If you are a serious bum marketer, you should consider submitting your articles not only to ezinearticles.com and other article directories but also to social bookmarking services. I will tell you some truths that will jolt you from your seat. Since I started submitting articles to social bookmarking sites, a few strange things have happened to me.
One of the biggest mistakes that most bum marketers make is to rely solely on ezinearticles.com for their bread and butter. Now, my previous rant and this one might make you feel that I hold some personal grudge against ezinearticles.com. I don’t. I really respect the owner of the site, Christopher Knight. In fact, during the early days of my career, he was one of the few guys who had helped me. During those good old times, when this guy had more hair on his scalp than now 
, he would diligently reply to each and every email I’d sent him. So I really have nothing against him. If I don’t like something about ezinearticles.com, it is some of their hard-nosed rules. Anyway, I am digressing here…
So, here are the strange things I was talking about:
1. One of my blogs in IM niche is only 20 days old. For 20 days, I steadily submitted articles to social bookmarking sites along with ezinearticles.com. As I saw from the stats, my new blog ranks 2-5 for some of the most competitive keywords in Internet Marketing. Notice that I said Internet Marketing, NOT any remote niche. If you are surprised, I was too. I checked the search results of Google repeatedly, only to find that the blog indeed occupied coveted positions for some short keywords in one of the most competitive niches out there, that too with broad results. Remember that here I am talking about search terms that have over millions of search results in Google. Strangely enough, my stats don’t show any traffic from ezinearticles.com. I did get a few hits from goarticles.com, but that’s it! No sustaining traffic from these article directories. Plus read below.
2. Another thing I noticed is that when I submitted an article to a social bookmarking site, the article was indexed by Google within a matter of two days. Compare that with ezinearticles.com: most articles I submitted to the directory won’t get indexed until after a week or more. Add to that the amount of time that ezinearticles.com takes to approve an article (24 hours for platinum authors and 72 hours or more for a basic author).
3. A third thing I have noticed is that my overall traffic was boosted manifold after submitting articles to these social bookmarking sites. In fact, the majority of the traffic that blog receives comes from social bookmarking services, pinging services as well as blogrush.com. That blog receives a daily traffic of 200-400 visitors. Strangely enough, I couldn’t find any traffic referred from ezinearticles.com. Again I have nothing against ezinearticles.com or any other article directory. I am just speaking the truth here from my perspective.
So, my point of making this post is that if you have not been submitting articles to social bookmarking sites, you SHOULD start doing it right now (this is something I explain in detail in my Nuttiebums report). One thing you should note when using social bookmarking services is that you should take every step to see that you are not spamming them. These social bookmarking sites are very sensitive and if you spam them, you are gone!
What I do is – I submit my sites along with some other sites (non-IM based) to these sites. Also I submit all sites manually. I have never used any automated software, until now that is. I cannot tell anything about the future though
FYI, I not only submit my IM articles but also my niche articles to these social bookmarking sites. In fact, niche articles have even more chances of getting traffic since the competition is pretty low.
Not all social bookmaking sites are worth your time, though. The following sites have been handpicked by me as best of the group:
- digg.com (be careful with this one – only submit your best articles here)
- propeller.com (formerly Netscape.com)
- reddit.com
- del.icio.us
- stumbleupon.com
- technorati.com
- blinklist.com
- plugim.com (for IM sites only)
I personally feel that with the advent of web 2.0 sites, our future has become brighter. We have a new and unique solution at hand to get free traffic, and if we use it wisely, traffic is sure to hit us. In all cases, CONTENT rules so do not ever submit junk to these sites or you will get banned faster than you can say ‘why’?