Article marketing, also sometimes referred to as content marketing, is a very popular means to market your website or blog and it is very effective for making sure that your content receives exposure. Many new and veteran bloggers market their content in an effort to create back links to their site and to establish credibility in their niche.
Incidentally, article marketing is a subcategory of information marketing and the entire purpose of having articles, is to provide information to your potential customers about the product or service that you are offering. Of course, your articles can be promotional but they are going to have very little effect, if you intend to use them for article marketing. Sales pitches do not offer anything of value and naturally people are not going to be interested in reading them.
If you want to understand the concept of article marketing, you have to understand its functionality.
Understanding the Concept of Article Marketing
The entire point of marketing your content is to have other websites or blogs which are related to your niche, publish your content. Consequently, your articles will have readers and your website gets a back link from a high authority blog. This not only helps you increase your page rankings but it also enables you to target your potential audience.
This is also referred to as article syndication; a very important part of article marketing and helps a business get organic traffic to their site. The biggest advantage is that one article can be syndicated countless times, meaning more back links, more readers and more traffic for your site.
Fairly easy, huh?
The problem with article marketing is that because it is so simple, marketers thought that it would be easy to manipulate it. Many authors tried to publish articles that were of very poor quality, linked to sites unrelated to the topic of the article and included affiliate links in their article body. Weeding out such poor quality content was the sole purpose of the Panda Update.
Many people, who published articles from directories, removed any credits or links to the original author and tried to pass the article as their own.
Unfortunately, despite it being such an unethical practice, the actual writers seldom took action against it.
This is why popular article directories like Ezinearticles.com and ArticleBase.com were affected so badly after the update. Because the Google search bot could detect that the content on that directory was published on other websites which were not linked to the directory. Search engine robots cannot determine which articles are syndicated and which are duplicated; they rely on the content to be linked to the original source to ensure that there are no underhanded techniques being used.
The reason I am saying all this is because many people who are relatively new to article marketing consider it to be a poor strategy after the Google Panda Update. This is not true.
Article directories were affected but only because of the people manipulating them, not because of the purpose of the directories themselves. In fact, if you were considering using article submission software to submit one article to hundreds of directories that is regarded as “article directory marketing” and is not article marketing. In that case, you are not hoping to have your articles syndicated on other sites; you are submitting articles to get the back links from article directories themselves.
This is an extremely short term content marketing strategy that will help you with your SEO but it will neither help you gain readers nor will it help you gain organic traffic. Back links help with your search engine ranking position but the quality of the back links is important too.
Here is a simple statistic: 10000 back links from article directory submissions will have less “link juice” then a single link from an authority blog in your niche! The figures are arbitrary but what they are suggesting is not. Focusing on the quality of your content is a much better strategy than solely targeting SEO.
“So I can’t submit one article to more than one directory?”
Of course you can! Google understands that different directories have different publishers and they can appreciate you trying to increase the exposure of your content. Hopefully, this post will have proved to you that aiming for article syndication instead of article directory marketing will get you far better results both in terms of link building and traffic.
Can I post on my blog and submit it to directories as well?
Despite popular misconceptions, you can post on your blog and submit it to article directories; however this depends on the article directory itself. Some directories accept only original content but most of the popular ones accept content that has been published elsewhere including EzineArticles and ArticleBase.
“…wait! Google would not consider that duplicate content?”
Google judges originality by seeing where the content in question was indexed first. Which is why, it is a good idea to have your content indexed on your site as quickly as possible. You can do this by pinging your website and bookmarking your article link. When you are submitting your articles, you can include the syndication meta tags in your resource box. These tags are not so widely used and are in more of a beta-testing stage. However, Google hopes that the use of these tags will help them better understand what’s syndicated and what’s duplicated.
Even so, how Google finds duplicate content is a bit of a controversial topic and I was only sharing my experiences. If your experiences are different or if you have a different opinion about article marketing in the light of the Google Panda Update, please comment!