Article Submission - Is there an easier way?

Once you get your Yahoo Store open for business, the question quickly becomes "where are all the customers?" So many people fall into the "if you build it they will come" mentality. Keep in mind, your store is not a Field of Dreams and they're not coming unless you make them.

One of the ways that you can begin to build traffic and improve your search engine rankings is by writing and distributing articles. The concept is fairly simple. Your write a relevant article related to your product or niche. You sprinkle a few anchored links with your keywords into the body of the article. Then you submit these articles to sites like ezinearticles.com, articlebase.com, buzzle.com and many more. Keep in mind that not every site has the same policies and some may be very specific about how and how many links you can include in your articles. When your articles are published, the search engine spiders find them and see links back to your products. Voila! Back links! And remember, you want links to your deeply nested pages (product pages). Don't just link to your home page. This makes your site less attractive to search engines.

When it comes to submitting articles, it can be very time-consuming. You have to log in to every site, do some format tweaking, change around the links based on site policy - ugh! I've had a lot of success with a product called Brad Callen's Free Article Submitter. The basic version is free and while it doesn't offer one-click submission, it does semi-automate the process. This company also offers a platinum version of the software that does fully automate the process of submission to 210 sites.

I stick with 20 or so submission sites with high page rank. I figure that if I can create an article per week and submit to 20 sites...52 X 20 = 1040 links. Not bad.