Lately we’ve been working on new ways to generate traffic to our blogs and are starting to try online services that can generate backlinks through placing articles on other sites. You’ve probably seen some of these sites or even tried them – sites like 1WayLinks, Unique Article Wizard, Free Traffic System and so on. We will do a blog post on the various backlinking services available at a later date..
As part of these services you can submit what is called a donor blog to the system. What this means is that you create a blog (or use one you already have), submit it to the backlinking site and once it has been approved, content is automatically submitted to your blog on a regular basis. In some cases you can receive up to 10 articles a day on your blog. The articles are just drip fed to your blog and you often don’t need to do anything but watch the content go up.
This was the case with us and we now, after a couple of months, already have a blog with close to 400 articles on all sorts of subjects ranging from dog training right through to insurance, ps3 gaming, crafts, hobbies and more…with more coming in on a regular basis. So what do you do with a blog like this with such a diverse range of topics? We could just as easily leave it as is since it’s not like we need to do anything to maintain it.
But then we had a thought that maybe we could turn it into an article directory. Nice idea in theory but in practice it really looked like a lot of hard work. I could just imagine the time it would take to find an article directory script and set it all up and then somehow transfer 400 articles over. It just seemed like too much to do on top of our already full schedule.
But then a thought came to me…I wonder if there is a WordPress plugin that can turn a WordPress blog into an article directory. It only took me a few minutes of searching and I came up with a couple of possibilities…and both of them free! And in fact, I never got around to trying the second one because the first one did the job beautifully….and by the time I was done, I had turned that blog into a professional looking article directory in well under 30 minutes.
So if you have a blog with lots of diverse topics then this might work for you too.
Steps to Creating Your Own Article Directory
Step 1: Download the following files – these are all free by the way:
1. Article Directory Plugin – More info for this plugin can be found here
2. Article Directory Theme – More info for this theme can be found here
3. – More info for this plugin can be found
4. Post Corrector WordPress Plugin – this one is optional – it allows you to add categories quickly and easily and this is the sample file of categories which you can use with this plugin. More info for this plugin can be found here
Step 2: Upload the Article Directory Plugin and Activate It
The plugin is easy to upload and activate and it includes various options which you can change in the WordPress dashboard such as excluding certain categories from displaying and whether or not to show empty categories.
Step 3: Upload the Article Directory Theme and Activate It
Note that you don’t have to use this theme. You can use your own but I can’t provide instructions on what to do if you use your own. I just know that when using their theme it all works perfectly and the theme is quite clean and ready to use. If you need more info on using the Article Directory plugin with your own theme then check out the creators website – Articlesss.com
Step 4: Add Categories
If you already have an existing blog then you won’t need to add any categories as you will have most likely added categories in the past. But if your blog is new then you can either manually add categories or use the Post Corrector WordPress plugin from Step 1 above. This will allow you to quickly add categories and subcategories especially if you use it in conjunction with the sample file of categories. This will create categories similar to EzineArticles.com.
Step 5: Upload the Role Manager Plugin and Activate It
To be quite honest we never got around to uploading this one. The articles we receive come straight from 1WayLinks and are automatically added to the one user account in WordPress. I think however that if you are wanting to get serious with your Article Directory then you really need to use this type of plugin so that you can better manage users wanting to submit articles to your directory.
Step 6: Your Done!
Your Article Directory should be up and running at this point. Your only job now is to adjust the sidebar widgets, header and footer to make it suit your blog.
This is precisely what I was looking for – thanks! I knew there was a plugin for an article directory, several in fact, and I knew about the themes…but my thick skull never put together *using the SEOLV/UAW/1WayLinks etc.* blog publishing services to create it…
This is a great idea.
Just snapped it all together for me…THANKS!
Just ensure you read the terms of each of these type of sites. Some allow you to pick and choose the articles that go up on your site and others don’t. I prefer to pick my own as it means you get better quality articles.
Auto-blogging? Really? Just please be careful and READ the articles. If it’s like other autoblog crap out there, 99% of it will be garbage.
Don’t I know it! Some of the articles are so bad they are hilarious to read.
Hey Paula
Long time admirer, first time poster :-)
Thanks SOOOOO much for this article. I’ve had it in the back of my mind to try starting a directory but didn’t have the 1st clue where to start. You’ve just saved me days of research in 1 post!
Love ya work girlfriend ;-)
Nic
Thanks for your kind words Nic.
Hopefully this will make things a lot easier for you. It’s such a simple way of creating an article directory.
Hi, Paula:
Would love to see an example in action, examples always bring it home for me. lol.
If you have one, would love to see it. Cheers!
You just need to go to the http://www.articlesss.com site to see it in action.
I just downloaded both for safe keeping, thanks! ;)
Very clever! Sounds like a great idea. Thanks for the article.
Hi Paula.
Thanks once again for this very interesting and informative post.
I think it could work well for my site topic.
I feel I’ve worked too hard on my site to spoil it with inferior posts,so my concern was also how do you monitor the quality of the articles but I see it has been addressed.
I am assuming that it’s similar to getting blog comments, you can go through them and approve or trash.
Thanks Shirley
It depends on the site you join up with. 1WayLinks puts the posts up automatically but doesn’t allow you to remove the posts so I wouldn’t recommend them for that reason. Unique Article Wizard puts up the posts automatically but you can remove them from your blog if you don’t like them.
SEO LinkVine is pretty good because you can read and approve the post before it goes up.
Thanks for this Paula. I’ll check out SEO LinkVine as I don’t know anything about this one.
Shirley
I tried Free Traffic System a while back on a site that I had and ended up deleting almost all of the articles as most of them didn’t even make sense It’s good to be able to check them and delete!
Yes we did the same thing. They started off pretty good but went down hill real quick. The articles are supposed to be checked but it didn’t look that way to me.
You do not have any informations on this paid WP Article Directory SW? (www.wordpressarticledirectory.com) I want to buy it, but I’m not sure whether the functions are better than this freely available.
I’ve never heard of that one so can’t really tell you if it is better than the free one or not. It looks pretty good from the images shown on their landing page.
It seems an interesting post, sometimes through search we came up with amazing tools which saves our time. i also set-up wordpress blogs. so this tip definitely help me in future. thanks for sharing this.
Thanks a lot for yet another amazing post. I am always on the look-out for fantastic WordPress tutorials to recommend to my own readers. Thanks for taking the time to write this article. It’s exactly what I was looking for. Truly awesome post.
Glad we could help Carol.
Hi Paula,
I have just come across your awesome blog! What a treasure trove of info on setting up an article directory. Over the past months I have toyed with the thought periodically but always came to the same dreaded thought of how in the heck can I do it? So now I know how.
This is such an easy way of doing it too especially if you already know a bit about WordPress and installing plugins.
Thank you for taking the time to post this Paula.
But, my blonde:) brain is not getting how to use the “Post Corrector” plugin. I have installed it but cannot figure out how to use the “Sample File Of Categories” text file?
Where / which area do I input the list to auto create all the categories?
Your help will be greatly appreciated. Tired of pulling my hair out.
Susan
To be honest I can’t rememeber what I did when I used this plugin. But the instructions are on the site here:
http://www.lordtime.com/blog/2008/03/25/post-corrector-plugin/
Thanks much for the response. Already been there done that. How I found your post.
Appreciate the reply in any case.
Susan
I seem to remember copying the list that they provide into the backend of this plugin but that’s all I can remember.
Maybe it goes in the Manage–>Bulk Categories section.
This page was extremely helpful. I have been researching the effectiveness of one-way linking sites such as Free Traffic System and 1 Way Links and thought using self-generated article directories might offer some backlinking synergy and overall efficiency. Thank you for your informative work here.
I’m planning to create article directory into wordpress. However can we have various themes for this script ?
When I click bulk create categories, it asked for categories per line, and I inserted the sample list that listed above. When I click create, I received 404 Error Page.
Any help would be appreciated
You will need to contact the developer of the plugin for an answer to this one. The links to each of the developers websites for the themes and plugins are listed in the post above.
I think you can use different themes but some may not work properly.
thanks for your reply.
I have modified the current theme like the way I wanted it to be. Please check http://www.ohoweb.com
Hope I’m good now.
Hi Paula. I already create one Article Directory Using WordPress Platform and Using Free Plugin and Theme. For now I’m working to customize my page ^^
Excellent Melissa. Your site looks great. You’ve done a good job.
HI Paula
I need the updated coding file for bulk Category creator.
The one i have downloaded is not working in latest version.
Can you help me. If possible also tell me where i can get some more article themes.
Thanks
HI
This plugin is not working.
After clicking on Create Bulk category. Some blank page open.
Please help me how can i do this.
Thanks
You’d really need to contact the developers of the plugin to get support. We don’t know enough about it to answer those sorts of questions.