Article Marketing - is Article Marketing Really so Simple?
Article by Barry Walls
The basic concept of article marketing is very simple indeed. The supplier or manufacturer of a particular product will offer to provide a newspaper or magazine an article that can be published, free of charge as long as the name of the product or manufacturer is suitably displayed with it.
In the print world, article marketing is a very efficient way to get a new product onto the market place at virtually no cost. This is because the publication needs interesting content for the readers and the manufacturer is happy to supply it in return for a little publicity.
With the arrival of the internet, the benefits of article marketing were very quickly apparent and the new technology added a really exciting bonus! On the internet, not only did the article have the name of the product or manufacturer, it also could include a live link so that anybody reading the article could simply click the link and be taken to see even more information about the product.
It wasn't long before the new technology was used to create libraries of articles where web site owners and operators could browse for articles. These would enhance their web site content and increase the popularity of their site. The article libraries (article sites) were able to make money from adverts on the article pages and, of course, became very popular (almost indispensable) with the average web site owner.
The basic process of article marketing is remarkably simple:-
Product owner writes an article.The article goes into an article site to be freely available.Web site owner puts the article and author information on his site.Web site reader sees the article and clicks on the author link.Hopefully the reader is converted to a buyer.
Thanks to RSS (really simple syndication) it is now possible for articles to be automatically taken from article libraries and posted directly to relevant web sites so the whole process would seem to be even more simple than it was before.
Is article marketing still simple? Yes. It is.
Unfortunately, even though the whole process called article marketing is still fairly effective, automation of all aspects of it have created a bit of a monster and you need to be a little more careful of the topics that you write about.
Although the article libraries (article sites) do try to maintain a reasonably high standard for the articles they will allow, the sheer volume of articles being presented to them means that there simply has to be a gradual fall in quality and originality. The most worrying aspect of the volume of articles being presented is that far too many of them are being produced by software which attempts to create as many 'new' articles as possible from a single article by manipulating the structure (moving lines and paragraphs) and exchanging words with synonyms from an online thesaurus.
What does this mean to you as you look at article marketing as a possible way forward? It means that you have a great opportunity to shine! It means that you will be able to do a little research and discover the areas that are being swamped with revamped articles and avoid them. It means that you have the chance to go back to basics and offer web site owners unique and valuable content in return for them displaying your authorship.
Article marketing is simple - you just need to put in a little extra effort to be unique.
About the Author
Barry Walls teaches ordinary people to make extraordinary incomes from freelance writing. Get details of his freelance writing course here.
