Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Amassing my article directory list is hard, slogging work

This is really something. I can hardly get to 20 article directories, much less 40. God knows where that guy recommended submitting to 100 directories for each article. The problem is that there are as many down sites as working ones - and as you get more tabs open, the computer slows down. Most of them require email verification, so this is a lot of back and forth. As you keep busy, you are tracking three or more sites at once while you get established for the first time.

As I get each link running, I bookmark that link and copy the link to a text file. And I archive the email for record. With submitting to three sites at once, you really have to keep track of what and where you are on each site. It doesn't help that I have three browser windows open with some 20-30 tabs on each one - the idea being that I can work from left to right on these tabs and take each article right through the submission process on each site as I go.

How Firefox helps on this is through remembering passwords for each site. So even as a site times out, I can get back in quickly. Interestingly enough, there are two CMS systems which are the same format (and have the same quirks), so I can copy and paste registration data to these pretty quickly, by leaving one of these tabs open to that profile page. Another Firefox assistance is through giving options to fill in forms - so when I have the same CMS system, I only have to type in the first letter and then click on what I want in that same form. (This might be the Google Toolbar, not Firefox itself...)

At any rate, my multiple scratches are getting itched.

I've spent a great deal of yesterday and today (when I'm not farming) on this project of amassing my 20 or so article directories to post to. After I was able to post two articles quite simply to a couple of directories, I decided to invest some time in getting these article directories lined up and get those two articles throughout these directories. Then take another article and so on.

What I like about some of these sites is that they tell at the top how many articles they have and how many authors. While it may be true that a particular site is "number 1" at something, statistics tell a different story. The best one I saw had over 30K articles by about 2300 authors. Meaning these guys were productive. But as these other "top-ranked" sites didn't share even similar amounts, these authors aren't commonly trying to submit to multiple sites, as I've been advised to do.

Ok, now I have 24 different article directories where I've signed up. Of these 9 had the same program. Another program was responsible for 2 others. A Google search for the first one showed some 750 pages of this type of CMS program, though some links are discussion pages. (One of these discussion pages gave me a list of 203 article directories!)

Now I started getting smart. One page mentioned that it was a script which enabled submitting these articles to multiple websites. A Google search on that brought up the zip file link. However, this is not for the faint at heart - it's all php scripts, so is really set to run on Linux or Unix server. (As if I didn't have enough to do...) Another link is here; don't know if it isn't the same one at this point. (Update: this works for the "Dashboard Article Directories", of which there are hundreds).

Low and behold, here's a free program to for Windows platforms. I'm trying it out now. Seems pretty straightforward. Ad sponsored. You still have to register at each site originally. It has some 120 or more sites in it. There is a feature where you can add sites, both for manual and "auto fill" for your articles. As well, you can edit (and add/remove) sites the author included (which are a wide variety, with many niche directories).

While I had to get a night's sleep, today I'm back at it.

A couple of searches turned up some 200-300 sites "powered by Article Dashboard" (I expect there are duplicates in the screen scrapes I did). I'm going to stick with these sites for now, since they are the same format and can be entered easily through this program. If I could post my article weekly to 300 sites, this should give me quite a bit of traffic to my Lulu storefront.

I also found several more free article submission programs, which I'll try as time permits.

But the essential work here is to get a program so that I can simply write the article once, then go through a fairly semi-automatic step of submitting these articles to the different sites. I want to do this all at one setting. If I can get these up to 2-300 submissions within an hour or so of finishing the article, that's the ideal. Then I can get back to my other work for the rest of the week.

But for now, I have to get these 2-300 sites all manually signed up and into this program. (Sigh). But it is going faster as I enter these Dashboard sites into the program. They have the same logon system and so are very simple to get up and running. I'm simply editing the non-working links and putting in one of these others.

But I simply have some work ahead of me - so I'll sign out this blog and turn on the MP3's to run in the background.

No comments:

Popular Posts

Blog Archive