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.

The initial payment threshold is $100.00. If I recall correctly payments after the initial threshold are in $10.00 minimum increments. If that is the case I will probably get another payment or two before I need to re-up on my hosting account.

In other news, I have had four articles published by article sites. I have seen some additional traffic from these articles already and should continue to see some increase for some time to come. If any of these should get picked up by a high traffic site I could see considerable traffic, but that is a rather large ‘IF’. It is among the first real site promotion that I have tried and I can see that  it could be of value. I had two articles accepted by Ezine@rticles. The first two they had rejected, so this was a minor victory. The two articles that Ezine had rejected went one to Buzzle and one to GoArticles. Ezine@rticles has very high standards for the articles that they will publish, but that makes being published there of greater value.