I’ve gotten a lot of questions about article marketing in the last couple of months. I really appreciate all of the questions and make sure to answer every single one which I receive, so keep them coming. I’ve gotten so many about this topic in particular that I decided to just up and write an article about it because it’s something which I didn’t understand and consequently wasted a lot of time on mistakes when I first started out.
The question is should you submit an article to your site or an article directory?
The answer is that you should be submitting your content to YOUR site first and foremost, building your sites over time. I made a mistake with this myself for the first year or so in which I was affiliate marketing. In other words I developed mini sites (see what is a mini site) and exclusively submitted every article which I would write with links pointing towards those sites only to article directories.
My thought process and rationale for doing this was that articles on article directories would rank higher and more easily in the search engines than on my sites. So rather than developing content sites (see what is a content site) of my own which would grow over time into powerful authority sites, I was instead contributing to the article directories I would submit to and giving them completely unique content of mine.
This is backwards thinking and while I was making money from those articles from the traffic which came out of them, I effectively wasted a lot of time contributing to someone else’s business rather than my own. Because of the Farmer/Panda update, article directories no longer rank well and the link juice which they pass on has diminished, as well, so while it was never a good idea to do this, it’s an especially bad idea to do it in the wake of that update.
Remember that Google likes content sites above all else and is wary of mini sites with very little content. They are constantly working to deliver the absolute best websites and web pages to their users, so they would much rather place a website which has hundreds and thousands of pages of content higher up in the SERPs for someone searching to find over a page which consists of only a handful of pages.
That’s not to say that mini sites aren’t without their purpose. Mini sites still convert well because of their emphasis on direct response marketing. ; the issue is that they don’t generally rank well organically. So if you’re not relying on organic search engine referrals to your mini site and have other traffic sources like email marketing or PPC then this can be a great way to generate quick conversions.
Getting back to the purpose of this article, after and ONLY after you’ve published your content on your own site and had it indexed (see how to get your website indexed) in the search engines should you go ahead and submit that same content to whatever article directories which you like. The important thing to remember is to build your sites before you benefit anyone else’s.