Considering how much money or time an online marketer spends on article marketing, we want to get the greatest return possible from our efforts.  Whether we write the content ourselves, use the writing talents of members of our staff or contract with an expert professional writer, online marketers want to recoup those expenditures as quickly as possible via increased traffic and revenue.

Most of us who use content syndication use article directories most often to distribute our content.  There are three advantages to using a good article directory.  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.  Thus, a higher proportion of those viewers will be drawn to our article.

The third advantage is that the search engines are very likely to notice the links to our site from the syndicated article, and, as a result, our search engine listings are probably going to improves.  Unfortunately some of the benefit of our search results will be limited and temporary, because repeated publication of the same article on a number of sites 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.  If we spin our content, then we can accomplish producing multiple unique versions of the same content.  But even if we submit a unique article to each directory, those niche sites that get our articles from the same directory will be duplicate content.  Thus, while spinning our article prior to submission to multiple directories is a great improvement, we can still do even better in squeezing value 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).

Happily there is a semi-automated system to make implementation of this writer to publisher exchange easier.  This alternative is a content distribution consortium of websites and content writers.  I provide a detailed description of this automated content distribution system in another article.