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Brand, control and results: submit articles on your own
Currently, article distribution is booming on the Internet. The authors do so for several reasons.
- It is a good way to get picked up by search engines.
- The backlinks in your resource box can help your position in the search engine.
Various products and services have been made available to help you distribute your articles to hundreds of article directories and mailing lists.
a) Software that speeds up document delivery or, in some cases, may do so automatically. b) Services that distribute articles on your behalf c) Services that distribute articles on your behalf, but in your own name.
The double edged sword
Many people pay a premium fee for article syndication on their behalf, without the worry of joining multiple article directory sites as members, giving their own email address, and receiving lots of emails from various Yahoo! groups.
Unfortunately, what they don't realize is that this often devalues their work.
1) In the author section of many sites, the name of the syndication service will be displayed, not the original author.
2) The author sections of many article directories are a unique marketing venue. Many visitors will visit the author's profile before reading an article to the end. Most profiles can have one or more websites listed.
3) Within RSS feeds of article directories, the syndication service may appear in the byline, not the original author.
4) Many article directories allow the author to change or modify their resource box. If an item was shipped using an account owned by a third-party distribution service, that route will be closed.
Full control
For authors who want full control of their brand, submit manually or use article submission software. You will receive more emails, but you can always have a special email address for this purpose. I think Google's Gmail service is an excellent option. Article Announcer and Article Submitter Pro are two examples of this type of software.
Limited control
Use an autoship service that guarantees that you are the author. There are services that enroll members in directories on your behalf, using a username and password of your choice. One of those services is the Item Marketer.
The inconvenience
You will have to confirm your membership to many outlets, and some will continue to email other people's articles. Yahoo Groups usually allow you to select a summary mode or not to receive any articles sent by email. Most of this is a one-time effort, although you will have to keep an eye out for important messages in the email account you use.
The massive gain
They are your articles and you should get the most out of them.
The use of item distribution is very similar to a variant of Pareto's 80/20 rule. You potentially get 80% effective results compared to manual dispensing, for 20% of the job.
However, if your item distribution method doesn't give you as much credit as possible for your items, instead of being 80% effective, you may only get 60% or less.
Managing your own article distribution with tools like Article Announcer or Article Submitter Pro gives you full control to achieve your 80/20 goals. A service like Article Marketer, which gives you full credit and reasonable control, could be 70% effective, for 10% of the work.
By refining your processes, and using only the most effective method where it benefits you the most, you can maximize your return on the work invested.
