Is Owning An Article Directory The Death Of Internet Marketing?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

You’ve heard people predict article marketing is dead. I don’t believe it’s dead at all. It’s still alive and thriving and depending on how you approach it you could see great to meager results from it. But what about owning an article directory.

A few years ago, around 2005, many people wanted to own an article directory. And just about everyone did. But there has been some fallout in the article directory business. For the most part, many article directories benefited the owners but not too many others. The benefit to owning an articled directory was getting  other people to populate your website with their content. Then you could slap AdSense ads on it and rake in a few bucks each month. Whether or not those articles were ever picked up by publishers is another story.

When Google provided link juice for articles in the article directories it didn’t matter. Article writers got a benefit whether their article was every published or not. That’s not true today. And since the search engines only give link credit to articles once they’ve been published beyond the article directory, article marketers have started being more selective about where they publish their articles. That means fewer pages in the directory for the owners, few submissions, and a slow down in AdSense revenue. Many article directories have closed their doors, primarily for one major drawback.

The drawback to owning an article directory is the maintenance. If you get a lot of article submissions you’ve got to approve them. That takes time. And for many article directory owners, for the amount of money they were making on AdSense, it just wasn’t worth it. Yes, they’ll still get the benefit, but the price to pay is a bit more than it was in 2005. And the payoff isn’t quite as much. That’s why you’ll see many article directory owners ditching their directories in lieu of other web properties like social bookmarking websites. But if you are an article marketer, you’ve still got a lot of life in you.