How Long Does It Take After Submitting an Article Before You Get Readers?
Here’s a tricky question from a reader because there’s a lot of variables involved . . .
“How long does it typically take after posting your articles for the site/product you are promoting to start getting viewed if you have high quality articles?”
This all depends on the directory and how hard they work at getting traffic. There’s always people perusing most directories looking for articles, but the main characters you want are the ones that’ll find your articles through search queries. These are the ones most likely to buy what you article is recommending.
If a directory adds a sitemap.xml file to their server and notifies Google, there’s a good chance you’ll get readers anywhere from a couple of hours to a week. If the directory has an RSS feed, it could be almost immediate once your article gets posted.
And if the article directory owner is educated in web 2.0 and known in the social bookmarking arena, there’s almost a guarantee that you’ll get readers virtually instantly.
Admittedly however, some directory owners had BIG ideas for their directory but never really followed through with SEO and promotion. By submitting to a large number of them, your chances of getting some good post placements are a lot higher.
Now you could do some tracking to find out which directories you’re getting the fastest results from, but if you only use that as a guide to determine which directories you should submit to, you’ll be losing out on a great deal of link popularity power from all the other possible directories which is also important.
But you could submit to as many sites as possible and still identify the ones that get your articles into reader’s hands the fastest.
One way would be to periodically Google your article title surrounded by quotes or brackets. This would bring up any instances of your article and let you know which directory has the listing for it. Most directories have a way of checking how many views your article has received, so visit the ones with the listings and get an idea how popular your article is and how effective the directory is at drawing in readers.
You could also subscribe to the directory’s RSS feed, if they have one, and tie it into Bloglines or some other RSS reader so you’ll know as soon as your article is posted.
Of course you could always help things along by doing a little web 2.0 work yourself.
Sign up to places like Facebook, Bloglines, Digg, and StumbleUpon and when you see a listing for your article on Google, visit the link and “digg it,” vote for it on StumbleUpon, add the feed for it to Bloglines, and add to your Facebook profile.
You’ll be amazed at how effective that is for getting people to visit your articles on these directories that are nice enough to post them for you.
Now there’s another variable to this question, and it has to do with “high quality articles.”
You could write an extremely good article on the “life cycle of a gnat,” but just because its a high quality article doesn’t mean you’ll get a lot of readers.
To get readers, you need to first find out what people are looking for and then deliver it to them. This requires a little research.
Go into forums, both general and those that pertain to your niche and find out what people are buzzing about. Look for questions people ask specifically, and write an article giving them the answer in one of your “high quality articles”.
If they’re talking about it in forums or in the social sites, then they’re also searching for answers to it too.
It wouldn’t hurt to post a comment in these forums with a link to a directory with your article on.
I’m sure there are other things you could also do to improve your reader numbers and the speed in which you get them, but these are some of the more important ways to do it.
If anyone has anything to add, feel free to make a comment. There’s a lot of people stopping by here, so you could be helping quite a few people with your knowledge.
ikoni
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