Is Article Marketing Dead?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

(Source) Article marketing has been considered a useful method of promotion on the Internet, since the very early days of the Internet. By writing an informative article, writers have been able to get their sales message read by millions of online consumers, through their resource box that follows their articles. Until 2005, the whole point of article marketing was for the purpose of attracting huge numbers of readers as a result of the articles being published in ezines that had a large reader base.

In my book, that’s still the purpose of article marketing. I think it’s a sad testament to the state of the Internet that people do not see this value. Article marketing practically died overnight when late night gurus masquerading as firecrackers started teaching that article marketing should be done to build link popularity. Article marketing, to be sure, can build link popularity, but that’s a side benefit; it isn’t the primary purpose for article marketing.

A New Kind Of Article Marketing For Link Popularity

In 2005, Jason Bradley, owner of Article Dashboard, released his free article directory software. Websites that use his software are commonly referred to as AD sites.

During the same time frame, people began turning to article marketing in droves, based on its promise for building link popularity with Yahoo, MSN, and primarily Google. Most people who jumped on the bandwagon in 2005 to endorse article marketing for link popularity purposes promoted a very limited view of this promotional technique.

Their thoughts went along the lines of “the only purpose for article marketing is link popularity.” There was no other role for article marketing, they said. And since one only needed to type enough words to get a link into an article directory, the most common recommendation was that articles should only be 300-400 words in length.

It was also commonly recommended that most article directory owners do not review the content submitted to them, so it was not important that the article made sense or pleased the article’s readers. After all, the recommendation being made was not for the possibility of generating traffic from articles; it was only for the purposes of influencing the search engine algorithms, which are not capable of actually reading articles for grammar or understanding.

People flocked to this new kind of article marketing, and they were more concerned with “quantity than quality” – quantity of links that is.

This is an interesting history. So do we blame Article Dashboard for the current state of article marketing? Is AD the McDonald’s of article marketing? Did Jason Bradley take a good idea and turn it into fast food?

I don’t think we can lay the blame squarely on Jason Bradley’s shoulders. It isn’t all ADs fault. And, no, I don’t believe that Article Dashboard is McDonald’s. In fact, I know that if I put an article up on ADs website it will likely get picked up by ezines and I will achieve the No. 1 goal for article marketing: Readership.

So what happened?

I think it’s Google’s fault. I mean, the search engine giant is the one who established the rules that we all follow. With its overemphasis on link popularity as a means to building PageRank and credibility, that’s what webmasters started doing. And it became a game of who can do it the fastest.

The truth of the matter is, ADs article directory template is a good SEO tool. Webmasters can take the template, put an article directory on their website, and build inbound links to their website, increasing their link popularity and PageRank. Even if none of the articles in the article directory get picked up by publishers, there is a huge benefit to including the directory template on any website. The benefit is to the webmaster. The webmaster gets

• Fresh content on his website
• Links pointing to his website
• And the AD template gets crawled thousands of times daily

A friend of mine installs AD templates on websites for people who are interested in building their link popularity. He uses it as an SEO tool. Nothing wrong with that if it works. The problem is there are too many article authors who are getting their articles published in these directories with no clear benefit because the directories aren’t being visited by publishers and the articles are not being picked up by them for publication. The benefit is totally in favor of the directory owner.

Software Developers Rallied

With the mass deployment of websites under the Article Dashboard software, and others since, programmers jumped through hoops and developed new article distribution systems that relied on computers instead of people for the distribution process.

Soon, these programmers had systems in place to mass submit articles to the new breed of article directories. They told the new article directory owners that if they would add a simple script to their website, then the submission service would populate their directories with article content.

Hundreds of directory owners flocked to this new kind of article distribution system.

Early on, people who used article marketing to promote their businesses were elated. They were getting links all over the place.

This is more great history and another sad fact to the near death of article marketing. Can it be revived? Do we need to send a death knell to these article directories that benefit their website owners without benefiting the article authors? Do we need to ban the mass submission software?

I think anything that save people time and money is a good thing. But I also believe that you are much better off manually submitting your articles. The reason why is in Bill Platt’s words himself:

For my own use, I use my own article distribution service to reach ezine publishers. And for mass directory submission, I prefer to submit articles to the directories by hand, because hand submission permits me to get the category right every time, which in turn permits my articles to get approved more often.

Get the category wrong and your article could be deleted at the article directory. Platt points that out quite aptly, I think.

Bottom line: I don’t think article marketing is dead. I do think that many article marketers are missing the point. Quality content is still the most important thing. It’s important for websites, it’s important for blogs, it’s important for articles, it’s important for everything you do online. Take the short cut and you are likely to fall into a pit. Do things the right way, even if inconvenient for a time, and you are sure to reap the rewards. They may not come when you want them to come, but they will come. You have to be patient. Success doesn’t happen overnight.

The above sections of Bill Platt’s article are taken from SiteProNews. The article is not reprinted in full. To read the entire article, head over to SiteProNews and Bill offers more great history.