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Article distribution used to be a highly effective way of boosting your site up the search engines through quickly generating high quality links to your site but due to its effectiveness Google made moves, similar to its more recent attack on directories, to limit its power.

However, despite this article marketing does still remain an effective way to promote your site. I’ve never received a huge amount of traffic through writing and distributing articles online but the deep links have proved to be very beneficial for SEO purposes.

When it comes to preparing articles for distribution we recently took a look at so-called eco-friendly blog promotion, which discussed the ways in which you can use or adapt your existing content for article marketing purposes… strategies to make your content work harder.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle doesn’t just apply to the environment. It can also be a good mantra for those looking to leverage their blog content for self-promotion. If you’re like me, your daily tasks already take up a lot of your time, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, take the content you already have and put it to work for you.”

You can use the techniques discussed in that article to develop articles suitable for blog promotion. Alternatively you can simply write new articles or hire content writers. If you don’t have the time to write articles yourself there are hundreds, if not thousands, of copywriters available on sites such as GetaFreelancer.com who are more than willing to write articles for a couple of dollars each. Initially I had varied success but soon discovered some very talented copywriters who don’t charge much at all.

In whatever way you decide to create articles for distribution you’re always going to be presented the problem of where to distribute them? There’s Ezine Articles, by far the most well-known article directory, but after that there are a whole host of second-tier sites to choose from. Which one to choose is anyone’s guess. Until, that is, I came across this very helpful article directory league table. In their own words:

“I have created a script that looks at various stats for the major article directories and ranks them. The script runs every Sunday night, providing you with a weekly ranking of the best article directories. Currently, ranking is based on Google Page Rank and Alexa score.”

At this point in time the top 5 article directories are:

1) Ezine Articles
2) Buzzle
3) Articles Base
4) SearchWarp
5) Go Articles

So, next time you’re distributing articles online don’t forget to check out the league table for article directories to see where you should be submitting your articles.

Have you had any success with article marketing? And aside from Ezine Articles have you found any of the other article directories particularly effective?

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