (see we care about our readers 
). I had a sort of clear-cut idea that could be split into two ways so here were the ideas:
Rating Authors
Implementing some sort of voting system on articles that can rate the articles, and the author of articles get a ‘combined score’. This could then be used to display the top 10 authors on the homepage, with a link back to their website. People are then more likely to submit articles to you if they think they have a chance of getting a homepage link and you are more likely to get quality content and before any other article directory gets it. (This could simply be an alternative to linking to peoples author profiles and instead link to their websites).
Allowing Comments
I havnt personally seen an article directory that is based on a freely available script that allows comments, and whilst its not a super unique idea it does have its benefits. People dont have to comment on blogs but they do for a reason, the same could go for articles. Especially if you allow the comments to have links back to peoples websites where the names where then its likely that you will build up more content on your article pages and have a regular traffic base commenting on new articles. You can find javascript and ajax scripts that will allow you to add code to pages to insert comments so this can be done relatively easily.
Article Resource
Instead of just having articles for people to use, why not show people how to write articles and how to properly market them? Turn part of your site into your own unique articles that give people tips on what makes a good article and even sources places that are good to get articles written. You could then talk about SEO / Marketing advantages or even setup a forum so people can discuss article marketing in general.
If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to our
RSS feed?
Great article! Thanks for the link!
Glad you liked it, make sure to spread the word
Exellent article. As we already have most of these implemented on our article directory http://articleflair.com/ then hopefully we are on our way to traffic and revenue.
Another point i would think is relevent is writing your own articles with subject of each of your different catagories then submitting elsewhere and linking back to your own site.
Definitely Kev but this article was looking at a new marketing angle, ways in which people would use your site rather than all the others in a competitive field
Welcome to the blog
Thanks for referring me to this highly informative article. Looking forward to reading more of the essential information that you have posted here.
Thanks tony, the best way to do that is too subscribe to the Feed
Isn’t article marketing for seo purposes dead. The recen news coming out of the SEO blogosphere says it’s deader than Doncaster on a wet Thursday afternoon.
If you have data rather than opinion I am always ready to be corrected, but my own data points to the fact that the links an article will get are from low pr ranking sites and that it would be better to publish the article yourself and SMO it.
If it’s a good article it will get links pointing to your site, if it’s a bad article who will syndicate anyway.
Not sure if you got the point of this post correctly (as it wasnt really about writing articles for SEO purposes) as people write articles and submit them for many reasons, links, traffic, recognition, branding.
I would say theres been 15 articles submitted for this website (just as a test). One notable example was an article on BlackhatSEO that I wrote. I got about 20 backlinks from a range of pr2 - pr4 pages (as of now) and was ranking solidly for ‘blackhat seo’ although I cant say that now as it seems we disappeared for that. Articles do bring backlinks, their value is unknown and only Google really know the answer to that one, I certainly dont rate the value highly though.
I was more commenting on Article marketing as an SEO tool rather than the article direct, I should have made that clear.
Maybe there is still a place for it maybe not, I still think it is worth putting effort into SMO than article marketing.
Thanks for the data.
Yeah I was a little confused, no problem
I like to diversify all marketing angles to see what works best. SMO can work for pretty much any site given the correct angle to market things on and get things into the Social ’scene’, but of course a lot of work with any marketing tactic doesnt guarantee that it will work out.
Hello There,
Your articles are nice.
Please add your articles in our site too.
Thanks, Glen.
Great ideas on marketing for an article directory.
These suggestions would appear to be features that can be added on-site as features for an article directory to have
However, from the perspective of bread and butter online marketing for traffic generation for an article directory owner, would any of you folks have any thoughts or feedback on the following?:
1) Using Online Classified Ad sites (e.g Craigs list) to drive traffic to the article directory
2) Blog Commenting
3) Forum Posting
4) Using PPC marketing
5) Using banner ads
6) Using ezine ads
7) Social media and social bookmarking
etc.
Just wondered how article directory owners would assess these methods (or any of your own) with regards to their effectiveness in marketing their article directory site and driving response traffic to the site.
Thank you.
SuccessArticle.Info Article Directory
Your Resource for Success, Personal Development
& Living a Fulfilled Life