When choosing where to submit articles authors are now spoilt for choice. There are literally hundreds of article directories to chose from. Which one should you submit your articles to and why?

Many authors chose just one directory to submit their articles to. They have a favourite because of its format, size or layout. There are many advantages and disadvantages to submitting to different article directories.

The huge directories like ezine@rticles are a great place to submit your articles to in that the site gets a huge amount of traffic, is very well laid out and has a high creditablity rating across the internet - proof of this is the number of people who choose to display their "featured on ezine@rticles" or ezine expert badges on their websites, although they are trading off traffic to the article directory they get in return the kudos of being considered as an expert and listen who should be trusted and listened to and this can result in a higher conversion rate in sales or join ups. The disadvantage of submitting to a large article directory is greater competition from other authors. However the general rule is the bigger the directory the more views your articles will get. Also the link rating of the directory may result in much higher search engine results. For example if you are an expert author on ezine@rticles and you type your name into google you will most likely come up as the top search return (great for the ego). The huge directories have a multitude of topics to submit to, however other directories have gone to the other extreme and limited their topics to a niche area, hoping to dominate a small section of the market. Sites like article garden takes articles on geared towards sustainable living, organic gardening, etc.

Smaller general article directories like article-gems have less competition and can result in a close relationship with the editor. It can also mean rapid article approval. It can also lead to a tighter sense of community and more comments on articles or authors replying to one another through articles. Hence you may see an article on one topic and very quickly get another article arguing the opposite point. This sort of interaction is not generally seen on the larger directories. It can also have other advantages in relation to RSS feeds and the like that you articles can be quickly disseminated with little competition from other authors. These smaller directories may also have easier submission guidelines or be more open to negotiation on content i.e. lower rejection rate. However these directories also tend to have lower visitor numbers than the huge directories.

Some article directories like articler offer authors a 50% split in google revenue. This can be a nice additional income for the author and represents direct income from article writing. This does mean though that the directory operator has less money to advertise the directory and therefore your articles on the internet, which can be a disadvantage.

Some authors simply advise submit to as many article directories as you can. There are a couple of disadvantages to this. Very quickly you will learn that this can be a huge time consuming exercise. Also search engines tend to ignore duplicate content therefore your article may only come up once on a search. I would argue despite these considerations the more directories you can submit to the better - not every directory has the same traffic, nor do they all submit to the same RSS feeds, therefore 'spread the love' as it were. In order to overcome the time consumption aspect there are numerous programs downloadible over the internet which can greatly speed up the process. These once set up can mean you can summit your article to hundreds of directories at the simple click of a button, which leaves you more time to concentrate on writing the articles and can result in a huge increase in traffic to your site and a large number of backlinks.