Case study results of an article submission through www.iSnare.com that was made in early 2007 with distribution results. The article directory iSnare.com offers article writers the option to submit their article for free to the directory or alternatively they offer a $2 paid distribution service.
For this article titled

Is Myspace the Hottest Social Network?

we elected to use the $2 paid article submission and distribution service through iSnare.com.
The paid service is supposed to distribute your article to over a thousand websites and send your article to over twenty thousand publishers via opt-in emails. Obviously a large proportion of those publishers will not be interested in your article or will not accept your article, so we were not expecting miracles. We have shown below the case study results for this article submission with screenshots from Google, Yahoo and MSN searches for the specific article title enclosed in quotes.

Search Results for Article Submission in Googles Index

Google shows 97 results for the specific article title searched for in quotes. Half the sites seem to look like other article directory sites. But as well as directories the article has been picked up and published by some Myspace Resource related sites (hopefully providing some related back-links and traffic).

Yahoo Search Results for Myspace Article Submission

Yahoo shows a higher instance of the specific article title than Google with 179 search results. Both Yahoo and Google are showing a similar mix of article directories, Myspace related sites, related Blogs and some obviously sp@mmy type sites and blogs that have picked up and republished the article.

Search Results in MSN for Article Submission

Out of the three search engines checked for the article submitted via iSnare MSN’s search index showed the lowest results. Only 33 instances of the specific article title searched for in quotes was found in the MSN search. Although the top result in MSN was for a Myspace related website (with Mypspace related domain name) rather than an article directory site, so MSN is showing results pages that are related to Myspace higher up.

Some direct traffic must have been created from this article as the iSnare publisher account shows that the article has been viewed over 150 times on iSnares website alone. So for the $2 iSnare fee it seems like this article submission should have gained at least 179 back links (according to Yahoo search for the article title). When writing this article we managed to include 3 url based links within the main body of text as well as a url link and anchor text link in the Author Resource box. Upon deeper investigation into where the articles have been republished it seems a small percentage of publishers have removed the Resource Box completely and quite a few strip anchor text based links from the Author box. So having managed to work url links into the main body of the article we still should gain at least a url based link (and maybe some traffic) from dodgy publishers that don’t republish the Author Resource box. Also the sites that have republished the article complete but stripped the anchor text links from the Bio will still have a live link from the url based link that was in the Author Bio box.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Content, Publishers, Articles, Marketing, Links