Online article submissions are a relatively straight forward process. If you’ve gotten as far as this article, you’re at least interested in writing an ezine article, but probably aren’t sure about what an ezine, what the difference between that an and articles directory is, or why writers would even want to waste their time writing for a directory to begin with. This article demystifies a few of the things I found perplexing when I first got into online article submissions and online writing jobs in general.
The first thing I wondered was, what ezinearticles.com was. Was it an ezine? Wikipedia was telling me what an ezine was (an online magazine), but that didn’t seem like ezinearticles.com. The website seemed like an eBay almost. It felt like there was competition on there, amongst its users and based on the forum content. Online article submissions were ranged, according to popularity, but I didn’t see the end game. Were publishers buying these articles?
Ezinearticles.com isn’t an ezine. It’s actually an articles directory. An old political science professor once told me that wherever I go in life, if I want to start breaking down a process, I’ve got to “follow the money.” So, where’s the money coming from and going to for ezinearticles.com? For this particular site, money comes from two sources: premium and premier customers that are charged a fee for being able to submit their articles, and advertising—namely, Google ads. A good chunk of those proceeds are spent on human editors and screener’s that ensure the quality of the online article submissions in their directory are written well, are posted correctly, and are in full compliance with the organization’s terms of service and editorial guidelines.
The end game for writers is traffic. Writers that do well tend to stay away from attempting to mass produce online article submissions. This is classic case of quality not quantity. Established submitters with good ratings on the site will tell you that you’ll get more traffic with 1 standout article than you will with 10 unremarkable online submissions. Now it turns out, the traffic is sought by writers because many own sites that either generate consistent advertising revenue (either by affiliate sales programs, pay per click programs, etc.) or have a product to sell. Because these are the money flows for writers, directories will strictly and explicitly prohibit your article from generating leads directly. Instead, you’ll only be able to refer an article reader back to your domain’s home page, and nothing more specific than that (i.e. not an address with multiple backslashes such as yourdomain.com/salesproduct).
Publishers are interested in traffic too. They’re looking for cheap or free high quality content that they can use to lure customers and users into a site or newsletter operation that they own as well. Users only want to be a part of a site or newsletter that’s useful, and good content is hard to find, so you can tell how quality over quantity in online article submissions really does make the sale in this case.
