Article Marketing – In Broad Outline

In the online world, article marketing has evolved rapidly over the past few years as a means to generate masses of back-links to websites and blogs. It is used primarily as a type of advertising in which e-businesses (website-owners/authors) write short articles related to products or services offered on their sites.

These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace via “Directory Services”. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information to the author's business and website. 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.

Note on "Directory Services":
The website where an author can post an article is known as an article directory. The primary reason an author can post an article without cost is that the directory owner places advertising on each article page and collects the revenue generated from the advertising. The article directory site gradually increases its own search engine popularity as more articles are posted, benefitting both the author and the directory owner with increased visitor numbers and therefore article page views.

Online Article marketing
As in traditional forms of media, online article marketing has served the dual role of providing publishers with what amounts to free content, and advertisers (web-owners) with similarly free advertising.

Unlike the off-line version, there are additional dimensions to article marketing online. Most notable among the differences is the use of articles for search engine optimization. Articles are written to target particular keyword niches, and distributed to content publishers that cater to those markets. Authors are able to target their audience with informative content, sent to an already-interested group of readers.

Online article marketers enjoy the low cost of this type of advertising and have written hundreds and sometimes thousands of articles. These prolific article authors enjoy abundant backlinks (i.e., links pointing back to the business' website). The exposure to the authoring business and number of backlinks is increased greatly when the articles are distributed via RSS.

Because of this, article marketing has been the victim of junk content over the past few years. It's important that article marketers be careful not to abuse the Internet and post poor quality content on the web just for promotional purposes; smart article marketers use scientifically proven techniques that dig deep into their own businesses and their readers' concerns and needs and tactfully persuades them to click through to their web sites.

At a stage the popularity of article marketing caused an overall reduction in quality in many subjects, mainly due to individuals writing low-quality articles as a quick way of achieving exposure. The top-level article directories responded by screening all articles and publishing only those that meet their standards. This appear to have had a positive impact on the quality of articles published.

There are offcourse those publishers that are purely interested in backlinks. They rely on the fact that when spiders 'crawl' websites where their articles are published, the spiders credit their sites with the 'signature' links embedded in those articles, that point back to their site. Be warned however, the search engines have been refining their 'spiders' lately to identify 'backlink-spamming' and publishers that abuse the system in this way, may soon find that they loose their ratings altogether, or worse, they may get blak-listed.

Remember the efficient use of article marketing as a form of promotion requires invested effort in writing high-quality, relevant articles.