Copyright 2005 Richard KeirI've been blogging occasionally over
last two months about my ongoing experiment with writing articles. This is a super hot topic lately with changes going on at Google and Yahoo that are impacting many websites and basically freaking people out.
Now everybody knows that writing articles is a powerful technique. You knew that, right? And everybody is writing articles, right? No. Did I? Not until recently, though I wrote a lot in blogs and did post some articles I wrote on my sites. There's two parts to this for me. Writing, which I have been doing. Distributing. Which I hadn't been doing.
I finally came out of that fog and decided that I had to see what distribution might really do. Content, such as original articles is still basic currency of internet. People come onto web looking for information. Content provides that information.
But, if content is just sitting on a blog or posted in an article directory on one website, it has very limited exposure without links. Content may be flesh of web, but links are bones, underlying structure that allows things to found and accessed.
It's in our faces right here - two basics that you can combine to really power a successful website. Content and links. Write articles AND publish/distribute them. Simple, basic, old style site building.
One technique many are using to build sites is to get other people's articles and put them up on their sites to provide related content. I do it, you do it, nearly everyone seems to. Other people publish ezines, but can't possibly write all content they want to provide. This is demand that exists, right now, for your articles. There is a deep, apparently bottomless need for quality content on nearly anything imaginable. And it won't go away.
Original content on your site is a great traffic booster. Distributing your content all over internet gets you lots of incoming links - which over time could well continue to increase as your articles are picked up and redistributed. Plus you are generating a name for yourself and qualifying yourself as an expert. Experts write about what they know and discover. They share their knowledge. I'm not talking about anyone being a genius and discovering anti-gravity (and finally eliminating rocket science). I'm talking about what's already in your head and what you can learn, research and write about.
I wrote three articles on some basics concepts to keep in mind in building and developing successful eCommerce websites. They aren't hot hot hot 6 steps to infinite wealth type writing. They're basic and based on research. Then I distributed them to a couple (not all) of big article directories and to a large group of relevant directories and lists through SubmitYourArticle.com (which I do recommend if you're looking for an excellent and reasonable article submission service). Here are results as of this writing (June 28, 2005):
