I wrote an article – now what?

If you’ve been doing much online business, you’ve heard the advice to write articles to get traffic to your website. Maybe you’ve even done that. But what do you do now?
Distributing your article doesn’t need to be difficult. There are many article directories and discussion boards just waiting for submissions.
If you want a place that takes articles on your particular kind of business, you can search for a keyword, such as “direct sales” and “article submit,” “article submission” and so forth.
There are many websites that take article submissions in general, many of which have good traffic and give a fair chance that your article will be seen. You will want to decide if you care whether or not you want webmasters and ezine publishers to contact you before using your article. It is easier for publishers if this is not required, but on the other hand, it is very nice to know when your articles are being used, if only to see them published. Some directories request that publishers contact the authors before using articles, others do not.
Here are a few article directories to get you started:
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
http://www.digital-women.com/submitarticle.htm
http://www.family-content.com/articles/submit.shtml
http://www.selfgrowth.com/artman/exec/admin.cgi
http://www.opportunityupdate.com/doorwaytosubmit.html
http://www.womans-net.com/
http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://www.workoninternet.com/Submit_Article.html
Yahoo groups offer a number of opportunities to submit articles. You want groups with at least 100 subscribers to give your article a fair chance of being published. You can go to http://groups.yahoo.com/ and search for business articles to find groups which will take your article, or use other keywords suited to your business.
Make a folder in your Favorites of places to submit your articles for easy access. This will greatly speed up your submission process over time.
Many of the article directories also allow hyperlinks, so even if you don’t get published you may get a link to your website, a nice bonus.
Finally, check your favorite discussion boards and see if they have a page for article submissions. My own discussion board has such a page at http://homewiththekids.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=16.
It can take some time to get your articles submitted to all the various directories you are interested, but as it only costs your time and may bring targeted traffic to your website, it is a form of marketing that is often well worth your while.