Here are answers to a few of the questions we get asked about article marketing on a fairly frequent basis -

Q - What / who are the main article directories?

A - The biggest by far is ezinearticles dot com They are a company based in De Pere WI and employ around 70 people in various roles from customer service to article editing. They are the largest directory in terms of content and traffic. Recently, their traffic was hit in a big way by the Google Panda algorithm update.

Another fairly large article directory is articlebase dot com. We have a list of around 50 of the top article directories ranked in order of importance, in our 'No Place for Dummies' guide on Article Marketing / Syndication

Q - Can I benefit from writing articles and submitting them to the big directories?

A - Yes, in a small way and only if you go about it properly. It was once the case where you could submit an article to one of the larger directories and receive some direct traffic and the value of the link back to your own website. Nowadays, the direct traffic is hardly worth bothering about and the value of the back-link is practically zero. If you're in a very uncompetitive niche, or brand new, you might see a little benefit from the back-link but not much.

Q - What is 'syndication' and how is it different than article directory marketing?

A - Primarily it's a different approach and one which requires a slightly different style of writing. Not just style, but content and presentation are generally different too. Most people use article directories in the hope of getting some direct traffic from people who read their articles and some juice from the back-link on the article page. But that's all but gone since the Panda update. Syndication is about providing valuable content for other webmasters to share with their readers. So they pickup your articles and publish them on their own websites or through their ezines and send you direct and targeted traffic. Plus, you have the benefit of a contextual back-link, which can have some value under certain circumstances.

There's a lot more about this subject in our reference series guide, at the link above.

Q - I'm not a good writer, what are my options?

A - it's to be assumed that even though you're not a good writer you're still knowledgeable about your business niche. In that case, write your articles yourself then pay to have them edited. You can use websites like elance dot com and place your editing project out for tender. People will bid to edit and rewrite your articles and produce a quality product fit for syndication. The cost can be quite low, as little as $10 for a basic editing job. So I would write perhaps 10 articles then submit them as a project and have them rewritten. In my book above, I give you the specification that you should use at elance when submitting the job, so you get back what you're expecting without any unpleasant surprises.

Q - How do I protect my work and stop it from being copied and published under someone else's name?

A - A great and important question. There are steps you can take and they affect all of us not just article marketers and article syndication folks. It's quite a detailed subject and I cover it at length in this article - 'how to protect ownership of your content', this article - 'Establishing Ownership of your content and article marketing' and in my book.

Q - I've written dozens of articles and got them 'out there' but there doesn't seem to be any real benefit, any payback.

A - That's probably because you're investing the time into writing the articles but not into the syndication of your articles. It's like building a website but having no marketing and no visitors. Your article is the first stage in a series of stages needed to attract traffic. In my book, I go through the complete sales funnel as follows -

• Writing an article for syndication
• Creating a landing page
• Setting up an autoresponder
• Attracting syndication partners
• Converting your leads
• Testing each element of your article marketing campaign
  

So if you're just doing one of the above components you're not really giving yourself a fair chance and you shouldn't judge whatever outcome you're seeing.