The EzineArticles directory is the best-known and most-cited article directory on the Web. Due to its stringent editorial guidelines it has garnered a high level of trust in Google and other search engines. This is a good thing for anyone willing to spend the time and effort in creating original articles for submission to the directory. If you choose your keywords carefully (especially when crafting the title) and use good anchor text and calls to action in the resource box, your articles will over time generate substantial traffic to your site. (It also makes money for EzineArticles, since some percentage of readers will click the AdSense ads instead of following the link(s) to your site. That’s the price you pay for the traffic, although of course it doesn’t actually cost you anything in real terms.)
There’s another way you can use EzineArticles, though, and that’s as a source of free content for your own blogs and websites. All you have to do is follow EzineArticles’ publishing guidelines.
Take, for example, my article BlackBerry Applications: What Software Developers Need To Know which primarily drives traffic to my BlackBerry consulting landing page. Having other sites republish that article gives me more backlinks and more traffic.
Republishing an article is quite simple. First you search for an appropriate article. One you’ve found one you like, click the EzinePublisher link to the right of the article title. (For a live example, just click this link to open the EzinePublisher page for my own article in a separate window — it’ll make it easier to follow the rest of this article.)
The page you get provides two versions of the article for republication. An HTML version and a plain text version. In most cases you’ll be interested in the HTML version, because you’ll be republishing it on a blog or site you own. Select all the text for the appropriate version and copy it into the clipboard. Paste the text into your favorite HTML or text editor. Strip out a few things: the <html>, <head>, <title> and <body> tags at the top and bottom. Don’t change the content, though, that’s against the guidelines. All links have to be left as-is!
You can simply copy and paste the article into a WordPress post and be done with it. However, I recommend you do a couple of simple things to add some extra value. First, create your own title for the post/page. Leave the article title unchanged as a heading, but make sure the <title> tag of your post/page has a different (but related) title. This lets you fine-tune the title for SEO/traffic purposes, especially if the original article title (which you’re leaving unchanged in the body of the page/post) isn’t optimized.
Second, add a blurb at the top introducing the article. This is a short paragraph or two that summarizes the article or tells the reader why it’s good, etc. You could in theory just take the article summary that you’ll find on the EzinePublisher page (near the bottom — there’s also a list of keywords there) but I prefer to write my own summary. Gives it a dash of uniqueness, which is good. You can also insert links to other pages you have or even links to affiliate products and so on into that blurb, which you can’t do with the content itself. (For extra credit, add a different blurb at the bottom of the article as well.)
The key is to make the pages useful to your readers. Good article selection (don’t take any old article you find) and a few simple editorial tweaks (the title and blurb) and good site organization will make a quality site in just a couple of hours.
You can do this with other article directories, of course. Same idea, just different source.
I hope you’ve found this information useful. By the way, I sell a tool (only $10) that makes it easy to find niche articles on EzineArticles and Article Dashboard — give it a look!