Going along with the recent post of Peter, Article marketing is probably one of the most discussed topics in my forum with people asking me daily whether or not it really helps with SEO.. People are divided between 3 categories when it comes to talk about article marketing on internet:

1. People who love article marketing.
2. People who hate article marketing.
3. People who don’t know about article marketing.

This article is for the people in the 3rd group, namely the ones who have no experience with article marketing and are wondering what its worth.

What is Article Marketing?

Article marketing is an online strategy that consist of you writing a quality article (in theory), and making it available for other people to use and republish on their site. Of course, since all labors require compensation, you’ll be rewarded for your generosity with a one way backlink towards your site, as well as a short biography of yourself. Here are the traditional steps taken:

1. Write an article.
2. Submit it to an Article Directory.
3. Wait for your article to be reviewed and approved.
4. Once your article is approved, it will be made available to visitors of the Article Directory.
5. People download your article.
6. People publish your article on their site.
7. You get visitors and backlinks from all the sites that re-published your article.

Your personal involvement pretty much stops at step #2, after that you can just sit back and relax, everything else is automated and doesn’t require your participation. Depending of the article directory you submit your piece to, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few months to get your article reviewed and approved. Also, keep in mind that all articles submitted are not automatically approved, so take the time to write properly.

Why You Should Love Article Marketing?

When it comes to SEO, article marketing offers an incredible feature, and that’s to build a potentially unlimited and constant flow of one way backlinks towards your site. The leverage on article marketing is huge as one person only needs to write an article once, submit it to a specialized directory where more and more people will then re-publish it giving you more and more one way backlinks without you having anything to do for it. Each of the articles have submitted in the past is being reused 300 times in average at least. That means for each article I wrote, I got over 300 one way backlinks. Another interesting aspect of those links from a SEO stand is the fact that they come from diverse domains, which is a great thing, and that they don’t appear all at once, but rather over time as all the people don’t publish your article at the same time. It’s a onetime effort, and a lifetime one way link building machine.

Why You Should Hate Article Marketing?

There’s a sound difference between theory and reality. Most of the articles in those article directories are of very low quality and some really limit spam junk. This having for resulting effect that you are very unlikely to ever get your article noticed further than the article directory itself. If spending so much effort for that, you are better of publishing on your own site instead. Even if your article get picked up, more often than not, it will be by automated scrapping software, and your article will be published on a rubbish site where no one will see it. Not only no one will see your article and you won’t get traffic from it, the pages where your article will be published are most likely to be in the supplementary index, if indexed at all. In SEO term, this means that the backlinks you get from there are worthless. At worst, you’ll get dishonest publisher who won’t give you credit at all, and steal your work to make it theirs. Article marketing ends up being a huge waste of your time, resources and talent. If you want quality backlinks, there are many other ways to do so.

In Conclusion

The truth is that no one side is more right than the other. I personally like article marketing as it helps in many other ways beyond SEO, such as branding to me. I’ve got thousands of visitors coming from those republished articles to my site, and in some instances was even lucky enough to get my articles in pages on the primary index and get people commenting on them, building valuable SEO backlinks and reputation for myself. On the other hand, I’ve also experienced people trying to steal my content, and honestly, majority of the backlinks I’ve got don’t bring any or much link juice. If you really plan to get a high PageRank, I don’t feel that article marketing is the way to go for you. On the other hand, if you plan to increase your exposure, or do increased of deep linking on your site, I would strongly recommend you to include Article Marketing as part of your SEO campaign.

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Did you miss any of these?:

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