Okay, you’ve identified a great topic related to your affiliate product and written a masterpiece of an article using the techniques that we discussed earlier.  It’s got an eye-catching title, great content and a keyword density of 3-5%.

Fantastic.  Now it’s time to submit your article so you can start building a steady flow of traffic to your website or affiliate offer.

There are literally hundreds of article directories out there, but here are the top 21 ranked article submission directories by name and Google page rank (which ranks the relative importance of different pages on the internet):

Most, if not all, of these sites will require you to create a free account before you can submit to them which is a relatively easy and painless process.

Remember – your articles will inherit some of the popularity of the article directory that you submit to.  This is why you want to submit to article directories with high page ranks like the ones listed above.  If the Google page rank of the directory you are submitting to is higher than the page rank for your competitor’s web pages, then you have a good chance of getting your article on the first page of the search engine results which can bring in some nice traffic.

When submitting your article, DON’T submit the same article to multiple directories.  For example, let’s say you’re marketing an affiliate product that shows people how to get friends on Facebook and you’ve written a single article which you’ve aptly entitled “The 5 Top Ways to Get Friends on Facebook”.  Don’t then go and submit that article to each of the 21 directories listed above.  In fact, don’t even submit it to TWO of the directories.  Why?  It’s simple – even if the article is accepted by multiple directories, Google will recognize the duplicate content and omit the duplicates from search results meaning that your article will only show up once no matter how many directories you’ve submitted it to!  So, remember… one article = one directory submission.

Article Spinning

Ugh, this one submission per article thing is starting to make article marketing sound like a ridiculously huge undertaking, huh?  Well, one clever way to get around the duplicate content problem is to “spin” your articles, a process which involves taking a single article and rewording it several times in several different ways to create unique versions of the same article.  Using this method, you can take one article that you’ve written and create several articles for submission without having to come up with multiple topics and without having to write entirely new content.  So, if you took that article called “5 Top Ways to Get Traffic on Twitter” and “spun” it into 10 different versions of the same article, you could submit one of each to 10 different article directories.  Smart, yes?

As you may have gathered, writing, spinning and submitting articles can be a very time consuming process.  However, the results of a well executed article marketing strategy are well worth it.  And there are some ways that you can cut down your work dramatically.  We’ll cover them in the next tutorial.

Up Next: Time Saving Article Writing and Submission Techniques.

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