Wow, lot of questions to start off a thread with lol
I do a ton of article marketing, but my methods aren't really blackhat and would probably be too much work for most folk here as a result, however it works for me in getting fair amounts of highly targeted traffic to sales or landing pages.
1:How many article directories do you submit to. The top or a lot?
In general, I submit to GoArticles, eZineArticles and ContentCaboodle for links.
For traffic forget GoArticles, but eZineArticles and ContentCaboodle both send a few visitors through for me on articles.
For the best (targeted quality, not volume) traffic though, I pitch my articles directly to ezine/newsletter publishers.
If I'm looking to promote a new site about "Blue Plastic Widgets", I'll spend the time to write a couple of really good (think authority voice) articles on topics of interest to blue plastic widgets owners, and then I'll search big G for ezines and newsletters where my articles might be of value to the subscribers, and I'll contact the publishers directly offering free use of my high quality content in their newsletter in exchange for a brief by-line where I can include my site's URL.
Stay away from IM and ezines being run as sales funnels by IM'ers and it's amazing how many publishers will jump on this offer. You can offer the same article to multiple newsletters, and so it doesn't matter if they only have a couple dozen subscribers each, I've seen crazy CTR's to my sites doing this and the traffic is highly targeted for you.
The trick is to offer out high quality articles that will leave readers wanting more though, which take time to write well and then invest the time in finding ezines and newsletters to offer them to. Like I said, it's real work to do, but the ROI is always worth it for me.
2: Do you use same article for submissions on diff article directories and Why?
As I said, I will offer the same articles to multiple newsletters for publishing, though sometimes I'll offer exclusive rights to a newsletter that has a lot of subscribers.
With article directories, I send the same article to each of them. I have yet to see proof that any dup. content penalty/filter applies when doing this, so there's no way I'm giving any article directory exclusive content that I create.
3:How often? Once a week, Once a day etc?
I do some form of article marketing daily.
4: Is it worth using software for auto submissions?
For me, no. None of the software works with the 3 directories I use, and the backlinks and traffic from all those tons of other directories that the programs do work with has never seemed worth the hassle to me.
5: Do u target keywords in your articles?
Not any more. I never have with articles I gave to newsletters, but I used to with articles I published to the directories. However, the search engines have gotten really good at understanding what content is related and what's not, so I don't see the value in targeting a keyword in published articles.
For example, let's say my site is about Credit Repair. Without wasting any time researching or focusing on keywords, I can spit off a quick article about being denied on a credit card application because of a credit score, and once it's published at the 3 directories the search engines will automatically find it from the "newest articles" rss feeds of those directories, and the humans who might be interested in my topic and visiting those directory sites will see it on the category pages, so without wasting time or efforts on keywords I've still gained the maximum benefit I can get out of them in my eyes.
Sure, if you target a keyword your article might get a high SERPs position, but it won't last long and may even bump your main site down in the SERPs in the mean time, so there's no real benefit there.
The only place I do think about keywords with articles now, is in the resource box backlink. I make sure to use the anchor text in the link that I want my main site to rank for.
6: Do you use socialbookmark/linkbuild/Xrumer or use other blackhat technique on ur published articles?
Nope.
7: Do you use spun content?
No, and yes. I don't with article directories or the newsletters that I give articles to, but I will sometimes spin articles and throw them up on Web 2.0 sites for additional backlinks.
Another thing I'll do, which isn't spinning but it is reusing articles, is I'll take 3 to 5 articles that I've written on the same topic and put them together into a PDF file, then I'll upload that on document sharing sites. Not for links but it can bring in an additional trickle of highly targeted traffic to my site on an ongoing basis.
Gee, I wonder how long it'll be before we see the stuff from this thread being offered as a system at DP or as a WSO? lol
