Have you ever thought about how article directories will affect your online business? In this article, we discuss about the impact of article directories on your sales figures. Let's start by looking at some background information on article directories.

Goal of Article Directories

The one reason that causes the recent uprise of article directories is that many of these directories derive their income from ad revenues. Ad revenues usually come in three forms. CPM ads, CPC ads and affiliate ads.

CPM ads pay the publisher on a per thousand basis. In other words, for every 1,000 ads shown, the publisher gets $X. For CPC ads, a web visitor would have to click on the ad itself before the publisher sees any money. Affiliate ads are performance based and pay the publisher only when a sale is made. There are different advantages for each type of ad but as it is not the goal of this article to discuss about ads, let's just say that the goal of these article directories is to maximize ad revenues with a combination of various ad formats.

What is Fueling the Growth of These Directories?

Articles are being circulated among these directories for free with the promise that their credentials and links remain intact. A quality article that sees itself being re-published in hundreds of websites means that in a short period of time, a website will get hundreds of backlinks.

Backlinks are believed to strengthen the position of a website in search engine rankings. They are also believed to be good for a website's page rank. A website with a high page rank tends to become more popular with time as it lends credibility to the website.

However, a visit among several popular webmaster forums reveal that there have been recent mumblings among website owners, which hinted that article submissions do not work as well anymore as they are usually added to a page rank zero page and do nothing to boost the page rank of a website.

Despite this finding, website owners, driven by the vision of obtaining higher search engine rankings, continue the rush to submit their articles to directories. Before we join in the rush, let's consider this question.

How should writers go about choosing article directories?

We spoke to a few writers from our own content hub at sg-web-design.com and asked them how they go about choosing article directories.

Lea Frydman, Content Manager for www.elvispresleynews.com, replied that exposure is what a writer wants and needs. When asked what type of writers would he like to see within the directory community, he said, "Anyone that is an expert in their field."

Other writers like Sean Mike (owner of www.christiansuccessnetwork.com) and Michael Cottier (founder of www.rc-model-airplanes.com) agreed that the categorization of an article directory is very important.

All three writers choose a human moderated article directory over an automated one. Automated directories usually accepts articles without moderation and over time, the general quality of the articles deteriorate. Even when it's human moderated, the article should adhere to strict submission quidelines and not accept articles that are written solely for advertising or search engines.

Glenn Murray of Divinewrite.com mentioned in his recent article that we'll see a decrease in the number of un-moderated article submission sites because they won't generate enough traffic to make AdSense profitable and the spoils will be greater for the surviving article submission sites, so they'll go to greater lengths to ensure the high quality of their articles.

All in all,

1. There must be a diverse list of categories so that writers find it easy to submit articles.
2. Categories must be easily accessible.
3. Directories should be human moderated to ensure the quality of the articles over time.
4. Most importantly, the directories must be well promoted so that writers get the attention that they deserve!

Writers can then guage the potential of a website by asking 4 simple questions.

1. How scalable are the categorizations?
2. Is the directory developed in-house? A directory developed in-house usually means that the owner has more control and flexibility over the development and direction of the directory.
3. Are there adequate admin tools for the moderators of the article directory websites to communicate with the writers?
4. How are the directories being promoted?

In the long run, everyone benefits from a quality article directory. When the reputation of these directories grow over time, articles submitted to these directories will lend higher credibility to its writers, which will eventually increase sales.

As for us, We certainly would like to see more quality content sites around and would work hard to bring more quality articles to www.sg-web-design.com

Happy writing, posting and earning!