Articles Syndication How To Survive In The Flood

Good title.

Not sure if I have the defining answer.

But I can tell you of how it's been so far, and that could be a chapter in the "Adventures In Internet Publishing".

You have heard that by writing articles and submitting them to article syndication directories, you get:

Expert Status

Public Recognition

Web Links

New Customers

... I'll take it?

And that in principle is quite true.

Only, we have now the world and his wife writing GAZILLIONS of articles every day; and we have that other world and her husband setting up websites like mushrooms to handle the FLOOD of articles that want to be posted, syndicated, distributed or simply filed away forever - LOL!

If you do a web search for "submit your article" you will find hundreds of listings and dozens of Google ads - this is big business.

There are MILLIONS of people trying to make a living on the web, most literally, and they all write articles; getting a subscription out of the ones who are willing to pay for storing and distributing them is a new form of "selling shovels during the gold rush".

So what is a person to do?

***Submitting Articles The Hard Way ...***

Well, there's the hand submitting.

You can find 20 or so (out of the HUNDREDS) of syndication sites and submit each article by hand.

Don't think that this is easy.

EACH AND EVERY submission site has their own type of forms - asp, php, cgi and whatever else there's going on these days.

They all have VERY idiosyncratic ways of handling their text formatting.

Some demand some html, at least or else your text gets all stuck together. Others use "smart" detection and if you paste your text containing in there, your formatting flies apart and you have to start all over. Some will turn hyperlinks into a mangled nonsense, some will bounce the article back if there's a single hyperlink in the body text, others will turn plain text into hyperlinks.

They usually demand that you make an account, and that means logging into each and every site, making your way to the submission form, and then battling with the formatting of your article repeatedly until you're finally done.

Now frankly, and as much as I love my articles, I really could never be bothered with doing that all over the place.

I write way too many articles on way too many topics (I AM a writer, after all!) to have the time left to submit them all everywhere.

So what's a writing gal to do?!

Well, there's software to the rescue.

For example:

***Article Submission Software - Article Submitter Pro***

This is widely advertised, comes in at just under $200, and I've just tested it for the three day free trial period.

Good program, considering what it is up against!

It does NOT "send your article at the click of a button".

With all those different forms and login procedures on all these different sites, and not to mention the email based distribution channels and lists, how could it, possibly?

What it does do is to give you a number of databases in a reasonably user-friendly fashion, so you get (ready pre-loaded) databases for:

Websites with logins Websites with forms Email distribution Others

That's handy in and of itself. It then also gives you databases for:

Articles (with heading 1, 2, body of article) Author's Bio/Sig Hyperlinks/Landing sites Authors Names/Pen Names Authors Email

It then proceeds to have you work your way through all these sites, one after the other, and when it recognizes a form, it will fill it in for you with as much data as it can.

As these forms consist of NUMEROUS boxes to be filled in EVERY TIME, that is a huge bonus and it cuts the time it takes to find the sites, log into the sites, and submit the articles DRAMATICALLY.

Even so, to submit one article to 30 sites took me over two hours of BORING AND REPETITIVE work. And that's really not the best way to spend my precious time.

***Premium Submission Services***

As they say, you either spend your time, or you spend your money, so there's another option.

If you're willing to PAY for an article submission service, there are good folk out there who will do what the Article Submitter Pro software PLUS one person who actually WORKS THAT, does for you.

I thought about this for a time and finally decided to go with www.isnare.com who will do article syndication and placement for 60 dollars a month.

I figured that for the same price as buying myself a programme that will have me slaving away on repetitive submissions in the dark I can get 3 months worth of being able to just send the article ONCE and have the isnare people deal with it instead.

They'll even kindly spell check it and format it nicely.

Phew.

I don't know how well that will work, but it seems my best option at this time to take care of *that* part of what you might call "basic internet marketing management".

There are so MANY other aspects of this, you just have to find a solution that works for you for each one so they don't take up too much of your valuable time or take your attention away from what it is you're actually doing in the first place (that's the main danger of the intricacies of internet marketing, in my opinion!).

***The Cheapest & Simplest Solution To Article Distribution?***

So, and finally, and what if you don't want to spend 60 dollars a month or $200 on the software?

Well, my tip is as follows.

Find the top ten article syndicators, by doing keyword searches for your chosen topic and see what turns up on page 1 in Google.

Bookmark them all.

Make THE SAME login for them all, the same password.

Work your way through the basic free author set ups, make your bio, add your pic, register in the forum.

And then just submit your new articles to those ten and nothing else besides; that should give you some sort of balance between doing what you're doing, and drowning yourself in the technicalities and vagaries of the article submissions madness.

Good luck to all ...

LOL