Should I Post Articles Only to My Site Instead of Submitting Them to Article Directories?

Article marketing pre-dates the Internet as a marketing strategy. Article marketing was used by professionals, marketers, and businesses to get brand exposure, build their reputation, and drive leads to their storefronts, offices, and call centers.

Articles were submitted to various print publishers including newspapers, newswires, newsletters, magazines, and journals. Marketers would submit their articles to numerous publishers with the hope that they would get published and syndicated.

As the number of publications that published an article increased, the number of inquiries and leads grew. This is one of the fundamental strategies of article marketing: more exposure delivers more inquiries.

The objectives of article marketing haven’t changed but the methods to syndicate articles have. With the Internet and Web 2.0, marketers are now able to syndicate their articles to publishers more efficiently and effectively.

Also, the Internet has expanded the number and types of publishers significantly. Search engines are the largest publishers on the Internet. There is a massive amount of traffic generated from search engine results.

Site Authority

There are two primary benefits to posting articles on your site or blog.

1. Provide information to help establish your expertise, credibility, and authority in the minds of your target audience.
2. Increase the authority of your web site so that it will rank higher in search engine results for your targeted keywords.

As you can see, both of these benefits are anchored in the concept of ‘authority.’ Authority is the acceptance that you are the definitive source on a topic.

Providing relevant, unique, and quality articles will help build your overall authority with search engines and people. Google and other search engines also use link popularity to help determine your site’s authority.

Link popularity is the quantity and quality of back links to your site. Increasing the number of quality links to your site will increase your website’s authority. Increased authority equals higher rankings in search engine results and more traffic from search engines.

Your Site vs and Other Sites

The only reason you wouldn’t want to submit your articles to multiple sites is to build your sites authority. Writing and posting original and quality articles to your site will help increase your site’s authority.

Through other link building efforts, eventually you could build the number of inbound links to your site. But why not leverage your articles for their content AND link building capabilities?

Using your articles exclusively for content is an inefficient way to leverage your marketing resources, time, and budget. Syndicating your articles will help build your back links and website authority. Submitting your articles to article directories and other sites will also help you ‘piggy back’ other websites' authority, search engine rankings, and search engine traffic.

Article Marketing Strategy

Here’s a quick step by step article marketing strategy to completely leverage your articles.

1. Write an article with a link to your site in the author box or article body
2. Post the article to your site and ping the article (don’t use a full feed)
3. Check to see if Google indexed the article on your site
4. After Google indexes the article, submit your article to as many sites as you can

This strategy will give you credit as the originator of the article. It will also increase the number of back links to your site, your search engine rankings, and traffic to your site.