Saturday, October 10, 2009

Article Marketing: Using Article Marketing for Maximum Impact!

By Barry Walls

Over the past year or so there has been a huge increase in the numbers of people attempting to use article marketing to promote their businesses. It is an unfortunate fact that many article marketers have only a vague idea of what the method is all about and have fallen for some of the less reputable methods associated with it.

Article Marketing has been with us since printing has been used for mass communication. The most common type is when a particular type of company writes a valuable article about an aspect of their business which has popular appeal (keeping your pet healthy, for example) and allows a periodical to publish it for no cost as long as the details of their business are allowed to be displayed with it.

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.

So long as you do this, you are not violating any terms of service. Another solution people have come up with to try and help website owners to get fresh content is a creation called an article spinner. An article spinner is a piece of software that will take an article and most use a thesaurus and replace words with synonyms and change the order of the paragraphs and sentences. While this type of software is freely and widely available there is an inherent risk in using it.

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.

Article directories are trying to keep their reputation with the search engines and webmasters who want to use their content because they derive a nice income from ads that are clicked which are placed on the article content pages. If the article directories lose favor with the search engines or with the users they serve they will lose their revenue.

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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