Sunday, October 11, 2009

Article Marketing: Do You Understand Article Marketing?

By Barry Walls

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.

Article marketing isn't necessarily something new; it's been a method for as long as people have been using mass communication. Back in the earlier days a company would often submit an informative article that is related to the product or service that they were in and the publication got free material and the business got to put a resource box that linked the article to the company.

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.

The internet and the exponential growth in the number of web sites has created a huge online demand for original content for web site owners to use to add value to their sites. It is probably true to say that the demand for content is virtually insatiable - and therein rests a major problem.

The internet is not only full of an ever growing number of web sites it also has a growing number of people trying to sell instant cures for every web site ill. The question of content has always been with us but now you can look at sites called 'article sites' and make a selection from a list of articles that might be suitable for your site. You can use any article you want to as long as you keep the 'resource' box (this contains details of the author) intact.

The demand for content is so high that some have tried to provide these webmasters with solutions. One popular way in which webmasters can get their content needs filled is to go to sites which are referred to as article directories, these directories have articles written on just about every possible subject you can imagine and are free for the taking by anyone who wants to put them on their site. However, if you do put the article on your site you must include the resource box that is attached to the article, giving credit and a link back to the original author of the article. .

If you include the resource box you are allowed to do use any and all articles you want for your site's content. Something else that people have developed to try and solve the content problem for webmasters is the article spinner. An article spinner is a piece of software that will change some words using a thesaurus and will also change the order of the paragraphs of an article, to try and make it unique. However, this tactic isn't a very good solution either. The search engines are catching onto these article spinners and are penalizing webmasters who try to use the spun content on their site. If the content isn't unique the website runs a great risk of being penalized by the search engines. Spun content can result in a site being de-indexed from the search engines if they were indexed and not being indexed if they never were indexed.

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.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a push button article marketing solution. So long as you put out quality relevant material that relates to your field of expertise you will be found by website owners that are looking for expert and relevant content for their site.

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