The following information covers -

• Article Marketing
• Article Directories
• Article Writing for syndication

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a frequently misunderstood concept in the world of Internet Marketing. Generally, if someone claims to be an active article marketer, s/he will be approaching things in the following way -

• Writing 'filler' content on a specific subject laced with keywords
• Placing strategic anchor text links within the article body, linking the article back to a page on the writer's website, usually the home page
• Submitting the article to numerous online article directories around the web

In the confusion which arises from the above, these 'article marketing experts' will often times resort to mechanical ways of creating uniqueness from an article so that multiple copies can be used over and over. This is something the industry has come to know as 'article spinning'. It involves using software which allows the user to place tags within the article body and provide alternates words, sentences and paragraphs which are then randomly 'spun' into the content, making the output significantly different from the original article. Using this method you can spend perhaps a few hours setting up the spin syntax then create perhaps 50, or even 100 variations of the original article. But why do people do this? It comes from a desire to submit 'unique' content to an article directory in the hope of it being indexed, and also to have more of this type of search engine fodder to submit over and over, so that more 'back-links' can be created from the article directories back to the author's website.

Wow. How on earth did all of this come to be?

Obviously it's a strategy to try to game search engines into providing better SERP's for the target website. Going back a short while it was a moderately effective strategy particularly for sites which were not in such a competitive niche. However, (you can see where this is headed), it was (and still is) 'gaming'. Gaming in this sense is trying to manipulate the search engines into providing more favorable ranking results for the people playing the game. People still don't realize that these strategies are always short-term success methods, particularly when they're adopted en mass, as has been the case with this strategy for using article directories to gain SERP advantage.

There was an 'incident' which took place during the past week that I want to share. It's a slight tangent but in many ways it indicates that the above strategy has truly come to a screaming halt, or at least its effectiveness has, it doesn't stop people from trying to do it.

During the week I was browsing one of the popular online webmaster forums and came across a guy promoting a 'get rich quick' guide which was titled something like 'Make Money From Article Marketing'. His story was quite unique but only in the scale of what he had been doing.

I don't want to lead you to the guy's name so I'm going to fudge the stats just a little so it won't be so obvious who he is. This guy had spent the last few years writing 'fodder' style articles and submitting them like a crazed hamster to www.ezinearticles.com - the largest of the Article Directories. His articles, (I went on to read a few) were generally short, snappy, semi-informative little blurbs of facts and information designed to steer people towards an opt-in form on his website, at which point he'd hit them with multiple follow-ups to try and squeeze a buck out of them. Nothing wrong with that if it's done ethically and in many ways his techniques were quite ethical. But it was the scale of his endeavors which caught my eye. He had risen to be placed on the top 5 or so on Ezine Articles, graded simply by the number of articles submitted/published, in his particular case, over 20,000. Amazing, how do you write so many articles over a space of a few years? I calculated based on his start date that in his first 4 years at Ezine Articles he'd averaged over 400 articles per month. Clearly 'outsourcing' was a major part of his strategy and outsourcing costs money. So his technique was obviously profitable, and looking at his click-through rate from EA he'd exceeded the 3Mil mark, which for many people is a lifetimes worth of traffic. So clearly he had been doing something right, no doubt about that. Now remember, the thing he was selling to people was a blueprint for his strategy. He was saying to people "this is how I was successful and I'm going to show you how to do it too, when you pay me".

So my interest was piqued sufficiently to dig further. I signed up for his newsletters, received free 'report's and ebook enticements for me to sign up, and set about reading them with interest. To cut a long story short, his whole focus was on this one strategy for making money - getting people onto his list from Ezine Articles. Now the issue I had with this is that in the first couple months of 2011, Google introduced their 'Panda' algo update and tore the heart out of article directories. It is estimated that Ezine Articles lost over 90% of their Google traffic. So wouldn't you think that a person with over 20,000 articles inside EA would get hit too, in a big way? It would be impossible to dodge that bullet. So what made me curious was this - why was the guy still selling a guide to a strategy that seemed to have been pretty much made redundant about a year ago? Did he still consider it to be effective in the light of Panda, I mean he must do, otherwise he wouldn't be selling his blueprint to other people, right? So I wrote to him and asked him if he still thought this way of marketing was successful. Here's an extract from the email I wrote to him -  "I can imagine that it would be hard to justify the ezine articles approach without a large critical mass of articles already in place (as you have). But a newbie coming into it now, would it really be worth their time and effort, do you think?" - He replied as you might expect, in the affirmative. "Yes this is still a great strategy and I recommend it to newbies" - to paraphrase his response. Now in his 'special offer' which he was selling to people, he showed a screenshot from some of his article marketing efforts. He showed a screenshot from a page in EA which showed his submission stats along with the dates. By comparing the info in the screenshot with the info taken from his current stats I was able to work out that -

1 - During his first few years he was submitting articles at the rate of around 400+ per month.

2 - From March 2011, which was around the time Panda struck Ezine Articles, his submission rates dropped to around 38 per month.

Obviously he'd all but abandoned his strategy for utilizing EA to gain traffic/backlinks. I suspect he'd fired his outsourcing team and arbitrarily submitted an article a day to just keep his stats moving up. So this guy is selling a system which no longer works, and he's standing by it. Why? because he doesn't have anything else to do. His whole business is built on one model and to change it would require a major re-tooling.

If you're interpreting what you've just read as me saying 'don't do article marketing', then you'd be wrong. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying don't do it this way. There are ways in which you can make money and the right approach is through 'article syndication'. Had the person who I've exposed above resorted to a tactic which involved quality over quantity, his empire by now would be untouchable. You see article syndication is all about sharing useful information with other website and ezine owners who then share it with their readers and send you qualified traffic. But it has to be useful and well-written and not just some fodder to try and gain a back-link and a handful of hits.

If you want to learn more about writing for syndication then grab a copy of my book Article Directory Marketing and Article Syndication

Also, why not subscribe to my mailing list and I'll send you the occasional pearl of wisdom to help with your marketing efforts (or click on my services link above and let my company do the work for you). Or if you're in the mood for more reading, here's a link to a recital of a single event which lead to the success of my Internet business. It too place over a decade ago and it involved my stumbling upon an article marketing strategy which I still use successfully today.

Join my newsletter at the top of this page, and good luck with your efforts.

CH