Article Directories or Direct Peer to Peer Syndication?

Given the amount of resources that an online business invests in article marketing, we want to get the most value possible from our efforts. Whether we write the articles ourselves, use the writing talents of members of our staff or hire an expert professional writer, we need to recoup our expenses by increasing our traffic and, ultimately, our sales.

Article directories are the most frequently used distribution point for our content. A good article director offers us three major advantages. First, a top tier article directory attract a lot of traffic. That means a lot of people have an opportunity to find our article there. Some of those people will read our article, and, if we have written persuasively, some of those readers will click through to our site.

Second, webmasters of other sites within our niche will pick up our article with our embedded links for publication on their own sites. While these niche specific sites will have less traffic than the directory, that traffic will be more targeted, so our article will be relevant to those visitors’ interests. Thus, a higher proportion of those viewers will be drawn to our article.

The third advantage is that the search engines are very likely to notice the links to our site from the syndicated article, and, as a result, our search engine listings are probably going to improves. However part of that improvement will be limited and temporary, because most of the repeated instances of publication of that same article will be considered duplicate content. Once the search engine robots have done their job properly, most of those duplicate external links will have disappeared in terms of their SEO value.

If we handle of syndication to article directories properly, we will provide unique articles to each directory to which we submit. We can accomplish that efficiently using article spinning. But even if we submit a unique article to each directory, the individual sites that take their content from that directory will still be duplicate content. So this approach to spinning is a huge improvement over distributing the same article to multiple directories, it leaves room for improvement in maximizing our benefit from our article marketing efforts.

Another alternative is to add to our syndication plan a system by which we can distribute unique, spun versions of our articles directly to individual sites within our niche. This can be an extremely tedious process as it involves considerable research time in finding those sites, establishing contact with the webmasters and persuading them that it is in their interests to publish our articles with our links on their sites.

Fortunately there is a semi-automated system to make implementation of this peer-to-peer exchange much easier. I think of it as an article distribution cooperative. I provide a detailed description of this automated article marketing system elsewhere.