smart computer use?

Haha, this almost made me laugh.

Back when I first started submitting articles to article directories and article sites, I eventually added ArticleTrader.com to my submission list. I added some of my core articles. But I noticed that it seemed they weren’t going to get approved any time soon, especially after checking back for a couple weeks without any action on their part.

Well, that was on (by the best of my estimations) about October 12th, 2008.

Now it is January 27th, 2009, and all of the sudden I get a bunch of approval emails in my inbox, from ArticleTrader.com!

At first, I didn’t even consider that the emails were anything from ArticleTrader.com, I thought maybe something glitched at EzineArticles.com and I was getting approval emails again, or something like that. I hardly thought that any sites I had submitted articles to were still mulling over approval of the said articles.

So… I can estimate that it’s gonna take about 3-4 months to get an article approved and live at ArticleTrader.com, that’s pretty slow! I guess I’m not sure how effective putting articles on their site is anyways, but that was kinda funny to see.

Ok, so I’ve recently started submitting some articles to articles directories. The main article directories that I have focused on to this point have been GoArticles.com and EzineArticles.com.

I think between those two I have picked the most spammy and one of the least spammy directories, so it’s been interesting to see the differences.

GoArticles.com results

So far I have seen my first article submitted to GoArticles.com picked up by a few blog sites that look like they get their entire content base from GoArticles.com. Interesting. I am hoping that after a while that I can start to get some articles out on some better, more established web sites. But, I suppose I’ll have to go straight to the source (as in submitting directly to targeted web sites) to get that to happen. Who knows though, it’s only been a couple days.

The ease of getting articles live on GoArticles.com is just too appealing, no matter how cheesy and spammy that site might seem.

EzineArticles.com results

At first I had to sit and wait for a few days to see any activity on my EzineArticles.com article submissions. The first article that started to get through their editorial review actually got rejected. The reason was because I was using too high density of a target keyword. I can see their point, but honestly it was very hard to rewrite that article using that particular keyword less, just because of the nature of the article content. Once I had edited the article down to use the keyword less (I thought it was harder to understand after the editing) I re-submitted the article and now it appears that it might get approved.

That was interesting.

Also, my other 3 articles appear to now be passing through the editorial process as well, so I hope to have my first 4 articles on EzineArticles.com shortly.

Fun stuff.

Time to start writing some more articles.

I recently have begun submitting articles to various article directories in an effort drive some more traffic to my various web sites.

I’ve read a lot about the technique of submitting articles to online article directories to help build traffic to web sites, but have never dug into it until this point.

Three Different Article Directory Web Sites

I have chosen to focus initially on 3 different article directory web sites:

1. EzineArticles.com
2. Buzzle.com
3. GoArticles.com

The main reason I picked these three is because they seemed to be three sites that are consistely ranked at the top of other article writers lists

I know that there are a lot more out there, but these are the three that I am going to focus on initially.

It has been interesting to see the difference between these three sites. I was expecting many of the article directory web sites to be similar, but these first three are already showing me that each site does have it’s own unique way of doing things.

EzineArticles.com First Impressions

I went with EzineArticles.com as my first choice. It always seems to be top rated on other lists I have seen and seems to be one of the top article directory sites out there right now.

I signed up for an account and gained access to the site within about a day. EzineArticles.com seems to have pretty strict policies to help prevent spam-type articles. They don’t allow a lot of spammy links in their articles and focus on making you use your “resource box” at the end of the article to good effect.

They also seems to have a very in depth editorial process, with 5 steps to approval clearly outlined.

One of the main things I really liked about EzineArticles when entering my first article was the way that their interface autosaved text very well and overall makes it easy to get your article up to par using their spell checker and word counters.

So… I went ahead and put in 4 articles right away.

It’s been a few days now and I still have yet to see any of my articles move beyond the initial editorial step. This is kinda disconcerting. I do see that they say it might take 7 days to get an article approved, but I would have expected that my articles would have made it past the first editorial step quicker than they have.

I’ve kinda gotten discouraged at this point and am just going to let those articles sit there until something happens.

This slow editorial response is why I quickly moved on to check out a couple other article directories.

Buzzle.com First Impressions

Buzzle.com seems to me to be like more of an online community. I like the ability to add polls, which is kinda cool, and my account got approved within a day (even though they said it could take up to four weeks).

I haven’t tried submitting any articles yet, as I beleive Buzzle.com said that it’s best to not submit articles that have submitted to other web sites.

So… I have decided to hold off on Buzzle for now, at least for a few days, until I can compile some unique articles to submit. Buzzle.com also seems to be a directory for articles and current events related material too, so I might take that into consideration when submitting some articles.

GoArticles.com First Impressions

GoArticles.com appears to the only one of the three that doesn’t have any strict in-article link guidelines or any sort of editorial process whatsoever.

The result of this is that the GoArticles.com article directory seems to be loaded with very spammy articles that are keyword stuffing and over-linking in the articles bodies. The majority of articles I looked at didn’t really even appeal to me as anything that would be worth putting on a web site.

I got signed up for an account and had an article live within one day. It was too easy. The site seems to not really offer many features compared to EzineArticles.com, for example, but it is easy to get articles on GoArticles.com very quickly.

Conclusions

Well… I’ll have to focus on writing some articles now that I can submit to the various sites. I’m thinking that I’ll just have to be patient with EzineArticles.com, and will continue to add some articles every week, hoping that some of them actually start to move through the editorial process eventually.

I’ll probably try to write current events type of content for Buzzle.com, that looks like a good approach for that site.

I’m also thinking that if I submit some good, non-spammy articles to GoArticles.com that I might be able to stand out from the crowd a bit on that site. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve already seemed to have boosted traffic to one on my web sites within only 4 days of submitting an articles to GoArticles.com.