Article Marketing

Article Marketing Versus Article Distribution

Thankfully the time when people mass distributed articles across hundreds or even thousands of directories is over. The huge number of duplicated articles is rapidly being squashed by the search engines. The fact that the overwhelming majority of these articles were really of a very poor quality, and often only written to serve the search engines as they used to work meant that the internet was awash with poor quality, duplicated content. Hardly a great selling point for any business, but this was largely because of the way the search engines' algorithms worked. Today they have got wise to the cheap tricks pulled by some article marketing businesses, and a combination of very punishing responses to this tactic has now meant that article marketing is now far more refined than ever before.

Throughout the past eighteen months in particular the way in which SEO articles are used has changed dramatically, and this is certainly a good move. On the one hand it means a higher quality of content is being made available for real people, and on the other it means businesses are being portrayed in a much more professional manner. Cheap, poorly written SEO articles say nothing good about a company at all, and today they won't achieve anything worthwhile, no matter where you try to submit them. The better quality article directories have now had to dramatically change the way they review and publish articles, weeding out anything less that first class content. Of course, the poor performing directories are still happy to accept any old rubbish, but this is exactly why they are poorer performing. They achieve almost nothing except to provide the owner with a small residual income from advertisers.

Distributing an article today is no longer the way to work. It's not about simply getting the content 'out there'. It has to be marketed properly if it's likely to have any degree of success. This means choosing the right article directories, thinking about the right way in which to use those directories thinking about alternatives, and using new and innovative opportunities when the arise. It's even about little things such as adapting the author resource and links section in order to maximise the chance of people clicking through to the main website. In essence, article marketing differs from article distribution because it is based on research, is planned, targeted and several times more effective.

How We Approach Article Marketing

We feel that article marketing should be carried out in very much the same way as any other form of marketing, starting with a clear idea of who the target audience is. Writing SEO articles without any real focus means that inevitably you'll miss your target audience more times than you reach it, which hardly provides a business with value for money. We take the time to understand the nature of the business, its aims and its target audience. We carry out research so that we know what the target audience are looking for, the questions they're asking, the problems they're experiencing and the sort of information they would find useful.

Once we have that information we go ahead and create the SEO articles, but the research and careful planning doesn't stop there. Our article marketing service involves us making decisions about where best to place those articles for maximum exposure, making sure that they stand the best chance of reaching their target audience. There's relatively little point submitting an article to a hundred mediocre quality article directories if the sort of people you're trying to target simply don't ever visit that type of site for information.

And don't think that having backlinks on those sites will help you, because if your target audience isn't viewing those articles then they're not going to be clicking those backlinks, and this will tell the search engines everything they need to know about the relevancy of your brand.