Article submission to high authority directories are a great way to get an authority backlink. However, be sure that having many links coming from the same directory will not do all that much for your rankings.

2/3 submissions may carry weight, but I’m beginning to wonder whether having more than that is not merely ignored but can actually contribute towards your site getting a slap (i.e. the assumption is that you’re trying to game the search engines ) at least while the site is less than a year old and/or doesn’t yet have a good variety of other backlinks coming in yet.

The idea does sound plausible to me as I have seen a mass of posts on the same topic appear under various author names all published over a course of days, if not the same day. I’m talking double digit submissions here.

This can serve a purpose though – swamping out the directory makes you look like the expert on the topic (or a freak, or an obvious salesman trying to push a product take your pick), and should drive a significant quantity of traffic to the target landing page.

So if you’re going to write articles for SEO purposes, use multiple submission sites. This should go without saying, but I got a bit lazy and couldn’t be bothered to sign up for other directories, squidoo, hubpages etc.

I also wanted to quickly get to platinum status in ezine articles – but I only ended up as Basic Plus after the first 10 articles were submitted as I did get a few articles flagged. I guess I am further than most people by getting as far as I have without outsourcing.

(In fact I’m just listening to an interview with Chris Knight in 2008, and he states less than 15% of the ezine articles members at the time have submitted more than 10 articles. Furthermore, to gain authority over your niche, you should write 25-250 articles. For better SEO of your own website, you may wish to spread submissions between several directories to leverage the variety of backlinks coming from different authority sources.)

Now I’ve only just recently submitted an article to squidoo and another to hubpages, which may have helped with the latest re-ranking menti0ned in y last post. I say these new sites may have helped with the re-ranking as I can see that yahoo has counted them, but the links do not appear in google webmaster tools, therefore I don’t know for sure that google has seen these and taken them into account.

That said, if page rank updates are ongoing, but are only made public periodically, then there’s no reason why the same too could not apply to counting links before they are publicly mentioned in webmaster tools.

Finally, remember, it’s one thing to get a link, to get a relevant link is another. Publishing to article submission sites is one of the best ways to get relevant backlinks as the websites that republish the articles should be related to the subject matter that your article is about. If you’re lucky enough to get a site with some PR republishing your link, then that’s even better.

So there are three good benefits from article publishing, squidoo and hubpages publishing:

1. High authority do-follow backlink (assuming you are submitting to a directory like ezine articles)
2. Trickle of Traffic (unless you write about a really hot topic(s) with a compelling reason for people to click through to your link then you can expect to enjoy at least 1 or 2 visits per day/week depending on quality and/or quantity of articles  and the demand for the subject matter of the article(s).
3. Article Directories only: additional backlinks. As some article submission sites offer republication rights to the public as a condition of authors using their service, and as the public in turn are expected to include your personal resource text with the article with dofollow, then you start getting free backlinks from sites relevant to your subject matter.

   Squidoo and Hubpages only: you can earn money directly from these platforms. I gather some people have created good income streams from hubpages in particular, but obviously you will have to submit a load of popular and in demand pages to get to that level.

I thought I was done with the initial series, but not quite. I have been lazily oberving figures and observed something interesting. What seemed to have been the worst performing campaign by far – 2 articles on SEO combined have since made up for lost ground and caught up to my views on a niche article. Obviously the niche still wins hands down for achieving a greater number of views on its own merit, but when I last wrote I think the gap was at least 12 views, so it’s interesting to see the gap close down like that. Similarly, between the two SEO articles there have been 4 URL clicks as opposed to the 5 click on the niche article’s URL.

I also got a few views through the search engines. Literally only 1 or 2 views on some of the articles. Great for articles just over a week old? I don’t know. Maybe I had a poorly optimized title or maybe it takes time for the title to achieve a series ranking.

The searches that lead to article views weren’t very well targetted in all cases other than the SEO articles, interestingly enough! Also, all these search engine originated views happened the day after the article went live, and the second day after for those articles that achieved a second search engine click through. Looks like they got buried soon just as quickly as they appeared.

It will be interested though to see whether I do start receiving search engine traffic again and how long it takes before that starts happening.

Okay, after the initial euphoria and suspicion this wouldn’t last, it is now confirmed. after about 2 days of good traffic, it’s started to filter leading me to believe that most traffic I got was simply because the article was new (no kidding Sherlock!)

However, that said, I am also aware that I should get secondary traffic in time assuming I have chosen a good keyword rich title for those articles with phrases searched for in signifcant volume but with little competition for that phrase.

If so, then hopefully I’ll start to see traffic coming in from people that find the article through search engines. And of course as Ezine Articles itself has a high PR, it does a small favour to my website by providing backlinks through the resource box that appears with my article and through the link(s) on my author page.

Of course, 1 article alone isn’t going to do much for me, so I think now that I’ve seen what it can do in the short term, I need to aim at the most laziest level to do at least 1 article per niche per month.

Hopefully there’ll come a time when I start outsourcing so I can create articles more frequently. But first I need to see more results.

I will be very interested to see what results the 6 articles currently in the pipeline bring, especially as 3 are on one niche that I got a few decent adsense clicks on, and 2 are on a site in a very saturated and heavily in demand market.

Oh, and on that note in the case of the latter. One interesting thing happened. I got a signup to my mailing list. This is significant as an adwords campaign was getting high click throughs but few signups.

But there are differences between the two. The article is designed to get traffic to my website. The adwords campaign is designed to get people on a list and/or purchase an affiliate product.

Also, perhaps the landing page used in the adwords campaign wasn’t compelling enough to be worth them signing onto the mailing list. But this is a whole different topic to discuss. I just throught it was great that I had a signup when I didn’t even call or ask for it in my resource box.

One more interesting thing. My niche article got 4 clicks on the Ezine Publisher link. This basically is a page where people can get the HTML or plain text versions of an article for republishing elsewhere.

Now frankly I am amazed that for someone that has just gotten started with article publishing, with writer’s block, has managed to delve into a niche and produce a quality article that people deem worthy of republishing.

I just hope they are practicing good faith and republishing my  article complete with resource box fully intact with live links, and without adding nofollow tags to those links. It would be great to have some free backlinks!

Okay, my preliminary results have been enough to spur me on to complete my goal of submitting a further 8 articles to EzA by the 20th Feb has just been completd. I made it – whew! Now I just need to sit back, and wait for the articles to go live. Hopefully there won’t be any problems with any of them this time. I don’t think there should be but I don’t work for EzA either.

Anyway, the 2 articles I did on Link building SEO were the worst performing out of the currently live 4. The article I published in a saturated market did the best. Averaged about 12 visitors a day with a 14% clickthrough rate. Question for the traffic is whether this is due to the article being new or if people were actually searching for an article and mine came up in their results and caught their eye. Question for the click throughs is whether my resource box was appealing enough.

My niche article had almost half the views of the most popular one, but with 18% clickthrough rate. I also got a few adsense clicks in the process which brought a smile to my face as I haven’t achieved much with adsense so far. This was an encouraging and welcome development.

I actually need to start affiliate marketing with the niche site. However I need to add a few more pages to it first to help ensure I get approved. Right now though, with article writing being a new concept to me. And with the psychological writer’s block having been something to push through, getting those 10 articles done has been a bit taxing and I do have other things that I need to attend to. So I’m taking a little break from adding content for now.

Just need to sit back and wait for the next 6 articles to go live – that’s not how long my break is going to last btw!

Okay, I now have live an article live for a niche market and one for a saturated market. Surprisingly (or maybe not so) I have had 12 views on the first SEO article, and with the new articles only going live a matter of about 6 hours ago, they both have got 5 views.

Maybe there’s a greater ration of interest contrasted with number of articles for the non-SEO topics than the SEO one…

Anyway, I’m certainly much more excited by these two new articles with these great results in a matter of a few compared compared to the results gained by the article running a few days already!

Hmm, I have to admit, getting started is difficult. Does it work, is my effort justified, who am I to succeed in this business and all manner of self-defeating efforts.

I’m battling against those thoughts. I want to stay the course and prove it’s possible.

Oh, and I earned a little bit from AdSense today too. Nothing major, but I’m just getting started and it’s a great start as far as I’m concerned. Thank you and keep em coming in more quantities more quickly!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaa!