A Free-Reprint Article Written by: Bill Platt
Article Title:
Have We Really Seen The Death Of Article Marketing?
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Article Description:
Article marketing has been an effective method of website
promotion that has literally been used since the inception of the
public Internet. I have been online since November of 1995, and
even in those early days, I would read people's articles and
click the link in their resource box to learn more about their
website.
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Written By: Bill Platt
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Have We Really Seen The Death Of Article Marketing?
Copyright (c) 2007-2013 Bill Platt
Writing Puzzle
http://WritingPuzzle.com/
Article marketing has been an effective method of website
promotion that has literally been used since the inception of the
public Internet. I have been online since November of 1995, and
even in those early days, I would read people's articles and
click the link in their resource box to learn more about their
website.
The Early Days of Article Marketing
In those early days, there were a few players who recognized the
value of article marketing. The two writers who were most
influential to my use of article marketing, as a promotion
method, were:
* Dr. Nunley (
http://www.DrNunley.com) has been online since
1996, and this website was registered in Oct. of 1997. Dr. Nunley
was influential in that he taught me the power of syndicated
article content.
* Wild Bill Montgomery (
http://www.MakingProfit.com) started his
website in Nov. of 1998. Wild Bill offered one of the very first
article distribution websites. I received his daily mailings for
nearly a year, until he shut his article system down. I
subscribed to Wild Bill's mailings, so that I could locate
articles for my own publication and website, and later to
distribute my own articles.
It was in the aftermath of the demise of Montgomery's article
distribution system that I wrote my first script to enable me to
make better use of this promotional method for my own articles.
That original script was adapted later to became the foundation
for my article distribution service a couple years later.
How Article Marketing Came To Be Regarded As A Powerful Tool
For several years, article marketing remained a promotion
technique utilized only by a few hundred people who fancied
themselves as decent to good writers. These individuals were able
to generate quite a buzz for their own websites. The buzz in turn
created streams of traffic to their websites, and more
importantly, sales.
Their articles were picked up regularly by ezines, which need
good content to retain the attention of their readers.
Publication of the articles in ezines resulted in thousands of
website visitors in just a few days. My biggest ezine publication
event resulted in 16,000 visitors in the first 96 hours after
publication. I regularly see thousands of visitors in
three-to-four days, due to publication in individual ezines.
Articles that I had written in 1999 still reside on websites
where they were originally published those many years ago. And, I
still see regular traffic from the placement of those articles.
Yes, and I still retain link popularity and good search engine
rankings, as the result of the placement of those articles on
third-party websites.
Many writers were seeing the same results as I had seen, and they
told others about their great success. People began to pay
attention and take advantage of the technique for their own
promotion.
A New Breed Of Article Marketers
In late 2004, the market changed when people decided that the
only goal of article marketing was for the purpose of link
building for link popularity purposes.
A few new distribution systems popped up only targeting placement
of articles on third-party websites. With these new systems, the
article writers had to put their own articles into the
distribution services database, and they had to select a general
category for the placement of their articles.
Suddenly, with these new fully automated systems, computers were
left to answer the most important question of category placement.
These new systems left this important question to the computers
to solve.
People were being removed from the article placement process,
because people cost more money to employ, leaving a lot of
results to chance. But, the new breed of article marketers did
not care. They liked the lower cost of human-free article
placement.
The Four Primary Players in of a Successful Article Marketing
Campaign
There are four primary players in the article marketing game.
First of course is the writer. Then there is the distribution
person or service. Third is the website owner or ezine publisher.
And the final element is the person who will read the article and
act upon what they read in the article.
Sometimes the writer is the same person as the distribution
person. That is fine. The website owner or ezine publisher is
actually the most important person in the link building process,
because he or she wants to be sure that the fourth person, the
reader, will be happy with what they are publishing.
Believe it or not, the website owners and the ezine publishers
are frequently very selective about what articles they are
willing to accept from a writer or distribution service. After
all, if the readers are not happy with what is published on the
website or ezine, then the reader will not feel a need to return
to either one. Webmasters and ezine publishers, who are committed
to success, will be even more selective in their article
choices.
To see what website owners really think of many of the automated
article distribution systems, read this:
http://www.articledashboard.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4679
Any writer or article marketer, who does not pay attention or
consider the needs or desires of webmasters or publishers in the
process, is condemning their article marketing campaigns to
failure.
Twisted Logic
When this new breed of article marketer began showing up at my
article distribution service, I found myself in many strangely
na�ve conversations.
People would enquire about the value of our service. Naturally, I
would mention publication in ezines as a method of driving
thousands of targeted visitors to their website. Then I would
mention the value of links on third-party websites, which results
in the double benefit of targeted traffic from the third-party
website and link popularity for search engine rankings.
Frequently, people would tell me that they literally "do not care
about placement of their articles in ezines." They continued to
explain that they were only interested in placement on
third-party websites for the purpose of influencing their search
engine rankings.
Wow! Every time I heard someone make this claim, I would think to
myself about the shortsightedness of this approach. In my
experience, link popularity and search rankings were a long-term
benefit, and the publication of an article in an ezine is what
was generating the most immediate and largest amount of
click-through traffic to my websites.
But, who am I? I am just some guy who had been using this
marketing technique for five years at that time, and I was a
person who had been providing distribution services to other
writers for several years. Why would anyone want to hear my
thoughts on the subject?
The Proclaimed Death of Article Marketing as an Effective
Promotion Tool
I have been hearing rumors for years of the death of article
marketing as an effective marketing tool. Here are a couple
samples:
* Dmitri Davydov proclaimed in June of 2007 that "'article
marketing' has been long dead."
(
http://www.nichegeek.com/article_marketing_is_it_dead_yet)
* In May of 2007, a few people in this forum thread declared
that article marketing does not work, one of them just a little
more vehemently than the rest
(
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=338394).
What I find somewhat funny and disconcerting at the same time is
that most of the people making this proclamation actually admit
that they have only tried article marketing with "one or two
articles". In their wisdom, you should ignore people like me who
have seen success with this promotion method, and you should
follow their advice to abandon all hope for article marketing as
a method for website promotion.
I have asked a few people to better define the status of article
marketing:
1. Does article marketing not work? Or,
2. Did article marketing just not work for them?
The Nail in the Paid Links Coffin
On April 14th, 2007, the Google Guy (Matt Cutts) spoke out
against paid links. A firestorm of complaints from webmasters
followed Cutts' initial comments.
On June 12th, 2007, Cutts' original comments became official
Google policy as shown here
(
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-ways-for-you-to-give-us-input.html)
Vanessa Fox of Google summed up the issue very succinctly, "Links
that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic
purposes, but aren't useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or
selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines
violates (Google's) guidelines."
Confusion Ensues Over Paid Links
With Google officially stomping on "paid links," a lot of
confusion entered into the marketplace. The confusion really
hinges on one simple question: What kinds of links does Google
consider to be paid links?
Many people have extrapolated Google's campaign against "paid
links" to suggest that anytime someone pays money for a link
building activity, then the links created during that activity
will be construed by Google as a paid link, and that link will be
discounted or ignored by Google. But, that simply is not the
case.
Some have even chosen to lump "article marketing" as a "paid
link", thereby decreeing that article marketing is truly and
finally dead.
But all one has to do to gain a different point of view is to
listen to Matt Cutts' comments from the SMX Search Marketing
Expo in Seattle on June 4th, 2007
(
http://videos.webpronews.com/2007/06/04/smx-seattle-matt-cutts-on-duplicate-and-paid-search/).
Within this video, Matt Cutts said, "If you are going to
syndicate your content, try to make sure people know that you are
the master or source of it. You can do it with a link from the
article or link from the video, or stuff like that..."
The End of Article Marketing As We Knew It...
I don't know about you, but I read Cutts' last comment above as
an indication that Google still considers article marketing to be
a valid and Google-approved method of building links to one's
website.
But, no matter how we cut it, we have in fact passed "the end of
article marketing as we once knew it." Here is why:
* Some people will never have the chance to read this article
and make their own mind about whether what I say has merit, or
not.
* Some people will simply trust the fear mongers who have been
trying to declare article marketing dead for years.
* And, some people will decide that they are not willing to take
the chance that I might be right.
Going forward, we will see a fewer people using article marketing
as a promotion technique.
The fact is that many people have quit using article marketing as
a promotion technique. This outcome will only strengthen the hand
of those of us who continue to utilize article marketing to
promote our websites. After all, with fewer people using articles
to market their websites, we will have fewer writers to compete
with, in order to get attention for our own articles.
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At
http://WritingPuzzle.com/ you will find more training materials for article
marketers. If you are more interested in writing and publishing books, then
you may find
http://ProfessionalBookMarketing.com/ to be your perfect
cup of tea. Bill Platt has been teaching other writers how to create content
that gets the reader's attention and how to promote themselves online, since
early 2001. Subscribe to his mailing list here:
http://PlattPublishing.com/offers/KWA.php
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