Article Submission. You Really Need To Know this Stuff...

Some people are natural born writers, others have taken to it to make a living online.

Submitting articles is without a doubt one of the most powerful ways to gain SE traffic, establish yourself, get "one way" backlinks to your website and earn a great living as well but don't let anybody tell you it is quick and easy...

Let's make no mistake about it, article submission can be a tedious and lengthy business. It is a necessary evil which every single author would like to automate as much as possible.

I have experience of both article submission services and also various software packages every one telling me that my article submission worries are over and I can retire as soon as they receive my check. I have also spent countless hours submitting articles manually to individual article submission directories.

You only have to have been in this business for five minutes to realize that the whole idea of finding thousands of article submission sites for your articles and knocking out 10 articles a day to each of them is ludicrous... Yet there are unscrupulous vendors out there who will tell you this is possible.

Not every directory is suitable for you to use so the idea of just having a huge list and then quickly and painlessly submitting your articles is, unfortunately, not going to happen. You really do have to spend a little time making sure the directory will accept your article.

** Search Engines - This is what it's all about isn't it? The reason why we submit our articles...

It takes time for search engines to spider the various submission sites, spider your site, put it all together and assign you some sort of score which determines where you are in the pecking order, (ranking), of your particular niche.

Don't be fooled into thinking that duplicate PLR articles are the way to go either. Search engines are really smart cookies nowadays and getting smarter all the time...

- One whiff of duplicate content and your site is gone - Good night Vienna!

- One Whiff of back door pages...

- One whiff of your site being associated with a bad boy...

- One whiff of illicit linking strategies...

You get the idea here.

It may be tedious and time consuming but the only way to achieve a significant presence on the Net is to give the search engines exactly what they want. They should be our friends not an adversary with whom we are constantly battling.

The secret is lots of good quality content with plenty of backlinks, (using your keywords as anchor text), from reputable sites.

Also bear in mind that what worked for search engines last year most probably wont work this year. An example being that if you now submit a ridiculous number of articles too quickly Google will penalize you for it. Much better to submit a reasonable number at a reasonable rate.

Exactly what defines reasonable I haven't been able to find out and I doubt that Googles Gadget Guy, Matt Cutts, is going to give us much information. I guess applying some common sense could work wonders though!

** Duplicate Content And PLR Articles

This seems to be all the rage nowadays but take note of the above comment relating to search engines and Google in particular. Just to reinforce things... Duplicate content is a big No No.

In my experience PLR articles are a waste of time. Like anything else if you want quality you have to pay. Nobody is going to either give away or sell for $4.99 500 PLR articles that have been professionally written with good content and keywords that are of any relevance.

I have found that it doesn't usually take much more time to research and write a 500 - 600 word original article than it does to mess around with the duplicate stuff to get it ready for submitting.

PLR Is Normally Rubbish...

! Poorly written
! Hardly any keywords or key phrases
! ALWAYS duplicated content - at least I personally have never found a PLR article to be unique.
! You have to spend time making the articles unique

If you are going to use PLR articles it is not enough to change a few words and juggle the paragraphs around. Remember I told you search engines are smart and they will pick this up straightaway. To use PLR articles effectively you must adopt a tedious procedure.

Firstly use the Copyscape or similar website to see how many duplicates it finds on the Net. You can guarantee that others will have been there before you.

Secondly check out all the results to see how much work is involved in making the article unique.

Thirdly keep amending the text until it is either showing as unique or has a small duplicity factor.

Believe it or not the 3 steps above will take a long time.

Don't be fooled by the sales pitches telling you that a piece of software can take a PLR article and turn it into a unique article instantaneously. Or, produce hundreds of "unique" articles from just one article.

This is all hogwash. You would be too embarrassed to submit this to an article directory to be reviewed by a real person and if you just upload the "articles" to your website, guess what...? Yep, you've been Googled!

You can see I've tried the PLR stuff and it certainly didn't work for me. It also made me feel like a cheat so the end result was worthless to me anyway.

To sum up, just as with anything else in life, there really isn't any quick fix to article marketing and raking in the big bucks. You have to be methodical and consistent. Submit just 3 original articles a week and you will soon see the benefits.

About The Author-- Taff Martin runs Taff's Article Directory and publishes TAD NEWS. A newsletter dedicated to giving real information to real people. Visit his Article Directory for tips and strategies on article marketing. http://www.Taffs-Article-Directory.com/

Article Source: Articles island - Free article submission and free reprint articles