Our latest alexa ranking continues to improve, its not a very accurate tool but it reflects what we see internally a gradual increase in traffic.

Alexa is a search engine in its own right, but helpfully shares its users traffic statistics in the form of a league table #1 is the most visited site.

The prize for the keenest author goes to Tony Hill Articles, who posted an article at 10 seconds past midnight on 31/12/2008 EST.

Appropriately his article is titled Maverick Money Makers Club Review, he joined our network on the same day, and we wish him all the best with his Article marketing efforts. Tony is a Newbie Intenet Marketer and is now getting into Article marketing.

Following our recent blog posting about our partnership with Yedda / AOL we have seen a big jump in the numbers of questions asked on Yedda.

Yedda is great as questions asked on Yedda bring answers! But as well as answers come visitors and links through to your article pages - all of which serves to increase the exposure that your articles get.

In the first week of January we have seen nearly 700 questions asked, thats a real increase. Some authors are getting a lot of success. An example Yedda prolific questioner has asked 160 questions alone since November!

Squiddo is a free social network site that allows you to create pages which include RSS feeds photos and a whole bunch more fun things.

Carolyn one of our team recently created a squidoo lens to promote a couple of customer sites. Squidoo is a good site and content on Squidoo seems to appear in the SERPS more and more. If you are looking for ways to get more out of your Article Alley content - why not create some pages on squidoo link back into your profile and articles on our site - add your RSS feed.

This sort of activity will help your pages to perform and increase the exposure your work gets.

Came across a really useful tool today.  Tweetscan allows you to search users on Twitter and find people to network with.

Twitter is a great way to promote your site, as it allows you to network and invite users to link to your profile, if you have an RSS feed then twitterfeed can update your twitter account automatically.
Its a great concept based on keeping conversations down to 140 characters.

Until I found tweetscan finding fellow articlemarkeeters was more of a problem - now its so easy.

Happy tweating.

Its new year resolution time again!

Authors writing about New Year Resolutions include Frank Mayers Articles who suggests that the best way to achieve your new year wishes is with a blog.

How to Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions with a blog

Nealon articles recommends taking the opportunity to change the look of your kitchen.

New Year’s Resolutions- Changing the Look of Your Kitchen

Denise Ryan Articles recommends that New Year resolutions never stick - which is pretty true:-

Why Your New Year’s Resolutions Won’t Stick

One from last year which I personally like, from Golden Articles

New Year Resolutions For Your Dog 

Our resolutions are of course the same as always:-

• To Improve traffic to your Articles
• Collect even more articles to add to our database
• Add new freatures to help us re-capture the top slot from our competitors
• Have lots of fun!

Take care everyone and best of luck for 2009

We recently started using folkd its a cool social bookmarking system.

Like many of these services content bookmarked gets indexed and picked up very rapidly by Google and the other search engines. It certainly seems to help speeding up the indexing of posts - so we recommend that you book mark your articles on Article Alley and elsewhere using their service.

Our Folkd posts can be found at Article Alley on Folkd

Happy New year to all our users and authors. We are really looking forward to 2009 as we have so many new and exciting features going live - also a new design for our site is under development.
One thing that is planned for the new year is an expansion of our free Article Distribution service, as many authors already know articles submitted to Article Alley spread rapidly around the internet.

We are planning to expand this by adding free submission to selected email and ezine distribution lists, we do this inhouse on a small scale already but are planning to crank it out fully during the first quarter, so all new submissions will get automatically distributed once approved.

Bloglines is a popular free blog site, we have added our own blog, its a good way to promote your site as it allows you to add your own choice of feeds and links back to your own site.

Article Alley on Bloglines takes you to our bloglines blog. A good way to help boost the performance of your articles is to create a blog using bloglines or one of the other popular free sites such as Blogger or Wordpress then compose posts and make use of your Article Alley RSS feeds.

Many authors are linking to their own profile pages, which of course helps to get more search engine attention and exposure to your articles.

But an issue that many miss is that authors with more than 15 articles have paginated pages.

Jan Richards Articles for example, an author since 16th July 2008 has 66 articles

http://www.articlealley.com/author_2_118314.html
http://www.articlealley.com/author_3_118314.html
http://www.articlealley.com/author_4_118314.html
http://www.articlealley.com/author_5_118314.html

Google in particular isn’t very impressed if the only way it can spider its way to your articles is via a pagination number, so if you can link to your own articles, it will help your own promotion efforts. How:-

Well……

1) Hyperlink from other articles within ArticleAlley - using anchor text within the body of your articles
this is particularly helpful as your articles get used around the web.
2) Link from your own websites and blogs
3) Post on Forums using the url of your internal profile pages
4) Social boomark your pages using services such as folkd.com
5) Write articles which contain links to your sections on Article Alley and post them to other Article Directories