Even before blogging became extremely popular for businesses (and there’s still work to be done in that regard!) people were publishing articles online in article directories.

This is one of Ron’s buzz challenges from his book and part my 3-Week Buzz Marketing Challenge.

Ron points out that you can get some amazing buzz by publishing content in newspapers or magazines. But that’s still pretty much a “black box” for most of us, and few of us have the right connections to do it. Still, I’d encourage this wholeheartedly and would love to do some writing for prominent magazines/newspapers (hint, hint.)

Publishing articles online is much easier.

Lots of individual websites are looking for content, and there are some very well known article directories as well, including EzineArticles.com.

A contact of mine had recommended that I publish some articles there, because it was generating a lot of traffic to his website. I gave it a try in mid-December, re-purposing two blog posts into articles. You can find them here:

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I tried two different topics to see what the results would be. Both articles have received similar traffic numbers – about 180 views each. Neither resulted in much traffic to my blog though.

Today, I submitted a third article. It takes 7-10 days for articles to be approved, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

If you want to give this a try, here are some suggestions:

1. Do your research. Take a look at what some of the regulars are doing at the article directories. What type of content are they publishing? How long? How are they embedding links? What do their bios look like? With a bit of research you can start to figure out how best to tackle article publishing.
2. Don’t re-publish content verbatim. If you have time to write original content, even better, but I think most of the articles found on those directories are exact copies of previously published material or re-purposed material. My recommendation is to re-purpose some blog posts; maybe blend a couple blog posts together, or expand on an idea you’ve already posted on.
3. Link wisely. In my first two articles I didn’t put any outbound links to my blog (or elsewhere.) And the link I did include basically said, “Please visit my blog at Instigator Blog.” Not only is that not terribly compelling, it doesn’t do much for SEO purposes.

   In the 3rd article I’ve just submitted, I included more embedded links to blog posts and added two more relevant links to my own sites – with anchor text emphasizing more interesting/important keywords.

4. Keep submitting. Like any buzz effort it takes time and work. Submitting a couple articles won’t generate a lot of results but start publishing regularly and you could build up an audience as well as some recognition from the article directories. It may result in being featured or highlighted in some way. Lance Winslow has written over 10,000 articles at EzineArticles — it’s gotta be doing something for him!

Article publishing on a regular basis can be time consuming, especially if you’re writing original content (alongside your own blog!) or re-purposing material (without making it crap.) My recommendation would be to give it a try and start doing an article per month, so you can see if it generates results for your target market.