Smart marketing - submit your articles to article directories

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There are a lot of benefits of submitting your own articles to article directories but before we go into the benefits, what actually are article directories?

Article directories are simply database websites that collect, compile, sort the articles to their own categories and make these articles available to the public. The public can then read these articles for free or reprint them based on certain guidelines.

There is countless number of article directories nowadays. Most of them are offering free membership to authors to submit their quality articles.

In short, this should be good news to webmasters too, who are looking for content to share with their mailing lists, as these article directories provide a great one-stop resource to deposit and find articles.

Now, if you are an author, you shouldn't just write articles and keep them to yourself if you want to get tons of readers to read them.

You want to get your articles distributed across the net. One great way to do it is by submitting your articles to various article directories.

Let's see why you should submit your articles to these article directories:

1. You will establish yourself as an expert in your area.

For example, if you are a doctor specializing in cancer treatment, you could write 500-word articles about mesothelioma or breast cancer and how to prevent them. The more you write, the more exposure you'll get and people will look at you as a knowledgeable person in your area.

Some article directories list top contributing authors and when people see your name among the top, indirectly and subconsciously, they'll have a perception that you know what you talk about.

2. You don't have to pay for advertising anymore.

Web publishers and ezine owners are hungry for fresh, quality contents. Simply give them what they want.

Where do these publishers look for articles? Many will find them from article directories.

If you write good articles, these publishers will be more than happy to forward your articles to their mailing lists. With a single article blast, you could potentially reach tens or hundreds of thousands of readers for free.

Article directory owners, at the same time, are also actively marketing their article directories. This means your articles go along with their marketing campaign as well.

3. Your articles can be your viral marketing tools.

There are article directory owners who partner with other webmasters to distribute articles to many other websites. You submit one article to a directory and that same article appears on many other websites at the same time. This technology is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). If you didn’t know yet, the power of RSS is simply amazing. Big websites will potentially pick up and post your articles on their sites.

Some webmasters will pick up your articles and forward them to others, who forward them to others again. Soon, you'll discover your same article has been published on hundreds of websites within days. It's that possible.

4. You can generate massive traffic to your website.

Search Engines love article directories due to their contents and, often, established directories receive massive hits from Google and Yahoo. You could piggyback the traffic received by these directories by depositing your articles on their databases. Those who visit these article directory websites will potentially read your submitted articles.

Just make sure you have a website to promote and you've already placed a link back to your website in your signature file at the end of all your articles.

5. You can generate sales even if you don't have a website.

If you are an expert in your area, people will read your articles and listen to you. Now, if you refer your readers to any product you recommend, your recommendation won't look like a sales pitch to them anymore. It simply is a solution to their problems, but be very careful with the way you recommend products in your articles. Most article directory owners don't like blatant advertisements in the articles.

Here's the best part. If you don't have a website, guess what? The article directories will be your websites. Your articles will be hosted on these article directory webservers for free.

To get website visitors to contact you, leave your phone number, email address or any special instructions to contact you in your signature file.

To sum up, the 5 reasons above are a few good ideas on why you should submit your articles to various article directories. You will discover more benefits once you get involved in article submission actively.

In case you are looking for websites to publish your articles, below are a few Online Article Directories you can visit.

BigArticleDirectory. com
ZapContent. com
EzineArticles. com
GoArticles. com
iSnare. com

Happy Writing to Smart Marketing!

Social marketing means higher sales conversions

In this new frontier of SOCIAL MARKETING, you can spike your traffic FAST, and if you do it right, you get LONG TERM search engine traffic too. It's really the best of both worlds. Free traffic and higher search engine rankings!

Plus! Higher Conversions

Here's the final key ingredient... and that's the fact that social marketing means that the huge flood of EXTRA traffic you are going to get on your site is already PRE-SOLD. You already have a relationship with them... and they are going to convert into customers at a rate you haven't seen since your grandmother visited your lemonade stand when you were a kid.

It's this simple... people like to buy from people that they already know, like, and trust. And your social marketing campaign will give you the kind of presence so that people already KNOW you, LIKE you, and TRUST you before they even hit your web site. It's not rocket science.

In a recent test performed by a well respected marketing analysis firm MarketingExperiments. com, a site that runs online tests and records the results in their newsletters. They recently concluded a 12-month test where they measured the results of social marketing versus buying paid traffic to a series of 4 sites.

Here is what they found…

Using social marketing, they were able to generate over 93,000 visitors to their sites, paying an employee to do the social marketing work for a total of $3600 during that time, resulting in a total cost per visitor of 4 cents.

Then they ran a one month test driving traffic from Google AdWords. Using that strategy, they obtained 2,057 visitors after investing $1,250 in click costs, resulting in a cost per visitor of 61 cents. Four 4 cents versus 61 cents - social marketing yielded a 1,427% better return on their investment. Not bad!

By now I'm sure that you're foaming at the mouth, wanting to dive in and take advantage of the huge opportunity that Social Marketing presents.

My newest product devoted to applying the techniques of getting traffic from social networking, involves three sites that will get your social marketing off to a great start. They are MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. In my videos I show you why they work and how to set them up to get the fastest results.

There are no secrets! It’s all about creating a presence on each one, developing friends and a relationship with your friends! The rest (traffic) comes naturally when you use social networking the right way!