For the first time today, I came across a traffic tool which comes up with results pretty close to Google Analytics.

Article Alley on Geek Tools shows a pretty close approximation to our real traffic levels, strangely, Alexa.com and compete.com the best known players in this area show figures that are way off.

As a result its very hard to judge the real traffic levels of our competitors.

However this Geek Tools suggests we are closer than we thought to our main rivals, which is very encouraging.

Anyways we are focussed on the needs of our customers and authors and not our competitors.

Found a great list of directories today - many i have never heard of before - usually when I am surfing around for places to submit Article Alley to its 99% the same sites.

Surprisingly there are some very strong sites on this list and they are free also!

Thought I would share with our visitors.

Happy Easter to all our readers from the Article Alley team, we are off until Tuesday 14th April, and will resume editing and dealing with mail enquiries from then.

Make sure you get your fill of chocolate eggs! Meanwhile here are a few Easter Articles from our authors:-

Polish Easter Cake - sounds really tasty!

Easter Egg Hunt for Any Budget — Easter fun for the kids.

Fun and Easy Easter Baskets Ideas - creative Easter ideas.

Easter Is Nearly Upon Us - What Gifts Can You Buy For Easter? - Gifts for Easter.

There are loads more Easter articles in our database just select the Google Search box and enter your Easter search request as usual.

It really is amazing to see the wide range of topics and content that can now be found within our database, in many ways Article Alley is becoming a form of Search Engine in our own right.

Another site we run is indexplex - its been around for about 2 years now - though its not as developed as Article Alley, we strongly believe it has real potential.

Indexplex is a feature rich web directory it allows authors to publish a page about their site, and include 5 deep links to internal pages. Its a great way to your websites. Some of the technology behind the scenes on Article Alley is used on indexplex and as a result listing on this web directory do well on the search engines.

Every author gets a unique page dedicated to their site, and all new listing are automatically pinged so that the Search Engines pick up the listing as soon as possible.

A listing on indexplex costs just $39 per year and payment can be made via paypal, currently 100% of income gets re-invested into promotion and whilst still a relatively small directory we are confident that this will be a long term success story.

Some of our regular authors already have a listing or two!

Whilst Article Alley keeps our team very busy - we do have another business that runs along side us and is owned by the same people behind Article Alley.

Discount Domains Ltd is a UK ICANN domain name registrar - they specialise in UK and international domain registration, web hosting, and search marketing. If any of our authors and visitors are in need of domain names for their website - our team will be delighted to help - just mention Article Alley!

Since 2009 all webhosting packages sold now include a free DIY site builder, which is proving to be really popular.

Discount Domains has around 18,000 UK customers and about 45,000 domains registered, it gained ICANN accreditation in 2007 though has been a member of Nominet since 2002 ( the UK domain registry)

We use Discount Domains for own webhosting needs and on occasion borrow one or two of their web design team.

Discount Domains has been in business for since 2002 so its actually 2 years older than Article Alley - we have built up a good reputation for friendly helpful service at a reasonable price. At one time we shared the same office - but now they have their own place.

The good thing about owning an ICANN registrar is that it brings all sorts of contacts into the industry which is always an interesting and valuable experience.

Many of our authors make $1,000’s each week through article marketing, here are some tips on how to get it right:

1) Write quality articles - with good grammar and spelling - experience shows that the better the articles the more they get synicated and read.

2) Choose a topic carefully - some topics are more likely to generate interest that others, for example an article on pregnancy is going to be of more interest to more people than one on stamp collecting.

3) The title of an articles is important as this is often used in the anchor text of links to it from Article Alley’s menus. Select a title that will appeal to readers.

4) Write regularly - the more articles you write the the more combinations of text and phrases will exist to bring visitors - more articles = more visitors = more money.

5) Always add a link to your site as a bio to each article.

6) Make sure your own landing page is attractive - better landing pages = better conversion rates.

7) Ensure you use our addthis service to bookmark your articles.

Link back to your own articles using pages on your own sites or blogs = backlinks help to boost rankings.

9) If you can use an RSS feed reader on your site to link back to your authors RSS - this feed contains links to all your own articles.

10) tell your own network of contacts to use and link to your articles.

You too can enjoy success with Article Marketing.

Compete the popular web traffic analysis site - shows our steady upward progression. This trend very much agrees to our internal stats.

What is pleasing is that we have moved ahead of some of our competitors such as isnare and goarticles, though there is still much to be done to catch back up to the likes of buzzle and searchwarp.

We are getting there and will keep plugging away!

We have been laughing today at some of the April fools articles going around the internet and posted by our authors

Bad Jokes for April Fools’ Day

Other April fool related articles include:-

April Fool’s Day Activities

April fools party

Google of course has come out with its usual attempt at humour see Google April fools

All good fun!