Starting your own article directory is quite easy, although there are several important things that need to be done for success.

First I had to find a domain for my future site, I was thinking a lot and unfortunately all the domain names that seemed good were already taken. Finally I found a free one, article-provider.com and I grabbed it immediately. I thought it's easy to remember and it's descriptive of what my site offers.

About choosing a hosting company - it's really important to choose a good host, you can't afford downtimes, you'll loose submissions and income too.

I also had to find a good article directory script, I wanted a free one so I started to search the internet for free article directory scripts. There are several over there. I installed them one by one and struggled a lot with them. All of them had some deficiency. One is hard to customize, the other's code is encrypted, lacks some features etc... Finally I found a script that seemed the best for my needs, although it required additional work to be done on it.

When everything was ready, I had the domain name and the script, the site was online but my article directory was empty. I needed articles to fill up the directory, so I started a research what is the best solution for the start. No one would submit their articles to an empty directory. I decided on the topics Computers and Internet, Internet Marketing, Web Design and Technology. At a forum I was suggested to contact some big article directories who are sharing their articles and ask them to include my directory in their submission process. I did so. Finally I got a reply from a site which can automatically send the articles with POST method; I just had to create the scripts which can write the data directly to the database. I have some programming knowledge, so I've created the scripts. If you know nothing about programming, you can ask a friend or hire somebody to do it for you, it's really easy. So I started to receive the articles, now I just have to approve them. The article directory fills itself slowly.

So at this step I had my site with the articles, and I had to start working on the most important part - promoting my article directory. It's like with every other site - let as many people know about it as possible.

I started to submit my site to web directories. Building the incoming links is a bit hard and slow process, but you'll don't regret. Also submitting RSS feeds to feed directories will drive additional traffic to your site.

I wrote several 500-600 word articles and submitted them to article directories. Of course there is a link in the "Resource box" to my site. This means additional back links to the site, and also a chance that readers will visit my site.

I've also created a partnership with an other article directory, they recommend my site to their writers, in return I recommend them to my writers.

Currently I'm still receiving the articles from that source automatically, but I'm getting more and more manual submissions every day. My site is PR4 at Google right now, and it's only 4 months old! So the conclusion is that everyone can create his own article directory easily, just have to follow these simple steps above for success!