There are thousands of article directories you could submit to, but I generally submit to only 5. I only submit to those directories that have an Alexa ranking of less than 10,000, because those are the ones that have the best traffic.

Personally, I’m not after backlinks only. The backlinks are great, sure, but I prefer to get backlinks AND traffic, because it multiplies my efforts.

There are currently only 5 directories I know of that have an Alexa ranking of 10,000 or less. These are the directories I submit to. I will occasionally submit to a few others if I have some spare time, but most articles are only submitted to these five.

1. EzineArticles.com

2. ArticlesBase.com

3. Buzzle.com

4. Pubs.acs.org/hotartcl

5. SearchWarp.com

I don’t bother with other directories simply because I don’t get enough traffic from any of them to make it worth my time. I may get a trickle of traffic, or the occasional hit here and there, but no other article directory gives me the level of traffic that these do.

If you find a directory that consistently sends you great traffic, by all means submit to it! This list is purely based on my own experiences, and my own opinion. If you find other directories that work for you, that’s great! But personally, these 5 are the only ones that send be decent traffic on a regular basis.

HubPages and Squidoo can both be great money makers, but which one is “better”? Which one should you use?

Well, I’ll be honest with you, I use BOTH. There’s no reason to NOT use both. In fact, I use other sites, too. (Like Weebly, Wet Paint, and others.) But I do tend to focus most of my energy on Squidoo.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, I just find Squidoo’s interface a little cleaner and easier to use. I also find their actual pages more attractive. They do contain a lot of links, but they are well-organized, and the AdSense ads blend in nicely.

On the other hand, HubPages interface seems a little awkward to use. Their pages are cluttered, and the AdSense ads don’t blend. In fact, their method of randomly choosing AdSense styles and colors can make their pages absolutely ugly. HubPages is also very picky about advertising, and you have to be careful to follow their rules. Squidoo is MUCH more relaxed towards marketing.

I also find that my Squidoo lenses tend to rank a little higher than my HubPages hubs. HubPages seems to perform slightly better in MSN for me, but Squidoo does better in Google. Remember, this is just my experience. Yours may be different!

Overall, I vastly prefer working with Squidoo, but I do use both equally. I would prefer to have TWO pages on the front page of Google whenever possible, rather than just one. If I can get a Squidoo lens and a HubPages hub listed on page one for the same keyword, I could potentially get double the traffic.

So the bottom line is this: use both. You may prefer one over the other as I do, but there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be using both and getting more traffic. I like to create a mirror on HubPages for every lens I make on Squidoo. (No, I don’t mirror the content!) I just write new content for the same keywords, potentially doubling my search engine listings.

In article marketing, your article title is perhaps the most important component. Your article title is similar to the headline of a sales page. If the title is poorly written, you’re not going to get the results you’re hoping for.

The article title serves three main purposes:

1. To let people know what the article is about.
2. To attract people to click on it and read the article.
3. To attract search engine traffic.

Let’s look at the ways you can make sure your article titles accomplish all three of these goals effectively.

First, your article title needs to be informative. This is the easiest part to accomplish, because you just need to make sure the title accurately describes the content of the article.

Next, you need to make sure people are going to read the article. If you have a boring article title, people aren’t going to be interested in reading it. For example, if I had just called this particular blog post “Article Titles”, it wouldn’t have received much attention. But by adding an action word (writing) and a descriptive word (effective), I’ve made the post seem more interesting.

Finally, you need to attract search engines. That means you need to have keywords in your title. The title will typically also be in the HTML title tag, which search engines give tremendous weight to. So you need to be sure the title contains keywords that are searched for fairly often. You can use your favorite keyword program to find these keywords. Be sure to look for keyword phrases that receive at least a few dozen searches per day, otherwise you’re probably not going to get enough traffic to make the article earn its keep, so to speak.

Adding numbers to the title can also attract more traffic. People are attracted to numbers, and they also like quick solutions. So try article titles like:

5 Quick Deer Hunting Tips

10 Ways to Make More Money

7 Killer Tips for Quitting Smoking

Just be sure to have the exact number of tips you mentioned in the article, and number them. Ezine Articles doesn’t like to accept these number tip articles if the tips aren’t numbered correctly, and other article directories may feel the same way.