If you’re trying to publish a regular email newsletter for your customers, I have good news. There’s a wealth of content out there that you can use for free — poor, average, good, and occasionally excellent. Why is this content offered free of charge? Two reasons:

1. Article directories can earn revenue from Google ads placed on their site as part of the Google AdSense program (www.google.com/adsense). This has stimulated the growth of thousands of look-alike article sites that receive very little traffic. Others are niche sites that carry articles in particular vertical categories;
2. Websites can be promoted effectively through articles. A link to the author’s website contained in each free article serves to:  (a) bring targeted traffic through a well-designed, intriguing “signature” or author bio at the bottom of the article and (b) raise Google PageRank by creating more incoming links to a website. These links point to the author’s website from the article’s presence both on the article sites and on the websites that use the free articles.

If you’re a marketer, I can hear your brain beginning to compute wildly:

1000 article sites X 1 link to my site X 15 articles submitted = 15,000 links to my site

Moreover, article submission tools make article spamming extremely easy. Hold on, it’s not that simple. Submitting your article to hundreds or thousands of article sites can actually hurt you, since Google spiders are finely tuned to spot spam in its many flavors. You’re much better off to submit your article to five of your favorite article sites and a couple of niche sites, and resist the temptation to blast your article to every pathetic article site on the planet.

To help you see which sites you might consider submitting to, I’ve listed below the top 25 article directory sites by their Google PageRank (10 being high) and Alexa traffic rank (1 being high). A disclaimer: The Alexa rankings are flawed and seem volatile, but give a relative measure of traffic to a site. Google PageRank (PR) is notoriously inaccurate, but can be seen as an indicator of Google’s relative trust in a site — sort of. The list is not exhaustive and includes both general article directories and some popular niche directories with an Alexa rank of under 50,000. Sites are listed in ascending Alexa rank order, with the PR 6+ sites boldfaced for your convenience.

All New: The Web Marketing Checklist 2013

The Web Marketing Checklist 2013

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