Writing articles is a great way to help market on the Internet. It doesn’t take a lot of time and it’s completely free. If the proper keywords are targeted then the article will get a lot of views and this will result in traffic for the person doing the article marketing. There are many great places to submit an article on the Internet. Here are the 10 best article submission sites.

Before we get to the top 10 article submission sites, let’s take a quick look at how article writing works with Internet Marketing.

There are three main parts to writing and submitting any article online. The first part involves choosing the keywords you want to target and then researching the article. The next part involves actually writing the article. The third part is submitting the article along with a call to action.

So you want to decide on the keyword phrase you want to target for an article. This will dictate what the article will be about. Once you’re ready, then you need to write the article being sure to include the keyword phrase in the title, the introduction, the conclusion, and a couple times throughout the body of the article. Then when you’re done writing the article you will submit it to one or more article submission sites.

Here are the 10 best article submission sites:

EzineArticles

Article Dashboard

Go Articles

Articles Base

Article City

Article Mark

Article Alley

iSnare

Search Warp

Idea Marketers

Not all of these sites are the same (EzineArticles is the best).
Some of them are better than others, and all of them have their own set of rules that must be followed. So make sure you know the rules before submitting or you’ll waste a lot of time and energy submitting articles only to have to rewrite them because they got rejected by the site.

For example, some of these sites allow you to include links in the article while others don’t. Some of these sites will let you have affiliate links with your articles while other sites won’t. So again, make sure you know what is and isn’t allowed on each site.

When you write an article online for the purpose of article marketing then you’ll have to submit that article to one or more article submission sites. Above you have the 10 best article submission sites. Take advantage of all these sites and you will certainly have success with article marketing.

The Backlinks Magnet Wordpress Plugin is a FREE WordPress plugin that can be installed and configured on your blog in just a few minutes. Just like any normal WordPress plugin you just upload the software to your Wordpress blog’s Plugin directory, activate the plugin, and take a few minutes to do some configuration to ensure that you get content that fits exactly to your site’s niche. This software has been designed so that anyone can have it operational with the minimum of fuss.

Backlinks Magnet: 10 Important Benefits 

1. It allows the blogger to receive specific, targeted article content from The Phantom Writers article submission service, after making a few simple decisions about desired content requirements. The Phantom Writers is one fo the premier article syndication and distribution services and their content has been for several years one of only two sources from which I take content without prior review.

2. You can choose content based on submission service categories or article keywords.  This means you get content targeted exactly to your site’s niche AND in the right categories as well, no more changing categories for submitted content, it will be where you want it!

3. You have full control over how content is reorganized on your blog. This has been structured to make the organization process super easy.

4. Each article carries up to three keyword tags when it is posted on your Wordpress blog website. Your site visitors will be able to find similar content elsewhere on your site without you needing to manually add tags to the articles. Visitors will stay longer and read more pages.

5. It also creates a tag for the article author (author’s index page), so that articles can be located by author within your blog. This is cool because as you get more articles you can start to find a following for some of the authors and their articles - some of the writers really are worth having on your sites!

6. Every article carries a link to the author’s index page on your blog. You are automatically providing attribution to the content author, no worries from ISPs or angry writers threatening DMCA takedown notices.

7. The plugin notifies the article submission company as to what URL the article has been placed. This enables them to provide the second part of the service to blog owners - backlinks to specific pages in your site, this builds internal Page Rank (PR) and authority, not just your home page benefits.

8. In the case of articles sent to your blog by the The Phantom Writers article submission service, The Phantom Writers will ensure that every article posted to your website will have its own inbound links, a.k.a. link popularity.  This serves to increase your page’s PR.

9. Inbound links, pointing to article placements, will arrive from a variety of websites / IP blocks. 10. Did I mention that the Backlinks Magnet WordPress Blog Plugin (paid for and designed by The Phantom Writers) is FREE to download and to use?  What’s to lose here?

Visit the Backlinks Magnet website at http://www.backlinksmagnet.com/ to learn more and to get the download URL.

Building Quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization.
It is not enough just to have a lot of backlinks, it is the Quality of backlinks along with the Quantity that help you rank better in Search Engines.

A backlink could be considered as a Quality Backlink if
1. The Theme of the backlinking website is the same as your website.
2. It links to your website with the keyword (keyphrase) that you are trying to optimize for.

This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.

Backlink Builder Enter Keyword (Theme)

Take a look when you first walk in to Wal-Mart or any other big store. Even if you’ve never been in that particular store before, it takes no more than a second to orient yourself.

How people locate what they want in a brick-and-mortar store
Signs above the aisles direct you toward the departments you want. Signs above the shelves tell you what to expect in each row.

Each sign is concise and clear. You won’t find any long product lists or fine detail on them. Everything is digestible at a glance.

So what can you learn from this brick-and-mortar shopping trip? Make your navigation similar to what you saw in the store.

Remember how you found your way around there? You looked for the big sign with the department name. Then you looked at the smaller signs that listed what was in each row.

How to apply brick-and-mortar navigation principles to your website
You can do the same thing with your website navigation. First, identify the links that lead to your main sections of your website. Place them in your navigation bar in a way that really makes them stand out so your visitors’ eyes will naturally be drawn to them.

Then identify the key links that lead to any subsections of those sections. Place them in your navigation under their parent sections. Make them less noticeable than your main section links so it is clear that they are subservient to your main section links.

What you want visitors to do is to scan the main section headings in your navigation and find the one that suits them best. Then you want them to the scan the subheadings to narrow their search. If you do this right, it should take your visitors two seconds to find a link to click as they move toward what they want.

But can’t my site visitors find their way on their own?
Why is it important to break things down like this? By organizing their search into easy-to-scan blocks, you build their confidence that they will find what they want quickly and easily. They could wade through a long list of links, but you might lose them before they find what they want.

Going back to the Wal-Mart analogy, the Wal-Mart greeter could hand customers a long list of all the racks and what was on them as they came in. They could count on the customers to read the list to locate what they wanted and do away with all the signs. But how many customers would get discouraged and give up before they found what they wanted?

Keep your navigation simple and easy to scan. Put it where visitors expect it to be. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t draw distinctions that match your in-house terminology but that could be confusing to visitors.

Think of your website as if it were a brick-and-mortar store. What would you do to help customers find what they want if they had to walk through a physical store? Then arrange your navigation so their eyes and their mouse can bring them to their destination with as much ease and confidence as they would if their feet were doing the walking.

Ecommerce Facts
Online spending in 2007 increased at a rate of anywhere from 18% to 21% compared against the same quarter in 2006. (http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/data/html/07Q4.html)

Fears of recession are not affecting most online marketers. A February 2008 survey showed that 43% of marketers surveyed plan to increase their online marketing budgets for 2008. 37% plan to maintain them at 2007 levels. Even in time of cutbacks, marketers are finding their customers more and more online. (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006267&src=dp1_home)

When pressed by Wall Street to explain how his bank was preparing for the double whammy of recession and the subprime mortgage crisis, the CEO of Bankrate, Inc., outlined how his company’s strategy for search engine optimization was helping his business weather the storm. (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629390)

If your car runs sluggishly, what do you do? You take it to a mechanic to pinpoint the problem. For most people, a car is too complicated to diagnose by themselves.

For most people, a sluggish website comes across in the same way – too complicated to fix the problem yourself. If your web business gets visitors, though, only to misfire on converting them to sales, there’s a six-second test you can do on your site that will help you diagnose a number of potential problems.

Open your page and glance at it. Let your eyes scan across the very top of your screen. Then scan down the center to the bottom of the screen. Don’t scroll down. You want to see only what your visitor sees the instant your site appears. Then ask yourself the following three questions, based solely on that six-second scan.

• Does your title grab them emotionally?
• Do they quickly grasp what you can do for them?
• Do they clearly understand what to do next?

Does your title grab them emotionally?
Does it clearly identify the problem that brought them to you? Or is it a generic label that vaguely describes your business?

You want your title to show them that you know exactly who they are and exactly what they need. Ask yourself what they’re looking for. Really put yourself in their mindset.

Think of it from their perspective (as a problem that they’re trying to solve) instead of from yours (as a product or service that you’re trying to sell). What words or phrases would they use to describe their problem? Use those words to introduce them to your solution.

For example, this article is titled “How a Six-Second Scan Can Boost Your Sales.” Would it have caught your attention as much if it had read, “Improving Your Website?”

The phrase “Boost Your Sales” caught your attention because it addressed a key problem for you. Combining that phrase with an unfamiliar concept like a “Six-Second Scan” piqued your curiosity. And the phrase “Six Second Scan” suggests a solution that is fast and easy.

Forget any misplaced ideas of what is “supposed” to be professional looking. You get no points for cool, detached formality. The only way you get people’s attention by connecting with them.

Do they quickly grasp what you can do for them?
The second thing to check is whether your page is easily to skim. Does your eye jump naturally to key points on the page? Do headings, bolded text, and graphics give you an instant “feel” for what you’ll find on that page even before you read it?

People don’t want to “work” at reading online. Big blocks of text lead them to hit their Back button and find something more friendly to their eyes. Give them an instant overview of the content and they’ll pick out and read the details they need.

Do they quickly understand what to do next?
The third thing you want to check is whether they’ll grasp THE key point of the page: the action they need to take next.

Many sites waste prime space, front and center, on a rambling introduction. Meanwhile, all the visitor wants to know is, “Can I find what I’m looking for here?”

Make sure your visitors can see, quickly and clearly, what they need to do next to solve the problem that brought them to you. Don’t count on them scrolling down to find this vital information. Put it right in front of them the instant they see your page.

Final thoughts
Granted, it takes longer than six seconds to read these guidelines. The scan itself, though, should be nearly instantaneous. If these elements are not instantly evident on your page, you need to fix them so that they are.

Your visitors will unconsciously make this exact same scan the instant they arrive. Make sure they see clearly and easily how you solve the problem that brought them there.

When we were building lots of blogs for other people we discovered that the search engines seemed to particularly relish content on the static pages.
We would add content to static pages that defined the style and theme of the site and once the pages were indexed they’d often be among the best ranked pages on the sites we made.

There is a problem though - our basic promotion strategy was to syndicate the rss feeds from these sites to a network of rss directories and aggregators and, as you probably already know, WordPress does not include pages within the feeds it produces. This meant that the first pages to be indexed were rarely the best quality content for which we wanted the sites to be known.

The normal way round this is to make a short post that links to the page but this can be quite time consuming.

Today I came across a plugin that helps a lot. This plugin, when activated, adds pages to one’s rss feeds. Rss Includes Pages is by Marios Alexandrou and works on Wordpress versions from 2.5 onward.
Here is a link to Marios’ blog where there are user comments on the plugin.

One important point, if you want to use the plugin to publicise pages on a new site but do not want to continue having pages in your feeds then you simply deactivate the plugin and pages will no longer be shown. No muss, no fuss!

Today I came upon a very useful blog post describing several tools (almost all free) designed to help social marketers and optimizers to gain an insight into what real people are doing, are interested in and are writing about.

These tools will help internet marketers, search engine marketers and social marketers to do research, find niches and to some testing of their ideas almsot all for free. The cool thing is that Marty, the author takes care to explain the utility of the tools and provides links, for those less clear about the concepts, to learn from.

The site is very useful and well worth a read with a cup of coffee or two.

I looked at www.alexa.com this morning, just as I normally do. I like to see what the Indians who comprise half my traffic have been up to overnight.

Those guys do well by me but their Adsense clicks don’t raise much money. I do much better when the US wakes up.

Anyway, today Alexa has a shiny new interface.

They have added a couple of very cool features - they are now measuring Bounce Rate and time on site.
After looking at my competition and seeing that I have a lower Bounce Rate than the market leader and my time on site is surprisingly good compared to my peers I thought I’d pop a post up here to tell the world, or at least this small part of it.

Bounce Rate is the percentage of one’s site visitors who, after entering a site, hit the back button rather than exploring further into the site. Ad networks prefer sites with a relatively low Bounce Rate as they prefer to have eyeballs exposed to as many ads as possible and because a low bounce rate can be seen as an indication that the site is offering readers that which they seek.

Time on site is a related concept and is exactly what it suggests but refers to the total time on the site, not jsut on a single page. In general the longer a user stays on site the better.

As an overall quality measure I am sure that ad networks and others use a combined measure that accounts for bounce rate and time on site; after all, somebody who hits a page and stays for five minutes before hitting the back button probably got benefit from the visit and probably more than the person who hits five pages in a minute before leaving to go somewhere else, yes?

It is speculated that search engines as well as ad networks are interested in these metrics and this new introduction from Alexa pretty much confirms it, after all, why would they bother sharing these metrics if they had no meaning or value?

Time to start making those pages more ’sticky’ and encouraging readers to move from one page to the next.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/

I have been a fan of Rss Bookmarker and AutoSocialPoster from Mass-Automation but both cost a chunk of money.
The products work very well but are not inexpensive and so cost conscious folks, particularly newbies may like to know of an alternative automated bookmarking solution that can cost as little as $0.00.

Anyway, I came across a solution to bookmarking from WordPress blogs that is almost free and uses a proven reliable system.

Onlywire provides a semiautomated bookmarking service to about 16 sites. One only needs to make one selection and the bookmark is forwarded to many different services. Problem is that one actually has to do the work and, well, we are all a tad lazy, right?

Well, I have found a WordPress plugin that promises to automate the Onlywire process leaving only the need to set up accounts at each of the bookmarking sites.

As far as I can see this is not a solution for those who have large numbers of posts coming onto their blogs each day as every post is going to get bookmarked and to a single account at each site. The good thing is that Onlywire take care of the sites and logins so there should be no need to update the plugin, unlike with ASP and other similar tools.

It looks like a useful alternative to some expensive offerings.

Onlywire is free if you link to them from a site you own or costs $24.99 for a year if you choose to not promote the site.

The plugin is free and can be downloaded here: http://www.lionstarr.de/onlywire-autosubmit-a-wordpress-plugin.html
Onlywire lives here: http://www.onlywire.com/

Of course with most free products the level of support is commensurate with the price paid so Matt and Mass-Automation may still be the best choice for quite a few potential users. Put it this way, I will not be giving up AutoSocialPoster for Onlywire but if I was starting out the choice would be much easier.

I thought I’d mention a service that has been around for a while and which I have found pretty useful.

Hittail.com

This service looks at the search terms that users have used to successfully find your site. Well, that’s easy…
But this goes further.

Over time Hittail builds up a picture of the terms used so that you can instantly see which terms are the most commonly used.

But then it goes further…
Using some digital black magic the system analyses those terms and then makes recommendations as to which terms to target by writing some site content based upon those terms.

The concept is pretty simple. The insight is that there are some terms that are worth chasing and others that are not. Some terms you probably already rank well for, it is not worth doing more about these, even if you did not realise that you ranked well for them.
Other terms you may well not rank well for, but a single well written article may well make a very significant difference to your ranking - often I have found a single article can be enough to get a thinly traded word to front page SERPs. These are the ones to track down. Doing this job by hand is not really viable. Hittail makes it easy.

When they started out Hittail was designed to enable webhamsters to avoid using PPC to drive long tail traffic. If webhamsters target these long tail terms, often being the only person to do so then one can build sizeable traffic simply from these targeted items of content.

It used to be that Hittail was free. Sadly this is no longer the case but there is a 60 day trial option. I’d strongly suggest that it is worth a look. 60 days may well be long enough to build up a worthwhile picture for your website and if it is then it’ll be worth continuing with.

I know that the recommendations from Hittail.com are worth following. The thing is that it directs one’s work, so unless the recommendations are off-beam then it will save time - if you are using the idea of pulling traffic from organic search through low demand keywords.

In essence, this is one of those tools that, when looking at basic principals, does the right things right. This is why I recommend the thing. There is no mumbo jumbo, the concept is sound and it is hard to envisage that, unlike many tools out there, it would not work in general application

I was using the tool on my article directory to track how folks were reaching the site and had my eyes opened to the huge breadth of keywords being used and the surprising number of times that some odd terms were being used. This helped me to understand how it was that many of the crappy keyword stuffed articles were not being found and led to the insight that, in general, they were not affecting the quality of the site because keyword stuffing leads to a monotone effect wherein only one or two phrases are being ‘broadcast’ and very few people will respond. Better written articles hit many buttons through their better use of language. These better articles by broadcasting a ‘tune’ appealed to many more readers and thus picked up many more page views. Hittail really helped me to see this and made managing the site much easier.

One application that strikes me, upon reflection, is to use the tool to ‘tune’ sites built using content from blog networks such as Syndicate Kahuna and Article Marketing Automation. Imagine starting a site based upon a fairly general keyword, then using Hittail to see how folks are reaching the content and then feeding those terms into the blog network setup to filter content. One could build small sites tightly niched, with ‘unique’ content that people were searching for. I can see that, as long as matching content is available, that such sites might rapidly become authority sites within that micro-niche.

Hittail.com
Syndicate Kahuna Blog network, free membership
Article Marketing Automation Blog network free membership