Learn how your ad can appear here! Get Your Vision Board Iphone/Ipod App and start moving toward your dreams today! Syndicate Marnie Pehrson's Articles Straight onto Your Web Site! - easy one-time setup, takes only minutes - fresh, informative content on your site - updates automatically - build content-rich sites with our authors! - best of all, it's FREE!! Click here to get started! Books by this Author Angel and the Enemy The War between the States is raging and Angelina Stone's world is falling apart. Her beloved father lies rotting in a Union prison and when her Georgia home is invaded by Yankee officers, Angelina knows she will never be the same again. One night will change her life forever...   How to Get More Done in a Day than Most Accomplish in a Week Get more done in a day than most people accomplish in a week! IdeaMarketers creator, Marnie Pehrson, shares her unique, relaxed method for joyful productivity.   How to Run a Successful Computer Training Business This is an ecourse which includes a 50-page Adobe Acrobat file plus a zipped file which includes flyers, sales letters, course outlines, brochure, contract, etc to use in your computer training business.   In Love We Trust & Second Sight Two romantic mysteries in one - In Love We Trust and its sequel Second Sight are two Southern charmers guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat.   Rebecca's Reveries Entertainment that won't offend your moral sensitivities - a perfect blend of history, romance, mystery and principles woven together in an engaging tale that will keep you turning pages wanting more.   Feature Articles: Article Marketing And Duplicate Content Misco... The MOST Powerful Marketing and Advertising o... How to Weed Out Your Social Media Following... Email Marketing Tips for Maximizing Sales and... How to Attract Clients and Opportunities Usin... Powerful Press Release Distribution Tips... Is Leadership a Gift or An Acquired Skill?... The Quirky Way to Market Your Business... Click here for more >>

In essence, it's free advertising for the writer and helps build link popularity to his or her web site. Since starting IdeaMarketers.com as an article submission site in December 1998, the number of article banks has mushroomed.

There are literally hundreds of them. But every article directory isn't of the same value to you as a submitter. Some receive little traffic. With the 1,000's of articles in these databases, your article is bound to get lost. A good way to decide which article banks to submit your articles to is to go to http://www.alexa.com and look up their traffic. A site with an Alexa ranking of 500,000 or less is receiving a decent clip of traffic.

The lower the Alexa ranking number, the more Alexa users visit that site. It's not a hard and fast determination of traffic because not everyone has Alexa's toolbar installed on their browser. But, it will give you a good general idea.

Is Traffic the Only Thing to Consider?

No. More traffic to an article directory doesn't always translate into more traffic for YOU. It depends on how that site features your articles, links to your site, spotlights you, and gives you exposure. We've found, for instance, that the longer an article stays on the home page of our site, the more traffic that article receives and the more click-through's the writer receives to his or her site. Google, for example, needs to make several passes over a page before that page is thoroughly indexed. Eventually, if an article is spotlighted for a few weeks, it will come up higher in search engine results.

For example, an article that stays on IdeaMarketers.com's home page for 2 or 3 weeks or longer will usually come up on the first page of search results for its title. A great percentage of the time it will appear in the number one spot on both Google and MSN for the title.

What about Duplicate Content?

There's been a bit of a scare online about duplicate content - having the same article on hundreds of different sites. The problem here isn't so much for the writer as it is for the publisher. Google takes the top handful of occurrences for an article and displays those on their search results. The rest get dumped into their supplemental index, which means they aren't going to get seen. For the web site running the article, this means that having articles that are on every Tom, Dick and Harry's web site is just wasting space and resources on the site - that is unless the site is one of Google's favorite article banks.

The article banks that have been around the longest, that have good PR rankings, and that are regularly spidered by Google will have a better chance of a top position for an article - even if that article is duplicated on other web sites. This especially holds true if the article is displayed on a main page of the site.

For the writer, submitting the very same article to hundreds of sites is a waste of time. Spend your time submitting articles to the top 10 article directories. If you want to submit to others, tweak the article enough that it's distinctive and then submit it to another 10 and so on.

Top 10 Article Banks

Here are ten of the most popular article banks on the internet, in alphabetical order:

www.amazines.com
www.articlealley.com
www.articlecity.com
www.articledashboard.com
www.articledepot.co.uk
www.articlefinders.com
www.certificate.net
www.ezinearticles.com
www.freesticky.com

And of course, my personal favorite:
www.ideamarketers.com