Over the next few weeks we will be testing the marketing strategy of Article Submission with various websites. There are many ways to go about submitting your articles in an attempt to gain some valuable backlinks and an increase in traffic to your website. Article distribution can be accomplished by manually submitting to free directories, via automated submission scripts, through paid article directories or by the many other submission methods. We will be researching various ways of submitting articles to different directories and article sites in an attempt to find the most cost effective way to gain traffic and links through article submissions. Including a paid submission through iSnare with distribution results, as well as a free article submission via ezinearticles. We have an example of an iSnare article submission case study that was made via the article directory iSnare during 2007 and the results in Google, MSN and Yahoo for the articles distribution.

The art of submitting articles can be a complicated one, and every publisher seems to have their own unique strategy. The basic principal is to write a unique article related to the website you are promoting, usually of between 400 - 700 words (we recommend 500 words as some article directories only accept articles of 500 words or longer). Don’t worry if you cannot write your own articles, there are many freelance article writers available on sites such as freelancewriting.com, Digital Points Content Creation Forum and other Webmaster forums. The rate for a 500 word article on practically any subject can vary from around $5 to $25 so feel free to shop around for price. Be carefull with very low priced writers though as the finished article may be of low quality with bad punctuation and grammar. It may be worth the few extra Dollars to hire a professsional writer making sure English is their first language. Once you have your article written you need to formulate your Author Resource box, this is the section where you can add your links.

The Author Resource box or Author Bio box is the section of text at the very end of articles where you are allowed to include html links. Most article submission sites will only allow you to place links and promotional material in your Author Resource box, not in the main article body. You can get away with using one or two links in url format within your article text body, but only if the webpage you are linking to provides additional information pertinent to the article. Your Author Bio box can only contain a limited number of characters so keep any text short and to the point. You should be aiming to sum up your website, the services you have to offer and details about any specific product you may be promoting with the article.We would recommend one of your live html links in your Author Resource box to be in url format (without anchor text). Unfortunately some republishers websites seem to strip out links with anchor text, so your url formatted link may end up the only live link left on some sites that have republished your article. If you have search engine friendly style urls on your website, a url with your article keywords present may be best for your url formatted link. If you have managed to include a url formatted link into your main text body this would also benefit from being a search engine friendly url including keywords related to the article. But it is essential that you only include links in the main article body if they are relevant to the article, as most article sites will not allow affiliate links or blatant promotional links in the main article. We feel it is useful if relevant to include at least one url link in the article body (if allowed) as some unscrupulous publishers of articles remove the Author Bio box completely when they republish articles. So even if your article is republished by some websites with the Author Resource box removed you may still gain some traffic from the link in the article body.As well as your url formatted link include one or two further links in your Author Resource box that use your required target anchor text. Depending on the type of website or business you are trying to promote other relevant details can be included in your Author Bio such as business address or telephone contact information.

Choosing where to distribute your newly written unique article will make a difference to how widely your article gets distributed throughout the internet. Depending on your budget you may decide to distribute your article via free article directories only or via a paid article distribution service. Using a paid article directory service should get your article submitted to many directories and publishers for as little as $2. Over the coming weeks we will be testing both methods of article distribution and publishing our results.

An example of some article directories and sites that offer a paid distribution service are :

iSnare.com $2 Distribution service.

ThePhantomWriters.com - Article distribution costing $20 - $35.

ArticleTrader.com

MarketWire.com - Press Release News Submission.

There are many thousands of article directories on the internet that offer free article submission, we will be testing some of these during our article marketing case study. An example of some free article submission directories and ezines are :

EzineArticles.com

AEticle.com - Free manually reviewed article directory.

GoArticles.com

Articles Base free article syndication.