ARTICLE MARKETING – ARTICLE DIRECTORY MARKETING AND ARTICLE SYNDICATION

Fact #1 - We are all Article Marketers, whether we choose to be or not. If you proactively publish your content in article directories, blogs or eZines, or just simply choose to passively publish content on your own website or blog, you are still an article marketer.

Fact #2 – Google is changing the rules on duplicate content and the new rules affect ALL web publishers -  proactive and passive article marketers alike.

The difference between active and passive article marketing and why I consider anyone with a website to be involved with one or both -

Proactive Article Marketers

Clearly, there are proactive article marketers who utilize sites like ezinearticles dot com to publish content. This is one of the most widely used methods of website promotion, yet at the same time it is one of the most widely misunderstood and potentially ineffective. I'll get to the how and why later.

Passive Article Marketers

If you simply have an eCommerce site or publish a blog or some other type of website, you may not be proactively using article marketing as part of your promotion strategy, so you may think the rules and concepts don't apply to you. But you are wrong. The most successful websites all share something in common – useful information/products/services. Whenever you publish something useful, it's going to get shared. That's the power of the Internet at work. People will take your content, extracts, products, images or whatever you have that's worth sharing, and....share it. In it's most innocent form the sharing process can be useful to you. But in other cases which I've already covered, people can take your content and use it in ways which can hurt your reputation and your business. You're either in control over the 'sharing' process or you're a passive bystander. You need to take control.

Proactive Article Marketing – Does it Work, Is It Worth Your Time?

Disclaimer – even when a particular approach to web marketing might seem illogical, you can always guarantee that a niche group will be doing it the illogical way and claiming to be successful at it. And they may well be.

My approach to marketing comes from a preponderance of evidence coupled with the personal experience gained from 14 successful years in the Internet Marketing arena. In my first installment of the reference guide series “The Internet – No Place for Dummies”, I recited a story which took place during my first year in Internet Marketing. On the verge of giving up, I submitted an article to a leading eZine of the time which generated $14,000 of business in 48 hours, and went on to create passive income from a group of clients recruited as a direct consequence of the published article. And that's just one article from many successful articles I've published over the years. So it can be worthwhile but only if you do it right.

The Different Types of Proactive Article Marketing.
There may be some subtle variations on these, but generally speaking, article marketing strategies fall into one of the following two broad categories -

Marketing to Article Directories

Marketing for Syndication

To learn more, download our reference guide on article marketing here