Don’t Miss Marketing Opportunities

Any chance you have of spreading the word about your site should be taken. Smart marketers never miss an opportunity and you shouldn’t either. You never know when one incredibly influential person might stumble over a link to your site, fall in love with your site, and suddenly send a flood of traffic to it by mentioning it on his or her blog or social media stream.

Of course, you do need to consider whether or not your time could be better spent doing something else, so if submitting your site to directories takes up so much time as to outweight the potential benefits, then you’re probably losing the benefits you’d hoped to gain.

Automate Processes, Not Content

So when people ask me if they should submit to directories, I always say yes, but I add a caveat: “Yes, submit to directories, but don’t spend too much time on the task. Automate as much of the process as possible to free up your time for other important marketing tasks.”

Some people cringe when they hear the word “automate”, as they immediately envision black hat spammers evilly autogenerating content in their sleep, polluting the web in the process. That’s definitely not what I’m talking about, so please don’t even go there in your minds. Processes should be automated where possible, not content.

The Tool I’ve Used For Over Four Years

So here’s how I’ve been automating the process of submitting to directories for over four years now. I use a tool called SubmitEaze that gives me the most flexibility I’ve found to reduce the time need to submit to directories. Every now and then I forget to use it, and when I remember again later (usually when an email arrives telling me about some new feature of the software), I kick myself for having put it aside for so long. (Hey, I’m human, and stuff gets lost in the daily flow just like it does for everyone).

I’ve actually reviewed SubmitEaze a few times in the past, beginning way back in January, 2006. You can read those reviews here, here, here and here. I haven’t reviewed it lately, however, and there’s been a ton of great new features since the last time I did, over two years ago. So, here’s an updated review of the product. (And no, this is not a paid review, nor were any of the ones I’ve done over the years).

Not Just Site Directories – Article Directories Too

The biggest new feature in the last two years has been the ability to not only submit to directories really easily, but to also submit articles to article directories as well. Article marketing is a step up in the marketing chain for several reasons.

1. You aren’t just giving a brief title and description of your site; you’re supplying an entire article about your site’s niche topic, with links back to your site in the author bio – and on top of that – you are authorizing anyone to use that content on their own sites, as long as they also include your bio (with links intact). This not only spreads the word to the article directories themselves, but potentially to many other individual sites who reuse the article as well.

2. Some article directories have a fair amount of influence in the search rankings, so you can potentially get fairly easy rankings for the articles. True, the ranking is a secondary effect, since the directory is ranking instead of your site, but the visitor still gets a chance to find your site, when they might not otherwise.

So to be able to use a tool that makes the task easier of submitting your site to directories – and in addition – makes it easier to submit articles to article directories – well, that’s just a bonus that is really valuable. To top it off, the articles submitted can be spun right within SubmitEaze to ensure that variations of the article are submitted, rather than the exact same content going out to each directory. Woot! I’ve used spinner software before, so it’s nice to not have to dig out a completely different tool to do something that the tool I’m in can do for me.

Other Features

Now, I don’t use every feature available to me. For instance, the tool can automatically set up and manage a reciprocal links directory to make adding recip links easy. But I haven’t traded reciprocal links in years, and I don’t plan to do so now, so I just skip any directories that require a reciprocal link. If asked to recommend doing recips or not, I usually say recommend against it, assuming the person is talking about this kind of generic reciprocal link. It’s just not useful to anyone, so it’s a waste of time and space on your site. But if you disagree with me (and that’s allowed [big grin]), then you’ll probably love the feature that lets you deal with it very easily.

A quick roundup of its major features:

• Submit to both website directories and article directories.
• Turbo Submission mode automates the process so you can submit to directories in super-fast time.
• Over 4,000 website directories and 1,000 article directories currently in the list that can all be sorted by Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, or number of incoming backlinks to the directory.
• Full range of general directories to choose from: Free, Reciprocal Link Required, and Payment Required.
• Ability to select just niche directory listings (i.e. directories which only list websites of one particular topic).
• Lets you set up rotating link title text and description text for each project. This is important for ensuring variation and targetting of different phrases.
• Link page maintenance so you can quickly create and upload reciprocal links to your website (if you disagree with me as mentioned above).
• Tag, categorize, and search your directories exactly how you want, and add your own notes to each.
• Free software and directory updates forever.
• Add your own custom directories to the list.
• Complete control over the auto-fill feature within SubmitEaze – you can even add your own custom fields. This can be hugely useful in some situations.
• Import / export between different computers.
• Create detailed submission reports.
• You can add a rating to each directoy so you can keep track of your favorites.
• And lots more

So, that’s my favorite tool for dealing with directory submissions. What’s yours?

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: article marketing, directory submissions, spinner software, Web directories
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1. Organic search engine traffic – This is the granddaddy of all traffic. Visitors who arrive at your site from a search they’ve conducted are extremely targeted. This is what SEOs live for – high search engine rankings for popular phrases related to your niche. Bonus points if the great rankings are on Google, as that sends far more traffic than others. Don’t make the mistake of concentrating solely on search engine traffic however. If you lose your rankings, and you have no other sources of traffic, your site’s traffic will be devastated.
2. Sponsored search engine traffic (PPC) – Second best is the traffic obtained from visitors clicking on sponsored listings from those same search engines. Essentially, you get all the same benefits as above, but there’s one difference. You have to pay for this traffic. The major search engines have made it a bit more complicated to play the PPC (pay per click) game. No longer is it as simple as “the biggest spenders get the top listings”. You can be very successful with this method, and the fact that you have more control over placement is a big draw. Keep in mind, however, that without experience, you may end up spending a bundle of cash on PPC systems such as Google’s Adwords without reaping any profits.
3. Referrals from other sites – This could come in several forms. Other sites may simply link to you because they like your site, or you may have chosen to purchase advertising (either as a link or a banner ad) on others’ sites. Either way, if a highly-trafficked sites in your niche recommend your site, there’s a good chance that you’ll receive nicely targeted traffic from those sites.
4. Participation in forums/communities – If you participate in forums and communities related to your niche, you can build up an element of trust. That trust helps send others community participants to your site via any links that you’ve listed in your signatures or profile pages. This may not send large quantities of traffic, but it will probably be traffic that has a strong bond with you. Those visitors may then go on to either link to your site or recommend your site in other ways.
5. Guest blogging – Like the community participation above, guest blogging helps build up others’ trust in you, and your name becomes well known. This in turn builds up your personal brand, and you become more recognizable. At some point, people will know who you are, and that almost always translates into more site traffic. Obviously, you should be creating quality posts on others’ blogs if you hope to succeed with this method of traffic generation and increase blog traffic.
6. Social networking – Traffic from social networks such as Digg and Stumbleupon, or social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, or popular video sites such as Youtube, can be huge. However, the traffic comes in spikes, usually only lasts for a few hours or at most a few days, and the visitors rarely stick around. These visitors may not be very targeted, or they may just not be all that interested in what you have to offer. Nevertheless, you may get some much-needed attention (buzz) or a few nice links, so social networking traffic is worth getting. It’s just not worth as much as the factors mentioned above, in my opinion.
7. Article marketing / Directory submissions – Submitting your site to directories or writing articles that will be syndicated via article marketing sites are both useful for obtaining a few links to your sites, and perhaps a handful of visitors. You won’t see much direct traffic from these sources, so put this a bit lower on your list of things to do. It’s not a bad idea, and it can be useful for link building purposes, but it’s just not highly useful.
8. Purchasing traffic packages and traffic exchange programs – In general, you should avoid these, and I only include this in the list so that I can warn you about them. If you are tempted to “buy millions of visitors for only $99″ or whatever the offer is, ask yourself if you enjoy throwing money away. These types of programs may or may not send you traffic, but the traffic they do send will likely either be fake or it will consist of visitors who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in your site. You will be wasting money. Likewise, traffic exchange packages usually consist of webmasters visiting each others sites, just to obtain more traffic for their own sites. Again, they aren’t interested in your site at all. They only want to increase their own traffic, which won’t be useful traffic for them either.

I’m sure there are other traffic sources, but those are the ones that I receive the most traffic from. If you know of any other great sources, please share in the comments below.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 26 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: article marketing, directory submissions, forums, Google, guest blogging, high search engine rankings, Organic search engine traffic, search engine, search engine traffic, search engines, SEOs, social networking, social networking traffic, social networks, sources of site traffic, traffic exchange, Youtube
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.