If you’ve been following my last few posts on article writing you ‘ll already know about the potential for traffic from these types of sites, traffic that you can send to your own website or blog or straight to an affiliate link.

You’ll see I named a few of the popular sites for doing this, with Ezine Articles being one of the biggest and most recommended. While those sites are not in any particular order I do tend to favour some more than others but this favouritism varies from user to user.

Remember the reason we use them is to access their traffic, this traffic comes from the numerous listings those sites have in the search engines. If you intend writing an article promoting a heartburn cure you might target your articles around phrases like “how to cure heartburn”, “quick heartburn remedy”, “relief from heartburn” and so on and submit those articles to one or a whole bunch of article sites (with your affiliate link or own website link of course).

The rules differ from directory to directory, with Ezine Articles for example you are not allowed to include affiliate links in the article or even in the resource box. The folks at Ezine do not want a whole bunch of affiliate links subtracting from the feel of their site. You can however link to your own site or a landing page you have made somewhere, including to a Squidoo lens (page). You can also link to a redirected domain name.

Other article sites are less strict and and sites like Hubpages and Squidoo allow you to put your affiliate links right in the body of your articles (within reason) so they have become enormously popular with affiliate marketers of all experience levels.

The iSnare site is not just an article directory but for a small fee will also distribute your article to hundreds of other sites and blogs, I’ve used it myself and can verify it works reasonably well. Your article may not end up on lots of high traffic sites but I take the view that the spread of links is a good thing. Articles must have 500 words as a minimum at iSnare.

USFreeads is really a free advertising site but one which also gets some search engine traffic. I don’t use it much but some folk swear by posting short articles there with links back to their squidoo pages or blogs.

This brings us to the question of should you put the same article on several sites? I would say your best bet is to write a base article for say, Squidoo, then submit variations of it to some other sites. By variations I mean a significant amount of re-writing, using synonyms and alternative sentences and paragraphs.

Don’t worry too much about the so called “Duplicate Penalty” the worst “penalty” I’ve noticed is the article being ignored by Google because they already have a copy of it indexed elsewhere. Having said that, posting a few variations of your article to different sites gives you several chances at getting listings and exposure, hence my recommending that approach.

Want to know how to pick good keywords and phrases to target? Watch for my next post on this subject.