Content marketing: where do you submit your articles?

I guess some of us here is engaged with content marketing, and so article writing.

Ok, we’re able to write great articles but the problem now is: where should we submit them in order to get seen?

There’s a plentora of submission services out there, but I bet most of them are black-hat and will most likely have bad SEO effect on our website in the long run.

What do you use guys?

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I put them on my product site or blog, where it hopefully attracts traffic and link juice from Google. I can’t think why I would want to put my hard work on some grubby article website. I thought most of these sites were just full of auto generated crap. I might even get penalised for having links from it. I might consider writing a guest post for a high quality website/blog, but that is a different story.

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Depending on what you write about, there are plenty of legitimate sites that accept article submissions. You need to start seeing yourself as a writer however, not just someone submitting articles in order to get backlinks :slight_smile:

A lot of my traffic comes from sites that I write for - for example Smashing Magazine. If you want to have articles posted somewhere like that however you need to come up with something that will be generally useful to their audience. You may just get to link to your product in your bio on the site but if people have enjoyed your article they are more likely to want to know more about you and what you do.

  • Find sites that publish content in your niche
  • Do some research to make sure you know what their audience like to read
  • Pitch an article to the editor, explaining why you think it a good fit, what specific expertise you have on that topic

Stay away from talking about guest posting, content marketing etc. Just pitch solid well written content, with the aim of being helpful to people.

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Thanks @Andy and thanks @rachelandrew.

@rachelandrew I understand your angle. I don’t write the articles myself though, we have a different core service, and articles are for us a way to attract users. In order to adopt a strategy like yours, the challenge is to find good writers who have some recognition in their/our niche.

We hired some writers so far and they write quite good articles. But they are not specific subject matters and therefore their profiles are not very high within our niche community.

Might have to keep digging.

Bang-on Andy. Don’t submit them somewhere else. These dodgy sites are precisely what Google have been trying to stamp down on. Keep them on your own website.

Bonus tip: use the rel=canonical tag, then submit the article to Google. This seems to work well in helping Google realise where the source came from, if/when someone else copies it onto their own website,

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…the Canonical Tag, I should study more about. Thanks Dave :wink:

My pleasure :slight_smile:

It’s mainly to avoid duplicate content issues, but seems to be a good anti-plagiarism option too… which I supose is also a duplicate content issue.

[On my way to make another coffee now.]

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When you have finished an article writing work, after that you must find relevant platforms depend on the article topic. I recommend submitting each article only on one article submission site to avoid copy content issue.

  • If you have own website where you can publish, so it is a first priority platform to gain traffic on your website.

  • Many bloggers provide “write for us” services and looking for unique content for their website. You can find the list from Google using below query.

    “Article category or topic” “write for us”

    Example:

    “Technology” “write for us”

    Once you find a list of bloggers then follow terms conditions to submit an article. I know that the process is time consuming, but it is wishful for you.

    Many bloggers find regular writers for their website. You may contact them; they will pay for your article.

  • Otherwise, many websites provide such type of services. You can find it on Google using this query “article submission sites list”.

    http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php?order=PageRank – list of popular article submission platforms

Hope Helpful!

Your best, most relevant traffic will always be from your own audience, specifically your email list subscribers.

You should focus on attracting email list subscribes from day 1 (I didn’t. Big mistake). Give some kind of incentive, like an educational guide of some kind to those who subscribe.

Then send every new article out to your email list to get those visitors to return to your site and share your new stuff (subscribers are your biggest fans, most willing to share).

As a brand new blog, submitting articles to various sites in your niche might help, but only marginally. SEO takes time. To gain lots of exposure quickly, you can try to land relevant guest article spots, or run paid ad campaigns. Both of those should point people to an offer to join your email list. Then grow your audience from there.

You might find interesting the post I wrote on how we are doing PR in the XXI century. Quite similar to the way @rachelandrew is explaining. IMOH companies & startups use to link the idea of content with ‘blog’ or whatever is in-written-form. But that’s a wrong way of thinking, even more in these times, when people don’t read, but scan info. Content marketing can be showcasing your product in meetups, participate in podcasts, etc.

tl,dr of the link included above

  1. Research general big media sites and pitch custom content
    Like: Techcrunch, recode, Venturebeat
    Content output: We managed to have a version of this article in TheNextWeb
  2. Find websites where your audience already hang out
    Like: Our audience is formed partly by devs, so we tried to put our product in sites where devs use to access. (SmashingMag, Sitepoint, etc.)
    Content output: A listicle in Sitepoint where we feature some plugins you can use in Wordpress to integrate Stripe (our product runs on top of Stripe).
  3. Lend a hand to specialized sites that cover your industry
    Like: Specialized traditional sites t
    Content output:
  4. Other publishing formats: Podcasts, Hangouts, Meetups
    Like: Rocketship.fm, Mixergy, GrowthHacker.TV
    Content output: We participated in some meetups, we hosted a ProductHunt meetup.
    A format that I would like to start exploring more is the what the guys at Nomadlist are doing: setting up not only a forum, but also a Slack chat room for all nomads working around the world. Also I see HUGE potential in snapchat, overall if your product is media and young audience.
  5. Being part of other products
    Like: Include your product or service as perk, or additional service for other products. A là Moz, Treehouse
    Content output: Being part of Founders Perks - where we are being featured along other tools and services that it’s likely that our audience will need too.

It’s true that there are many sites out there in the Interwebs willling to host your content, but as some fellas already pointed out, they are taking benefit from your time.

If after reading this, you are still interested in submitting your content to other sites, I would try to go for big & well curated sites where they care not only about what you write, but also their audiences. It won’t be easy, it won’t be fast, but you will have the right content in front of the right audience. At least that’s what worked for me when pitching and getting my ideas in Moz, Shopify, Intercom, TheNextWeb, SEJ.

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