Why Article Marketing Just Won’t Go Away

How you can benefit from this established marketing practice.

Article marketing isn’t about to go away. You probably knew that, but what you might not know is why this form of “getting the word out” still works.

Marketing Expertise

I consider myself an expert of sorts in article marketing. Beginning in 2005, I was hired by a client to write articles for his business and post those articles to various marketing directories, but especially to EzineArticles. “Ezine” is owned by Christopher Knight and if there is any one person who knows article marketing better than Knight, then I haven’t met him. Come to think of it I haven’t met Knight either. Moving on….

Seven years later, I have scads of articles posted to directories. At one point I was No. 10 on EzineArticles’ list, but eventually I shifted my sites to magazines, blogs and websites. Yes, I was paid to write for the directories and to post those articles. Maybe I should change my tense here because I still market articles on a regular basis. These days I write about a dozen articles each month for EzineArticles and other sites for my clients.

I thought article marketing would eventually fade away, but at this point in the game, I still see benefit from having original and interesting articles posted to other sites and picked up, with backlinks intact and posted elsewhere.

Article Marketing

Here is why article marketing will continue to thrive over the next few years:

1. It is free content — Even if an article is eventually posted to multiple sites, the people who are doing the posting are getting free content. Sure, you NEVER want to rely exclusively on content used available for use elsewhere, but with article directories you can find some good reads to include on your site. In exchange, you’re expected to keep the links in the “author’s resource” section in place.

2. Authors can build a name for themselves — If everyone knows who you are, then article marketing won’t matter to you. For people who want to make a name for themselves or desire to expand their base, then writing several quality articles and offering these to the directories makes sense. The alternative is to find a website to host these articles, but that doesn’t always work out. Besides, if you want multiple backlinks, then article marketing is the fastest way to gain these.

3. You don’t have to be a writer — Writing for the article directories is one way people who aren’t especially good at writing can hone their skills. Of course, that means some of the articles submitted to and accepted by the directories aren’t first-rate. Still, if you are looking for an audience and can’t afford the services of a copywriter, then the article submission route is a very good way to go.

4. Your article stays in place always — This is where you need to be careful about submitting your articles. Use a directory that isn’t proven or regularly updated and you’ll risk that your article will someday disappear. Personally, I don’t count who picks up my articles and where they get republished — I’m satisfied that the article directory has a copy and that copy will continue to send links back to my sites or my customers’ sites for years to come. Choose only an established directory and avoid those with little to no standards.

5. You’ll get new business — As a writer, I know my articles have brought in new business for me. As for my clients, they’re satisfied on two fronts: 1) backlinks are gradually built up and, 2) more customers find their websites. What they pay for my services is a cost they’ll need to recoup. I’m confident that my services are a moneymaker for them, otherwise why am I still doing article marketing?

Final Thoughts

One bit of advice that should be used is this: when you market your articles, submit what you write to just one directory. Multiple submits are a waste of time — find a directory or two or three that you like and send your articles there. Keep track of your articles including how many times each article is picked up and redistributed. Work on writing catchy titles, use your keywords wisely and put in place your sub-heads too.

Considering Massive Rewrites? Don’t Bother!

Late last month I received a bid request from a company who wanted to increase the amount of content on their website. In their email to me they mentioned that their site was founded in 2000, had about 300 pages indexed by Google, and they believed that there were about 5000 inbound links.

I did  a little research myself and discovered that while the home page had a PageRank of 4, most of the main inner pages were PR3 or PR2, with deeper pages showing up as PR1, PR0, if that. Though PageRank isn’t critically important, I was a bit surprised to find that this site wasn’t ranked as well as it could have been. Checking some of their competitor’s sites I found much better results which had me wondering — what were they doing wrong?

Digging deeper I discovered some problems with the site, mistakes made by a webmaster which needed to be corrected:

• For quite a few internal pages, there wasn’t much linking between other pages on the site. I didn’t find that many outbound links either, but there should have been more links between existing pages on the same URL.

• Some of the internal pages were difficult to find. Likely, when the site was first started, these pages were linked to some other page on the site, but were no longer. Effectively orphaned, these lone internal pages were getting absolutely no benefit from other pages, hence the grayed out Google toolbar ranking.

When I mentioned these matters to the owner, he was surprised. Clearly, when the site was launched in Spring 2000, all of the pages were properly linked. A web designer and writer were hired to put the site together and everything worked fine. However, I did learn that the company — in a bid to save some money — made some changes to the site themselves early in 2003 and again in 2005 whereby content was updated, new pages added, and the design tweaked.

I also learned that the owner was the one who did all of the changes. Ugh.

Anyway, the client had contacted me initially with the purpose to have me rewrite a bunch of pages to bring them up to date. His thinking was that the fresh content would be recognized by the search engines and encourage the “bots” to visit his pages. Though this is true, I mentioned that he could save a whole lot of time (and money) if he added the links in himself and update the content as needed. Each page FTP’d to the internet would invite a crawl from Googlebot provided his site map was up to date.

Naturally, I found out that he didn’t even have a site map in place so I instructed him on how to get one.  I also shared Google’s Webmaster Guidelines link and encourage the client to visit Google Webmaster Tools to add and verify his site and do the same with Yahoo! Site Explorer.

As for me, I’ll be doing some other work for this client, but nothing involving fixing internal problems made by others.  Most times I’d rather have people clean up their own mess and take on fresh work without hassling with old stuff.  Besides, learning from one’s mistakes has its advantages, particularly when you manage your own business.