Article Marketing is a Waste of Time?

CLICK TO ENLARGE
In previos posts I have made about blogging for money, a recurring tip has been to 'submit your articles/best posts to article directories such as ezine articles and Go Articles. I have been doing this for a while and I am now officially an 'expert ezine author', which means I can keep submitting for free. I have submitted a good 10 articles to both those directories, but do I have the results to show for it?

yes and no

Positive results
- I have received 2 inbound links from people using my articles and referring to me. (2 people have re-posted them their blog).
- I have received a small amount of traffic from people reading my articles (the screen shot is of one of my submitted articles which has been viewed 65 times, some of that traffic will have filtered down to this blog)
- I have spread my name and gained a small (very small) standing as an author.


Negative results
- I have only received 2 inbound links, by submitting over 20 articles which I laboured over like a dog (although I do enjoy writing them).
- The traffic received was very small given how long it took to write those articles.
- I now have duplicate content which the search engines don't like, and to make things worse it's a duplicate of my very best content.
- The sites that re-posted my articles were rubbish and had no authority or original content.
- isnare still have not approved any of my articles, and they say it could take up to 6months unless I pay (which I’m not going to).

So there is a bit of a mixed message there, over all a negative one. I don't really know what I expected. If you think about it, none of the top sites, or even half decent sites got to where they are by re-posting free ezine articles. All that’s going to happen at best, is I would get a whole pile of links from crap sites. Maybe I will have more luck in the future, although I doubt it.

I am eager to know of your experience with article marketing, so do comment if you have any article sites that have worked well for you, or if you agree with me and think its not really worth it.

Technorati WTF?

Before you exclaim aloud 'how rude!' you should know that WTF stands for 'Where's the Fire?'. Technorati have began a service much like Digg. They have described it as a "a big social experiment to see if people will work together to help create something great and useful, and will use the voting system to push up the best explanations to the top. " If it works this will be great for bloggers with good content (as they will receive some targeted traffic especially if they get on the front page) and for people browsing the archives for information. Providing people vote honestly the articles will be ordered fairly, rewarding the hard working bloggers and punishing the spammers.

I for one believe it will be a success. I have already posted a few of articles from this blog on it. I do have one nagging issue with it and that is that It was surprisingly easy to submit articles. You are given a lot of freedom (perhaps too much) even to the extent of choosing to start your own category just for your post. On other similar sites this has been frustratingly difficult because you need to 'apply' for a new category. On WTF however you can just type one in and BAM its a new category. Whether this is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen. I am not especially worried about spammers but about honest mistakes being make. For example, if you submit your article and label its category 'football' it will end up in a different category to an article categorised as 'soccer'. There are lots of other circumstances where a category could be slightly different and end up dividing content. I am unaware of how Technorati are going to prevent this. Perhaps they are only allowing new categories to be created like this because it is still in very early stages and will remove this ability once the 'directory' is more developed.

Check out WTF