Xigaware

Given the amount of resources that an Internet business invests in article marketing, we all hope for a good return on our expenditures.  No matter if we write our articles in-house or hire an expert professional writer, online marketers want to recoup those expenditures as quickly as possible via increased traffic and revenue.

Most of us who use content syndication use article directories most often to distribute our content.  A good article directory offers us three major advantages.  The first of those is that a top ranking article directory gets a lot of visitors.  That means a lot of people have an opportunity to find our article there.  An attractive title will encourage a lot of those visitors to read our articles and, perhaps, click through to our website.

Second, webmasters of other sites within our niche will pick up our article with our embedded links for publication on their own sites.  While these niche specific sites will have less traffic than the directory, that traffic will be more targeted, so our article will be relevant to those visitors’ interests.  Thus, a higher proportion of those viewers will be drawn to our article.

The third advantage is that the search engines are very likely to notice the links to our site from the syndicated article, and, as a result, our search engine listings are probably going to improves.  However part of that improvement will be limited and temporary, because most of the repeated instances of publication of that same article will be considered duplicate content.  Once the search engine robots have done their job properly, most of those duplicate external links will have disappeared in terms of their SEO value.

We can get some additional benefit by providing each directory with a unique version of our article.  If we spin our content, then we can accomplish producing multiple unique versions of the same content.  However, even when we go to the trouble of spinning so that each article directory gets a unique version, the individual sites that take their content from that directory will still be duplicate content.  Thus, while spinning our article prior to submission to multiple directories is a great improvement, we can still do even better in squeezing value from our article marketing efforts.

Another alternative is to add to our syndication plan a system by which we can distribute unique, spun versions of our articles directly to individual sites within our niche.  This can be an extremely tedious process as it involves considerable research time in finding those sites, establishing contact with the webmasters and persuading them that it is in their interests to publish our articles with our links on their sites.

Luckily for those of us who rely heavily on content marketing, there is a new, largely automated system to handle such distribution.  I think of it as an article distribution cooperative.  I go into the details of this content distribution system in another article.

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