Article Writing and Submissions to get free backlinks

Yesterday, we talked about getting free backlinks by finding blogs on related subjects to your website, and leaving comments with links pointing to our site.

Blog commenting is not the only way you can get free backlinks to your site, there are actually quite a few, and today we’re going to talk about writing and submitting articles to free article directories.

Article directories are websites which accept articles from publishers, which they place on their site. Whilst at first this might seem like a one way street - you give them free content for their website, and you get nothing in return, this is not the case.

The great thing about article directories is that they allow you to place a “resource box” at the bottom of your article. Think of this resource box as a place to put a short biography of yourself or your business, with a link back to your website.

The other great thing about writing articles for article directories is they those articles find their way all over the web. Most article directories have terms of service which allow other website owners to republish their (your) articles as long as they leave the resource box intact.

This can happen in two ways. Other article directories pick up and republish your articles, or bloggers/website owners republish them with your link in the resource box.

First, let’s talk about writing the actual article. There are a couple of tracks you can take here - write the article yourself, or pay someone else to write it for you. Whilst it’s true that nobody knows your industry the way you do, so the best person to write the article is you, some people lack either the time, or writing skills to take on the task themselves.

To this end, you can contract the writing of your article out to a professional copy writer, from as little as $0.10 per word (a 500 word article (the minimum length for most article directories) will cost you around $50).

Once we have our beautifully crafted article in hand, we need to think about what we’re going to write in our Resource Box: We want to write a little about ourselves, a little about our business, and make sure to include a link back to our site. If I were to be writing a resource box for articles I was to submit promoting my Search Engine Optimisation business, I might write something like this:

Stuart Drew is an Adelaide Based Search Engine Optimisation professional, with five years of industry experience helping clients improve their Search Engine Rankings. Stuart is the owner of ChilliCool Adelaide SEO and Website Design, an Australian firm which provides affordable premium internet services to small to medium businesses.

Now that we have our article and our resource box text in our hot little hand, we need to find some places to submit them.

Once again, you have two options here, you can hire a professional to do it for you (Submission to 200 article directories will cost less than $100), or do it yourself. If you choose to do the article submissions yourself, here’s a good list of article directories to start with:

1. EzineArticles

2. GoArticles

3. WebProNews

4. ArticleDashboard

5. SearchWarp

6. PubsACS

7. ArticleBase

8. Isnare

9. Buzzle

10. ArticleCity

11. IdeaMarketers

12. Site Reference

13. Article Alley

14. Web Source

15. Amazines

16. Submit Your Article

17. TheWhir

18. Excellent Guide

19. Directory Gold

20. Articles Factory

21. Content Desk

Keep in mind that submitting articles to article directories is not a quick fix ranking booster. It will take time for your articles to propagate across the web, and time for the search engines to take into account the new links when calculating your rankings.

If you have any questions, or would like help putting together an article submission plan, we’d love to hear from you to discuss your needs.