Sep 25 2009

5 Software Packages To Produce An Article Directory Of Your Own

Published by at 04:43 under Software Reviews

Article directories by themselves are very useful things. First, they provide people content that they can use for research as well as for publishing on their on website or blog. For others, they can be an important component of the linking strategy by providing a link back to the author’s blog. But the third benefit is that it can earn you money if you own one yourself. With the right traffic and proper monetization methods in place, you could be looking at a self-sustaining site that earns you passive income for months or even years to come.

But it’s not easy. Just like any site, it needs to provide the things that your visitors are looking for, things like ease of use, quality content, ability to provide RSS feeds, and the all-important backlink to the author website. Once you have built a solid platform using one of the different software solutions available today, you can then reap the benefits of your work and the work of countless others.

So what can you use to create an article directory of your own? Here are a few methods

WordPress blogs (wordpress.com)
The most popular forms of content management systems today is called WordPress. It’s free, easy to use, and has an incredible community-driven support system. By itself, the software is flexible. But when you add things called “plugins”, you open the door to numerous was you can enhance your blog. Using something called “themes”, you have limitless ways to display your blog, but choose wisely. Though you will find lots of free WordPress themes available online, that doesn’t mean that they’re the perfect solution for you, not does it mean that they’re built by seasoned coders.

I’ve started my own article directory called Article Radar, which is using the WordPress platform. It’s a very stable and ever-growing content management system that I highly recommend to anyone.

ArticleFriendly Pro (articlefriendlypro.com)
The very affordable Article Friendly Pro will cost you $49. I’ve seen this software used on other directories and it seems to do a nice job. If there’s anything strange about the layout of the sites that use it, I think it’s the directory owners to blame and not the makers of the software themselves. You can check out the demos on their site to get a feel for the front and back ends. For a little more investment, you can even purchase the rights to sell the software, making it easy to recoup your cost by advertising it on your own directory. The software is also easy to customize, which is important for two reasons. First, you want to distinguish your blog to stand out from the competition. Second, you need flexibility to make it your own. I’m talking beyond just making it look different, but also modifying its structure to have it do what you want it to do.

And if that’s not enough reason to use this as your choice of article directory software, then you may be pleased to know they provide you with a free bonus script that feeds your directory with thousands of articles to get you started or for continuous feeds.

Your Articles Directory (yourarticlesdirectory.com)
With a $99 price tag, it may be out of reach for many people’s budget, but it also comes with a lot of features and ready-made templates. You can create a “featured articles” area on your site in addition to providing a “what’s hot” section. As the administrator, you have control over which articles get published, and which ones don’t. And managing comments is easy too by allowing you to approve or disapprove one by one, or all at once.

Article Dashboard (articledashboard.com)
The proliferation of the software used to run Article Dashboard has made this a very, very popular solution to categorize all kinds of articles. You can pretty much identify at a glance a site using this software anywhere you go. It’s free to download, but keep in mind you get what you pay for. In this case, you pay nothing to use the software (aside from keeping a backlink in your footer that points to the main site, which is a reasonable “price”). As such, support is seemingly non-existent. This author’s attempts at getting help with getting it installed have gone unanswered, but perhaps it was just bad timing. That being said, it’s still worth checking out. Its display is very clean and well organized.

Article Friend (articlefriend.com)
Another inexpensive option is Article Friend. It, too, has many features to offer. Templates are easy to customize, integrated related articles list for each article posted, search engine, rating ability, most popular author sections, and much, much more.

These are just a few of the available options you have to create your own article directory. Actually, there’s so much to say about them all that it wouldn’t be right to post everything here. I encourage you to visit these sites and learn more to get started with yours.

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