Creating an effective online presence is crucial to internet marketing success. Article writing and distribution is a great way to brand yourself, your business, generate click-throughs to your site, and get tons of free links. Many webmasters starting out should consider submitting their original articles to article directories. It builds a lot of free links in the long-term as original and well-written articles will tend to get picked-up by many other relevant sites using your information as content. With articles, there is never any fear of penalization and content IS king on the internet.
Here is a “small” list (in alphabetical order) to get you started:
Amazines
Article 99
Article Alley
Article Avenue
Article Beach
Article Central
Article City
Article Dashboard – Also offers free article directory software.
Article Depot
Article Emporium
Article Garden
Article Hub
Article Responder
Article Sphere
Articles 911
Articles Factory
Author Connection
Business Know How
Constant Content
Content Desk
Ebooks ‘n Bytes
Ezine Articles
Ezine Trendz
Ezine Writer
Free Content
Free Sticky
Free Zine Site
Fresh Articles
Go Articles
How to Advice
IBiz Resources
Idea Marketers
Impact Articles
iSNARE
Knowledge Finder
Link Snoop
Marketing Idea Shop
Marketing Seek
Publish 101
Site Reference
Small Business Newz
Small Business Outpost
TheEzine.net
Valuable Content
WebmasterArticles.net
Webmasters Library
Web-Source.net
Zinos
Skaffe which runs a quality web directory recently created Skaffe Articles. Most article directories don’t allow you to choose your anchor text and merely offer URL link back. Skaffe Articles allows you to choose any anchor text in your articles. Choosing the right anchor text is vital to getting ranked for your key terms.
These directories are also a great repository of content which you can use for your own site. You can use Content Rover, a meta article search engine, to get fresh content quickly from a variety of sources. ARA Content offers a large collection of copyright-free articles and images from online media for you to use on your site. WebProNews and ClickZ are also awesome repositories of articles from many industry experts.
For those who lack the time or drive to manually submit articles themselves to the article directories, consider having someone do this for you. The following sites offer such services:
Ezine Trendz
Opportunity Update
Submit Your Article
The Phantom Writers
And, if you’re still using the excuse that it is just too hard to come up with quality articles yourself, you can outsource this as well. No more writer’s block! There are many freelancers out there. Here are some places worth visiting:
Contracted Work
Elance – One of the most popular freelancer sites around.
Getafreelancer
Guru
Just Articles – An article writing service
Rent-A-Coder – Another of the most popular freelancer sites that has many quality freelancers available for both technical and non-technical work.