Article Surfing Archive

Writing articles on topics that are relevant to your Website's topic and submitting them to free content sites is a great way to effectively promote your Website at little or no cost. There are many Websites that want topical content, and they frequently obtain this content from 'free content' publishers. Those sites are always looking for articles and they'll accept articles from most anyone. They offer no compensation other than a link back to your Website. This, as many writers have discovered, is a powerful incentive. Thousands of people have written and submitted articles to 'free content' sites in order to promote their own Website, and it's probably the most cost-effective tool for Website promotion. But there are hundreds of 'free content' sites on the Web. Should you submit your articles to one site only, or should you submit to many different sites? I would appear that submitting articles to as many sites as possible is the best way to promote your site.

In the six or seven weeks that I have been writing articles, I have been submitting them to multiple 'free content' sites. I don't just submit to any site; I have some criteria. The site must have a form that allows me to 'fill in the blanks' to submit my article. I'm way too busy to deal with sites that require e-mail submissions or require me to join a Yahoo! Group. I also avoid sites that will not provide a live, clickable link back to my Website or sites that cover only topics that aren't relevant to the topics of my Websites. Based on those criteria, I have a 'core' group of eighteen sites to which I submit my articles. I have an additional group of seventeen sites I use for articles I write that are related to Website promotion, such as this one. Anytime I write an article, it is submitted to up to thirty-five different sites for publication. From there, each article could end up being published on thousands of different sites.

To date, I have written some 60 articles, published to many different sites. In roughly that same time period, another author who regularly submits articles to one of these content sites has written nearly twenty times as many articles. It would appear, however, that this author does not submit to multiple content sites, but instead submits his articles to this one site only. Still, with some 1200 articles written, this author must be reaping much greater rewards from his work than I am, right? That does not appear to be the case. This author's Website actually has fewer incoming links than a site of mine that I have promoted through articles exclusively. If you do a search on Google for this author's name and a search for my name, you will find that my name and his yield the same number of search results. Even more interesting is the fact that this author has written all of these articles to promote one Website, and my articles cover six different topics and promote six different sites! By submitting to one article to thirty-five different sites, I am obtaining the same promotion power as if I had written thirty-five different articles!

The statistical evidence would suggest that while it is important to find the best sites for submitting articles, it is well worth the writer's while to submit articles to as many sites as possible in order to get the maximum amount of promotion out of each article. Writing the articles is the hard part; submitting the articles takes about one minute per site. That minute is well spent.