Neil Lemons’ Blog

Pre-Wordpress’ birth and the critical mass of blogs, Internet Marketing Professionals used many other tactics, one of which was writing value-based informational articles and submitting them to several article directories for online publishers and website owners to repost. This type of article marketing was done for years before blogging.

What is Article Marketing?

Wikipedia defines Article Marketing as:

“A type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business’ credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.”

Over the last few years it has become harder and harder for those starting fresh in the Internet Marketing arena to separate the wheat from the chaff, the noise from the signal. Of all the 100s of techniques and gurus touting the latest trends, it’s hard to know what works and what’s a waste of time.

Learning SEO wasn’t hard. What took me the most time was learning what sources and advice to listen to and which to ignore. Does article marketing still work? In my opinion, and from anecdotal evidence, yes it does work. Just as most other Internet marketing tactics, it doesn’t work as a magic bullet and its purpose is not for the reasons you might think. It works best in the realm of SEO for relevant link building, not traffic or lead generation. If Google didn’t exist, article marketing would be used differently.

SEO Benefits to Article Marketing

1. Controlled anchor text backlink in byline
2. Deep interior page backlinks
3. Associated relevant, on subject, content

Other Benefits

1. Positions the author as an expert in the industry
2. Provides value to the reader to enact law of reciprocity
3. Generally free, except for time cost

Problems with Article Marketing

1. It’s hard to know which directories/sites are worth your time.
2. Creates duplicate content
3. Time consuming to create high value original content
4. Better for SEO than actual lead generation
5. You’re building other people’s network content, not your own

I first learned about trading content using expert-style articles for links in 2004 when I read the now legendary Yanik Silver and Jim Edward’s guide. There are still a lot of other tactics that work in varying degrees suggested even back then. Yanik is an excellent copywriter, so don’t get sucked in if you visit his link. I’ll get you a free copy of his ebook if you want it by contacting me here.

Using a little more direct method, Silver suggests calling webmasters up on the phone and offering to write content for them either in their ezine (newsletter) or website in exchange for links.

Article Marketing Verses Guest Blogging

If you are savvy to current Internet Marketing methods, you might say article marketing is in essence “guest blogging” — you trade your unique content that builds another’s site for an author’s byline linkback. This is true, except in article marketing you typically do not get to pick and choose where your article lands if being placed on an article directory or publisher’s site. The trade off is that your article is exposed to a lot more potential publishers without you having to call them up individually and negotiate. With guest blogging you have to have offline relationships and network with high powered bloggers. With article marketing not much offline communication has to be done.

I should clarify my question “Is Article Marketing Dead?” by adding “Is Article Marketing via Article Directory submission dead?” Without knowing the right directories, the answer is yes. By knowing the places worth the time, article marketing can be an extremely effective method of building backlinks.

Two Authoritative Article Directories

After spending literally weeks in SEO forums, and after reading many veteran SEO opinions, I have come to the conclusion there are, much like search engines, only a handful of article directories are worth the time. One has taken years to aggregate 1000s of other directories so far as your article continues to get published for years in the future by different content seekers added to their directory. The second authority site has done very well because of its strict editorial policy and no duplicate content guidelines.

1. ArticleMarketer.com
2. EzineArticles.com