About a month back I posted an article on the Top 10 Free Article Submission Sites.

These were based on my research with Alexa for the site rankings (a combination of traffic and page views) on some of the most popular article submission sites. I then took a crack at the Top 4 on the list and started submitting articles.

This post is all about the results, what I learned, and some Tips and Tricks that will help you out and save you some time if you should decide to try them out yourself.

The list looked something like this (lower is better):

I decided to target the top 4 first. I set up accounts at EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, Buzzle, and SearchWarp. All were fairly easy to do, and it took me maybe about an hour to fill out all the required crap and to build my profile. Over the course of the next month, I submitted every post from my blog as an article on all 4 sites.

1. All of them limit the number of outgoing links in the article or your sig. It ranges from 2-4 links max be it to your site, or to other sites. I found the best happy-medium was to include 2 links in my sig, and then use the remaining spots in the article body to other sites. It’s kinda a pain when I am referring to resource sites to help people out, but that’s the way it is.

2. Don’t pitch yourself or your business. I know that is the reason you are submitting the article, but it is REALLY frowned upon. I used my own logos to serve as examples for an Identity Kit articled and got slapped. I also tried telling people in the article that the Article Sites would not allow my pictures, so I pointed them to my site to get the pictures. Again slapped.

3. None of these sites allow any type of video. That’s tough for a quasi-video blog like mine. Now I have to decide which is best for my own blog (people like video) and what drives traffic to the site and builds buzz (the articles).

4. If you can, copy the source HTML code from your blog and on the article submission site, switch to HTML view if available. (Most of them have it) Then just copy the code in, switch over the “normal” view and tweak. This is by far the easiest way to get a decent looking page. If you use wordpress like me, do not just copy and past the content from the Visual Mode of wordpress. It will come out formatted like crap and will take forever to fix.

This site is far and away the most difficult site of all of them. BUT they really do have the best page ranking. Unfortunately it didn’t do squat for me.

Approval =F

 I NEVER got an article approved with the first submission, many took 3-4 changes to get approved, several were never approved and I ditched even trying.

Ease of Submission = F

VERY picky interface to insert content. Cludgy at best. On average, it took about 20 minutes to reformat every post to look ok.

Article Views = B

Article views – 139, profile views- 35

Not bad, not great. One added bonus though. I noticed that a search on my business name in google had a searchwarp.com article in a couple spots in the top 10. Not bad.

Approval = A

Every article I submitted, even the “offensive” ones were approved quickly. Also allow more links than some of the others.

Ease of Submission = B

Easy. Just copy HTML from wordpress

Article views =C

Article Views – 81, search engine referrals- 48,

This one was just weird. Set up the account, created a profile, and submitted a few articles. Now it says that I have not submitted any articles, and my account is on hold.

This one is now my favorite. It took a little while to get everything and approved and rolling, but now it’s a breeze.

Approval = A

Every post has been approved. No worries

Ease of Submission = B

Again easy peasy. Just past the HTML code from your wordpress and tweak a little. More advanced formatting takes a little more work. 

Article Views = A-

Article views – 119

Traffic to my site from these article sites can be summed up in one word – Suck. Ezinearticles which pulled the best still only contributed .2% (two-tenths of one percent) of my site traffic. Part is the nature of the sites themselves. They are geared towards getting people to THEIR site, not yours. I understood this going in, but my hope was to get at least a little more.

On the flip side, it is really difficult to track the general buzz addition that an article site adds. Since I started the blog in August, my site visits have been doubling every month. That’s certainly OK with me and more than I had been expecting. That HAS to be in some part to these sites. While my traffic is still nowhere near stellar, my goal of 100,000 visits a month now certainly looks doable.

I stumbled across a tech tutorial site recently by accident. I figured it would be a good spot to throw up a few of the Joomla and Wordpress tutorials I had. Took about 10 minutes to create a profile and submit my entries. It is still really early yet, but this one looks great for actually driving traffic to your site. Within 2 days I had already gotten more site visits from this one aggregator than all of the article submission sites combined.

What’s cool about this site is that it points directly to your website, not theirs. The summary is posted on their site, but then goes to your website for the actual article.

www.good-tutorials.com

My submissions –

Starting this month, I am going to stick with articlesbase and search warp and begin a trial of the next 3 on the list. I will keep my account on ezinearticles, and maybe post something if I think it has a REALLY good chance of not getting bounced (no links, no pictures, sesame street language, and nothing to do with my business. If they didn’t have such a stellar traffic rating I would ditch them entirely, and I still may.

So I’m off to try Articlealley, articlesphere, & Articleclick.com (*note: I don’t think selfgrowth.com is really going to fit, but I’ll check it out anyway) As with this one, I’ll post my findings sometime next month. Until then, happy marketing!