Article Marketing - the Do's and Do Not's of Article Marketing

Written by Barry Walls

Thursday, 15 October 2009 11:54

by BarryWalls

Within the past year a lot more people are seeing article marketing as a viable way to promote their business, services, or products. Many people still aren't clear on exactly how to properly utilize article marketing to its fullest potential, some unintentionally have used unscrupulous methods.

Even though the internet is still relatively new, article marketing is not. In fact, it was one of the old staples of mass media. It was very common for a company to send an informative article related to their product or service into a publication to be used as content the publication got free content the business got a free plug for their product or service.

By doing this, the publication keeps the readers happy by having interesting content and the business is happy because they get free published advertising. This symbiotic relationship eventually gave rise to what was referred to as resident columns these allowed individuals or companies to attain expert status because of their knowledge on particular subjects related to their product or service. Being seen in the field that relates to your products or services is the best kind of advertising that anyone could possibly hope to get.

Flash forward to today, the internet is seeing explosive growth every hour of every day and the people who are putting up websites are hungry for content that will help give their readers and search engines something of value and a reason to keep coming back for more. The demand for content from these website owners is extremely high and this is actually a bit of a problem.

Because of this need for fresh and current content there are people who have tried to come up with their own fix. For example, there are sites that are article directories where there are articles written on just about every subject available for any website to take and place on their site. The only stipulation is that you keep the resource box at the end of the article intact if you place the article on your website.

So long as you do this, you are not violating any terms of service. Another solution people have come up with to try and help website owners to get fresh content is a creation called an article spinner. An article spinner is a piece of software that will take an article and most use a thesaurus and replace words with synonyms and change the order of the paragraphs and sentences. While this type of software is freely and widely available there is an inherent risk in using it.

Search engines are becoming much more sophisticated in the way that they recognise what they are seeing. Most search engines are looking for value for their customers and will often disregard anything that they see as being duplicated. This can lead to pages being de-indexed or not being indexed at all.

The owners of article directories try to appease the search engines as much as they possibly can. A large part of their income is derived from site visitors clicking on the ads on the article pages. Should the article directories get into the bad graces of the search engines it could result in them losing significant income because their rankings for top keywords would plummet and they would not only lose visitors but also income.

There isn't an easy, instant way to use article marketing. The very best way is to work at it and create truly valuable unique articles that will enhance your reputation so that, eventually, you too will create that 'expert' status and be sought out by web site owners looking for valuable content.

About the Author:

Barry Walls article marketing course is quickly generating full time incomes for virtually all who sign up. If you want to quickly quit or replace a full time job with a dream work from home solution, try his article writing class.