Article Submission Or Bookmarking?

For those who want to promote their websites, especially those content-intensive ones, for example, blogs, article submission and bookmarking are both among the most effective means you can take. At first glance, they look roughly the same. But they do have differences. In the following analysis, I’d like to perform some basic comparison between them.

Before I start, I’d like to clarify the meanings of article submitting and bookmarking, respectively.

“Article submitting” means submitting your entire article content to article submission sites. Popular article submission sites include EzineArticles, ArticleBase, GoArticles and so on. To submit your article, you normally need to provide the following information:

• Article title
• Author name
• Author Bio (or called Resource Box)
• Article summary
• Article Body
• Tags
  

“Bookmarking” means submit your article link’s basic information, rather than the entire content, to bookmarking sites. Famous bookmarking sites include Digg, SlashDot, Reddit, Google and so on. To bookmark your sites, you normally need to provide the following information:

• Article title
• Article Link URL
• Article summary
• Tags

So, from what was listed above about article submission and bookmarking, you could easily see that the functions and requirements of the two are indeed different. Let’s try to summarize their two major differences as follows:

• Article submission gives away your content, whereas bookmarking doesn’t. After submitting your article to some other sites, your website is no longer the only place that publishes your article. The visitors who are interested in your article may not need to visit your sites. The article submission sites may publish PPC ads, like Google Adsense, alongside your article on their sites, and the ad revenues all go to their pockets. On the other hand, bookmarking only exposes the link of your article. To visit the full content, the visitors still need to come to your sites.  That means, you are still the sole owner of your article and your website is the only place that publishes your article. (Let’s ignore content piracy issue at this moment).

• The promotion benefit that you get from article submission is the resource box offered by the article submission sites, in which you could list two to three links that you would like to promote. Normally the article submission sites do not allow you to insert any affiliate link in the body of the article. On the other hands, as you only submit the basic link info, rather the entire content, to bookmarking sites, the promotion benefit you get is directly related to the article link the bookmarking sites have bookmarked for you.
  

Arriving here, you may wonder which method you should adopt. Well, there is no definite answer, since it all depends on your own judgment and biggest concern. For example, if you’re concerning about the copyright issue or don’t want someone else to enjoy the ad revenues brought by your articles, the better alternative is bookmarking. If you want your website’s link popularity to be increased more quickly, the more suitable choice for you is article submission. Nevertheless, you could always combine article submission and bookmarking to achieve a maximized benefit.