Having someone else publish your article is a great way to bring traffic to your website. It’s a chance to get attention from people who may be interested in what you have to offer, but haven’t heard of you yet. Not all articles are published to websites, however. Some are only sent to a newsletter or ezine list. Does it matter whether your article is published on someone’s site versus their newsletter?

The benefits can be different for each, but it’s not something I stress about, personally. The main thing you want from your articles is exposure to a new audience.

Website Publication Benefits

The benefit of having your article published on someone else’s website goes beyond the initial exposure to human visitors. An article on a website usually stays up for years, potentially giving you traffic for years to come. Links in the article may provide you with benefits for your search engine optimization efforts. It’s a pretty good deal when it’s done right.

Newsletter Publication Benefits

The publication of your article in a newsletter has similar benefits, except it may be for a shorter time. How much initial benefit you get depends on how big the list is, how engaged they are and how relevant they find the information you’re sharing.

If it’s a big list, but they send out so many emails that many don’t get opened, your article may get lost in the shuffle, no matter how well written and topical. You have to be careful when choosing newsletters to offer an article to, because some won’t be worth the time.

Some newsletters also get published on websites, so while there’s no guarantee of later visitors finding the article, or of any SEO benefit, you will get that sometimes. Don’t expect it unless you know the newsletter is published on a website as well. A membership with the Directory of Ezines is a shortcut to finding relevant newsletters to check out.

With any newsletter, the main surge of traffic you may get will be on the day the newsletter is sent, with late readers trickling in over perhaps a few days.

Does the Difference Between the Two Make a Difference?

While the extra traffic you can get over time from having an article published on a website is nice, don’t completely rule out newsletters and ezines. Most important is which one will get you in front of the audience you’re after. Getting in front of the right audience can do far more for your online business than any search engine benefits you may get.

Don’t get me wrong. Ranking highly on the search engines for your keywords is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it’s a huge thing. But it can also be short lived and frustrating. Rankings rise and fall, and there’s only so much you can do about it. Build your traffic in other ways, and a drop in rankings won’t be quite the crisis it would be otherwise.

While it pays to keep both the short term and long term benefits in mind, you shouldn’t always sacrifice one for the other. Besides, if you get a good list of newsletter and website owners who are regularly willing to publish your articles, you’ll have a long term benefit already. You’ll be able to write articles and know that you can pull in traffic more or less when you want it, not just when the search engines like you.

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.