Given the amount of resources that an online business puts into article marketing, we want to get the greatest return possible from our efforts.  Whether we write the articles ourselves, use the writing talents of our employees or outsource to a professional web writer, online marketers want to recoup those expenditures as quickly as possible via increased traffic and revenue.

Article directories are the most frequently used distribution point for our content.  A good article directory offers us three major advantages.  The first of those is that a top ranking article directory gets a lot of visitors.  That means a lot of people have an opportunity to find our article there.  Some of those people will read our article, and, if we have written persuasively, some of those readers will click through to our site.

Secondly, many webmasters who monetize their sites with advertising will add our articles (including our links) to add to their own sites in our niche or a related niche.  While these niche specific sites will have less traffic than the directory, that traffic will be more targeted, so our article will be relevant to those visitors’ interests.  Consequently, we can expect a higher proportion of those niche website’s visitors to choose to read our article.

Visibility of our links to the search engines, thereby improving our position in the search engine listings, is the third advantage of submitting our content to article directories.  However part of that improvement will be limited and temporary, because most of the repeated instances of publication of that same article will be considered duplicate content. 

If we handle of syndication to article directories properly, we will provide unique articles to each directory to which we submit.  We can accomplish that efficiently using article spinning.  But even if we submit a unique article to each directory, the individual sites that take their content from that directory will still be duplicate content.  So this approach to spinning is a huge improvement over distributing the same article to multiple directories, it leaves room for improvement in maximizing our benefit from our article marketing efforts.

An alternative to using only article directories is to also distributed unique articles to individual sites within our marketing niche.  Unfortunately this can be a time consuming challenge in identifying potential publishers for our articles and then convincing those webmasters that they can actually benefit from publication of our articles (and our contextual links).

Luckily for those of us who rely heavily on content marketing, there is a new, mostly automated system to handle such distribution.  This unique approach is a content distribution consortium of publishers and content providers.  I go into the details of this content marketing system elsewhere.