Newbie Project: Your Own Article Directory

One of the biggest problems I have with my business, that I’m a little ashamed with, is that I don’t have all my articles on my site. I’ll write them for article directories, but not all of them make it back to my site.

That’s not to say all of them are like that though. I do have two blogs that focus on two niches, which get updated regularly with my content I submit on directories. The problem is I’m in a lot of different niches and I don’t want to set up a new blog for every niche. That’s just a waste of resource.

Sometimes I do it in HTML format, but I don’t do that often. The deal I have is that I have 1000+ articles at EZA, but I only have a few hundred of those articles as my own personal online real estate. I decided it was about time I tackled this problem and I want to show you what I came up with to make this easy.

What Platform?

I thought about this for a bit. It was actually my biggest stepping stone. I’m a fan of simple HTML. I thought about making some simple custom HTML pages that I could just easily add in the articles too. The other advantage is that there are no databases. I also thought about getting article directory software like article dashboard.

I came to the conclusion that a Wordpress article directory would be the best way to go. The reason I like this is that there is one single wordpress database for all your articles, it is easy to add articles plus it does pings, which I think does an amazing job at keeping your pages indexed with search engines.

Here is how it is done

  1. Install Wordpress on your website. I recommend dumping it in a subdirectory like /directory/, /articles/, etc. It doesn’t really matter. Wordpress will ping, so the SE’s will find it.
  2. Configure the blog properly. That means giving it a good name, setting up permalinks. I personally like it to be /%postname%/
  3. Install the following plugins…
    * All In One SEO
    * WP DB Backup
    * Article Directory
  4. At this point you have two options. The first method is to setup a static page, write an introduction paragraph and add in *see below*. This will show the category structure on the page and update automatically as you make posts. Note, that there is a category.css file you have to add into your themes directory when you install the plugin.
  5. The other way is to just get a ready made skin for the article directory plugin. It’s really up to you, what you choose to do.
  6. At this point you’re ready to go. You can put ads on the pages. You can use Adsense if you want to lose money.
  7. Make sure you turn on the WP DB Backup plugin. Set it to automatically backup the database every week and automatically email you a copy of it. The last thing you want to do is lose all your articles.

<?php if (function_exists('article_directory')) article_directory(); ?>

That is a relatively painless setup. You should be ready to go within 15 minutes. Obviously your job is to update this directory with your articles from now on. Don’t leave your articles at an article directory. You don’t know what could happen. EZA could fold tomorrow, it could go bankrupt or it could ban you and delete all your articles. That’s what scares me.

I recommend rewriting them in some way. You don’t have to though. I think at the bare minimum, you should copy them over onto this directory. It will add 5 minutes to your day with copy and pasting. That’s easy and you have copies of it all. For me, I’m adding all my articles to it (that aren’t already on a blog) and rewriting them all. I probably have a good 800 articles to do, which will take me about 3 months, if I pace myself. At that rate, when I finish the 800, I’ll have an additional 500+ articles to do.

It will be a long process, but I think it is worth it. I hope you’re not careless like me, without having a proper backup of most of your articles. Always be in control of your assets.

September 19 2008

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