Showing You The Results Of Submitted Articles

Some Of The Realities To Be Aware Of When Article Writing/Submitting

If you search the internet about "how to get traffic to your website" sooner or later you will come across the "Internet/Website/Traffic Gurus" who state various ways of getting traffic to your website. They usually offer you a promotion and/or a free "Traffic" e-book explaining the various ways, including advice on "How To Submit Articles". There is no real secret involved in Article Writing though.

Even as a natural writer (i.e. a non-marketing, non-salesman, writer) you have the ability to know how to give your article a good Headline grabbing Title. It's not rocket science. And the same goes for the article itself and its introduction. Regardless if you write naturally, without a care for marketing/sales tactics, or as a marketeer/salesman either way, if the article content contains Knowledge and Helpful Information it will gain an audience. Although I have outlined some basic article guidelines and advises below, this section focuses more on the Reality Of Article Submission and the Reality Of Article Results.

Below is a table consisting of statistical data from EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com and ArticleAlley.com (three well known article websites) in respect of six articles I submitted to each of them in July/August 2009. Although other article websites such as ArticleBin.com and Amazines.com have published the same six articles they do not give out popularity and/or viewing statistics.....which is a shame. Anyway. I have published these statistics for you so that you can see the reality of article writing, traffic-wise. Is it bad news or good news?.....read on!

The above results for the six articles I submitted to each article website are based on the Date Published, as opposed to the Date Submitted, in order to make them accurate. Meaning. When you first submit an article it takes anywhere between 2-10 days to get published, if not longer. This is because the article has to go through an editorial review process. Therefore, to be accurate you have to calculate the results from the Published Date.

Is Your Article In The Correct Place?

As you can see, after one month the results from ArticleAlley are quite impressive! The results from EzineArticles though are not so great. This does not mean articlealley is better than ezinearticles. It just means my particular articles appeal more to the viewers using articlealley, at this moment in time only, perhaps because articlealley has more Computer-Related viewers for example.

If I wanted to write/submit an article that attracted more ezinearticles viewers I would need to see what categories/topics rank the highest on ezinearticles, but the problem with this approach is that the popular categories/topics might not be in my area of expertise. Another problem is that article websites, in general, are not like blogs or forums whereby they are themed (i.e. cookery blog, health forum, etc). Article websites are categorized.

If your article does not fit into a, popular, category you may have to work harder than everyone else - You may have to force your article into categories that are not ideally suited to its topic. An example of this would be articles about Shoes. You may have to submit them into a Shopping category (Product), Self-Improvement category ("Wearing a good pair of Shoes.....") or a Health category ("Research shows that Shoes.....". All because you could not find a Shoes category and/or Footwear article website. This is especially true if you are in a niche market and have niche-topic written articles.

Is Your Article Being Credited?

To make sure the six articles had a chance of being accepted/published (getting past the review stages) I had to create them using various, popular, web page content taken from my already successful yoingco.com (free computer lessons) website.

I could of written the articles from scratch but why do so when you already have successful web page content to use, of course. At this moment in time (August 2009) my Computer Memory article has already been used by two blogs (Example Here - The other example's blog is no longer around).

Even though this could be taken as a good sign of article quality, you also have to be aware that people want your quality articles in their blog.....without crediting you. If you click on the link just given you will see my article with the name Sarah Phelt on it (my pen name - see below) but no link to my website. This is probably because they got it from an article website where I had no option to insert my website link below the article itself. So even if that article is to be used in two more different blogs each month, at say 1000 viewers per blog per month, not one of those viewers will be heading to my website.

Therefore, when you sign up for membership on an article website try and make your pen-name the same name as your website. I say try because not all article websites like you having a pen-name named after your website, for whatever reason(s). Hence why it is so important to fill in your profile page (see below).

General Guidelines, Advises, Tips And Observations

The above results show the beginning of article submission, for the month of August 2009. At the end of each month, for the next 2 months (September 2009 and October 2009), I will show you my results so that you can see how my articles progress. Below are my general guidelines, advises and observations with regards to article writing, article submission and article websites. These guidelines and results are continued in the next section.

Submitting Articles

Submitting an article is just a case of registering yourself with an article website (article directory), filling in an Article Submission Form and then waiting approximately 2-10 days for it to be published. Easy as that. However. The hard part is writing good quality, fresh, content that viewers will appreciate and at the same time other webmasters will want to include or link to within their own website, blog or whatever.

When you register with an article website you are generally agreeing to have your published articles made available to anyone who wants to use them; whether this be in their own website, blog, newsletter, leaflet or whatever. You do this in the hope that plenty of other people, besides the article website owners, will publish your articles. Why? Because whenever their websites, blogs and so on are crawled (searched and indexed) by the search engines so is your article content and its profile link (if the person was kind enough to leave your link intact). Therefore giving your website more exposure.

It is not all about search engines and their rankings though. It is about building up your authority and bringing targeted visitors (in relation to your article subject matter) to your own website or blog.

With the market flooded with websites and blogs these days you have to submit each of your articles to at least five, if not ten, major article websites to stand even a small chance of being noticed. Saying this. I would not suggest submitting to every single article website simply because most of them are rubbish, in terms of doing anything fantastic for your articles' search engine rankings. Many people assume article websites are a foot in the door, but tend to forget they have competition from other article websites and struggle for search engine rankings too. Therefore, look at an article website's credentials first.

Look at the article website's page rank (search engine popularity), the amount of articles posted on it daily/weekly, how many authors it has, the quality of article content, the average number of visitor views per article, what categories are popular, whether or not they publish your articles elsewhere (i.e. to other blogs and/or newsletter services) and so on. Unless you check out each article website you have been recommended to, and/or liked the look of for example, you will just fall into the trap of submitting to junk article websites.

Submitting The Same Articles

As you can see. The six articles I submitted have the same title (except for the last article title) when submitted to each article website, and definitely have the same article content (click on a title to see its content). Some "Gurus" advise you not to submit the same article to different article websites (known as: cross posting/submitting) simply because they feel article websites do not approve of this practise and check to make sure you have not cross posted/submitted your article before even considering it for publication. Obviously, you now know this is not true!.....the above proves that.

Auto (Spam) Submit / Manual Submit?

Another thing a "Guru" might promote is an Article Submitter. This is either a program or online service in the guise of an Article Submission Form that will automatically submit your article content to X amount of relevant article websites, and in some cases to rss feeds and/or other general websites. Some "Gurus" even suggest that you rearrange the wording of your article content so that it looks/reads slightly different and can therefore be classed as a completely different (variation) article when it is submitted.

The idea of submitting many articles automatically, as opposed to manually, is plausible but to reword the same article is a spam (junk article) tactic that is frowned upon by article websites and search engines alike. This is because they know these kind of tactics/tricks only end up injuring the innocent article writer/submitter, because at the end of the day their articles are over shadowed by the vast amount of junk articles. It's a classic case of a programmer creating a genuine tool/service to help genuine people submit their genuine articles, only for that tool/service to be abused by the spammer.

Why do article websites and search engines care? Why? Because they do not like similar/repeat (spam) articles. They prefer genuine content that brings out the quality of their services. Article websites do not want to be known for Junk Articles - at this time www.junkarticles.com does not exist - and search engines database-wise do not want to be crawling and then listing floods of fake/repeat articles. Many article websites claim to check each submitted article by hand before it is published, which I doubt purely because of the amount of articles submitted each day.

Imagine a huge team of staff reading hundreds, if not thousands, of submitted articles each day checking for duplicate articles, spelling mistakes and so on; and somehow still manage to publish your article within 48 hours (or within 16 hours over two days). If they can work through hundreds, if not thousands, of article submissions within 2 days they should be working for the Passport Office and Government Offices in general! The point here is that I doubt they have a huge team of staff.

So the big question is "Should I Use An Article Submitter Or Should I Submit Manually?". At the end of the day although it is not impossible to manually submit 5-10 articles a day, to 5-10 article websites, for example (over a period of 1-2 hours) it will be quicker to use an article submitter tool/service (taking 10-30 minutes). On the other hand. If you only have 1 article a day that needs submitting to 5-10 article websites you may want to submit them manually.

Both methods normally involve pasting your article title and article content into relevant edit boxes, selecting various drop-down menu and tick options and supplying a username & password for each article website you are registered with. The only real difference between them is that the article submitter tool/service will submit your article(s) much quicker to many article websites at once.

There are a couple of hundred tools/services out there that you might consider - The List. Not all of them will be of quality or of use to you though (i.e. some may not have a category for your subject matter). Also. Tools and Services do cost money. So the real question is "Do I have time to manually submit my articles?". Below is a list of some well known article submission softwares/tools/services.

Using Different Details

When submitting my articles I used different hotmail/live email addresses. Namely: sarahphelt@live.co.uk (Sarah Phelt), johncomputers2004@hotmail.com (John White) and traceykiel@hotmail.com (Tracey Kiel). These are email addresses I regularly use when posting/submitting/registering something on the internet, purely because I do not want to enter a website for the first time with my proper domain name email address (i.e. john@websitecreationhelp.com) because of the real possibility of receiving spam (junk email) from these first-time/unknown websites/companies.

There is nothing wrong with using hotmail email addresses. When you first register with an article web-site their main requirements are a Name and Valid Email Address, and that is what I have given them. Some article websites even encourage you to set up a Pen-Name. So as long as you do not abuse their services you can register with whatever name and email address you like.

You may of noticed that I use unique/made-up names (Sarah Phelt and Tracey Kiel) when creating an email address. This is so I can easily track them through the search engines and therefore quickly see who publishes my new articles and how well they are doing in the search engines. I highly recommend using this unique name approach.

Male And/Or Female?

When submitting articles test the water by submitting as a Female and Male to the same article website. I have not done so in my case because I know the outcome from doing this with forums and blogs over the years. Basically. A heterosexual male usually takes more interest in a question/article when it has been posted/submitted by a female. Why? Because under the "three second male fantasy law!" they think by viewing your article or by replying to your question they "might be in with a chance!". This is sad but true. It's just the way men are wired in general.

There are genuine helpers, in every day life situations, who will help man or woman regardless but you will always get the sex-on-the-brain helpers too. And the same applies with article viewers. Some are genuinely curious, some are genuinely interested and some are genuinely wired! It's a fact of life. So by submitting an article as a female you might just get more viewers, which could lead to a higher position or ranking in the search engines.

You may be thinking the above said could be classed as a tactic/trick but if you think about it, it is only a tactic/trick to the non-interested viewer (i.e. the sex-on-the-brain viewer). The genuine viewer will view your article for its genuine content and not because it has been submitted by a "Helpless Female". Remember. It is about Traffic and Knowing Your Audience at the end of the day.

Regardless if you entice genuine viewers, curious viewers or even sex-on-the-brain viewers they all help to build up your rankings. By identifying which gender gets better results for you, using the same articles, and by identifying the genuine viewer (if possible) the better you will be at understanding your article statistics - good or bad.

Identifying your audience involves testing female and male, testing your article titles, making sure the content is of the authority and so on. For example. If you think using a female identity is a tactic/trick by a male, let me demonstrate a perfect example of a female carrying out what could be considered a similar tactic.

Below is a profile/articles page by a female. It is under the Relationships >> Sexuality category. There is nothing wrong with the articles this woman has written. They are headline grabbing with authoritative content. However. What could be considered a tactic is the fact she is wearing a revealing dress for her profile/articles picture, as opposed to wearing something that covers her upper body. Why did she do this? When I write an article under John White I post a profile picture of my face only.

One reason why she uses that picture could be because she is tactically using her feminine profile to attract viewers to her articles and also to show its okay to be sexually liberated (within the context of her articles). So you could conclude that we both employ various internet marketing tactics, in this particular instance, to direct our attention specifically at the male psyche. And that it is our job to illicit the appropriate response from our male viewers. At the end of the day it's about what works, what doesn't and what is appropriate to a particular need. Sometimes "Sex Sells" and sometimes it is inappropriate.

Fig 1.2  Did she really need to wear that Revealing Dress?

Your Profile/Bio Is Very Important

Always get into the habit of filling out your Profile page. And always upload a Photograph, even if its not you! In the case of Sarah Phelt I created a special effects photograph for her using a royalty-free photograph of a woman.

Fig 1.3  Sarah Phelt

Fig 1.4  John White

Just in case you are not aware. A profile page (also known as a Bio page) on an article website does not consist of your Name, Age and Website Address; It consists of links to your published articles and maybe a small description about yourself, depending on the article website, that is meant to contain your credentials (i.e. Computer Engineer for the last 20+ Years, Door-To-Door Repairs, Etc). Someone who has read one of your articles and wants to know more about you and/or your other articles are given some sort of link to your profile/bio page (i.e. Click here to see more articles by Sarah Phelt).

With the above EzineArticles statistics showing 67 profile page views, so far, for Sarah Phelt you can only assume people are interested in her articles. On the other hand it may just be 67 curious viewers or 67 sex-on-the-brain viewers looking at her profile page, but I doubt it. Saying this, John only has 1 profile page viewer.

The only real way of cutting out any doubt would be to have the same articles published on the same articles website by both Sarah and John, but as this goes against the rules of article websites you would never truly know if it is a female male thing. Or even an Article Viewers versus Just Stumbled Across Your Profile Page viewers thing. One thing is for sure though. Always fill in the profile/bio page (description), if it is an available option, because this can lead to all sorts of viewers clicking on your website link later.

The Resource Box

The resource box is the boxed off area, normally located towards the bottom of your article's page, that states your author (bio) information (filled in whenever you submit an article). Most of the time the information inside the resource box comes from the information you filled out when signing up to the article website, so you might not be able to word that information how you like. If you can though, word it something like "For more information about.... please visit my website" or "If you would like to know more about.....".

Fig 1.5  This resource information comes straight from the bio (author information section)

The resource box is your reward for using that article's website. It is a place to advertise your website link. There is nothing wrong with a blatant website link but leading into it is much better because you can squeeze in a little background about your website, the topics it covers and so on.

Fig 1.6  A resource box with active links




Fig 1.7  A resource box with static links

Some article websites may give you a bio (profile) box or a resource box but not both. Some may create a static link or an active link. So in these cases you may need to rethink what you put inside the box(es) - Try and lodge a website link into whatever is available. A static link is not ideal though because the visitor then has to Cut & PASTE your link, as opposed to clicking on it, but the link may be out of your control anyway in that respect.