The Hobby Webmaster Blog

I did battle with the article directory script last evening. It was only a skirmish but it did take a while. There is an external CSS file that is editable, you just have to find your way around in it. The location that I have the script in its current state is:  Articles Directory at Articles – Here’s The Site. It does work ok in FireFox but still needs some tweaks for IE-6. I have not checked with the newer versions of IE.

There are pluses and minuses with this script. The script is encrypted so you cannot edit the output aside from the CSS file. I wanted to add a nav bar at the top since the directory is only a part of the site. There is hope of doing this, but not in the normal way. I did trick it into displaying a couple of links, and I later thought of a way to do this better, but having access to the script would make things easier.

An other minus with the script is that there are built-in affiliate links. You can get a reasonable affiliate payout on these links, but they may not be your first choice of things to display on your site. You can add ads in three places in the script, and it is through creative use of this option that I was able to display my own links.

The other drawback to the script is that only the site owner can post articles to the site. There is a library of articles and all articles submitted by other participants are immediately displayed on all of the more than 200 directory sites. If you are looking for a script to start a real article directory site, where people can sign up and submit articles this is not the script for you.

On the plus side, with over 200 of these scripts in operation you do get exposure around the net. With the major article directories you will only get the one backlink unless the article is picked up for publication. There will probably be more individual surfers that are exposed to your article on a high page rank article site, but the link love may not be any better than with this article service. The owner of the script states that he does spot checks on articles posted to the directory and will block further posts if he catches someone not complying with his terms of service, but every article is not necessarily checked by a human editor.

The experience has been interesting and I will be submitting some articles through my site. I will post at some future date if I have positive or negative opinions on this service. In the mean time check out the first instance of my article directory and leave me a comment here if you have thoughts or questions.

Last evening I ran across an article directory script. I have downloaded the script and will be checking the possibility of integrating it with one of my sites. This will be an interesting challenge.

Article directories allow people to post articles to the site. Articles posted to the web are an important source of backlinks. Backlinks are important to a site because they help in placement in the search engine results pages presented to searchers. A page with more backlinks will usually be listed higher than other pages if they contain information relevant to the search terms.

I have a few articles posted to article directories. I have just had my fifth article accepted by Ezine Articles and I have articles posted on GoArticles and Buzzle.com. These articles have directed some traffic to my various sites. An article on a directory site like Ezine or GoArticles may be reprinted by webmasters around the world. At least one of my articles has been picked up for reprint.

The script that I found is part of an article directory network. There are over 150 instances of this script in use around the web. This means that an article submitted to any site running the script appears on all of the other sites, so the opportunity for exposure is at least fair. These sites are not likely to have the traffic that a site like Ezine has, but the articles may stay near the top of the list longer, too. If the script works as advertised I will probably support the site with a few articles on some of the major directories.

I will be checking this out over the next few days and post about the outcome. I had considered doing this a few months ago, but all the pieces of the puzzle were not available at the time. Perhaps this is the final puzzle piece that I have needed to complete this puzzle. Be sure to watch for my further post. If the script is good I will provide a link to the source and I will be providing a link to my instance of the script on my selected site.

Have you tried article marketing? What results have you seen? Leave a comment telling of your experience.

I submitted a new article to Ezine @rticles this evening in support of my site MC Rally.com. I had received a communication from them stating that approval times are now short. The article may be live within a couple of days. I will probably place an article with GoArticles with a similar topic soon (I started an article).

Ezine has a double manual approval process. Each article is perused by two editors as well as software scans that check for duplicate content and other standards. The Ezine site is visited by more than a million visitors a day, so the exposure can be great. If the article is picked up by a publication that can lead to even more exposure. The approval process can take up to a week but the email stated that there is currently no backlog. My last article took about two days as I recall.

GoArticles does not have as stringent of editorial standards. If I place an article with them it will be live within a few hours. They do have a good deal of traffic, and I have seen some visitors resulting from some of the articles that I have placed with them. Alexa ranks them at about 1100th in the US as far as traffic is concerned. Ezine is at number 55 in the states.

The article directories are one of the ways to support a site. They will generally drive some traffic to your site. There are good stats with Ezine. I have one article that has been viewed a few times but not driven any traffic. The other two have about 12 and 16 percent click through rates.

One builds traffic incrementally. The more paths that lead to your site the more likely there will be visitors show up. Each article is a pathway to the site that it promotes. In addition the search engines look at how many roads are headed your way when they are determining your position in the results page for a search.

I added two new sub-domains and a new blog to the stable this evening. I have signed up as an author on some article sites. One of the sub-domains is to list the published articles (none yet). The other one with the blog is to promote some click bank products. The blog is to help promote the new site. I will put up some links when I am ready for show and tell. Subscribe to my RSS feed so that you will be the first to know!

You can look now if you want, but there is not much to see today. There may be more tomorrow.  The article list is at: HowHub Articles and the promotional site is at: Make Money. Both are Here’s The Site sub-domains.