I enjoy article writing and distribution. It’s an affordable way to get the word out about my sites, especially since I have a lifetime membership to Content Crooner that dates back to when it was Article Marketer. Makes things quite affordable when the expenses are already paid.

Time’s another factor. But I’ll go into that another time.

There are a number of factors to consider when deciding if article marketing is right for you. But for this review I’m only going to look at factors relating to the distribution of the article, not how well my writing skills and so forth bring me money. That part’s my own fault if it doesn’t work.

An article that I had them start distribution for me on 1/6/2010 currently shows 350 instances in Google. It was submitted to and accepted by Ezine Articles, which is generally considered one of the best article directories, and of course many other directories.

But before the article was submitted by Content Crooner to their article distribution list, it had to be reviewed by them. That went well, and it was reviewed on time, and distributed on the day I specified.

They check to be sure that your writing is likely to be accepted by article directories. I’ve had articles rejected at times back when it was Article Marketer, generally for minor reasons, but it’s a help. It means I don’t lose out on that distribution because I made some stinking mistake.

You can schedule your article distribution up to a year in advance if you like. This is a feature I appreciate, even though I don’t schedule out nearly that far in advance. I’ve done a few months in advance, however. It’s nice to be able to spread articles out and to have articles sent out at an appropriate time of the year if your inspiration for writing strikes at the wrong time of year.

You can get a monthly, annual or lifetime subscription, and then submit unlimited articles for however long your subscription is. They also track where they submitted your article and give you links so you can see how often the various search engines have found your article out there, searching by title.

You can also tweet your article through their system and they’re working on adding more social features.

Now the disadvantage of distributing a single article with no rewrites, as done in this service is that Google will note that it appears in many places, and essentially ignore the duplicates. When Google does that for this article, the number of appearances goes from 347 to 15. Ouch.

Adding in the link: command, it looks like about 7 currently count as backlinks. At least that’s what Google is willing to admit to on what I can see.

I do note that on some of my older articles that number goes up somewhat. But that’s an issue with distributing one unspun article. But then article spinning has it’s own problems, such as not always coming out as a clear, understandable article. You decide which way you want to go.

Overall, I like Content Crooner. They get my articles into the directories I absolutely want them in without a lot of effort by me trying to rewrite them just so for proper spinning and whatnot. One of these days I’ll have to try a service that offers that, just to see what happens, but not right now.