Article marketing

Article marketing is a type of advertising in which companies write and distribute short articles to a range of outlets such as article banks, forums, and newsletter publishers. Its main purpose is to gain a huge number of online audiences and boost the number of sales opportunities for products or services on websites.^[1] It is one of the most successful types of marketing a business can do. This old type of marketing strategy can help marketers acquire new visitors and increase sales on their websites. Article marketing is also one of the least costly ways to market a company.^[2]

Advantages and disadvantages of article marketing

There are many advantages in using article marketing such as:

• Increasing brand awareness - a company can use this marketing strategy to establish a good relationship with their readers, which they can convert into consumers if the company’s articles are useful enough for their readers.
• Increase in page rank and SEO - an advantage of article marketing is that if the articles are good enough, their search results will get higher ranks. This results to the company’s whole website to get a higher rank since those articles have backlinks to the website.
• Free way to make money - by doing article marketing, the company will not have to spend money to advertise. They would only need to spend their time and effort in making sure that they write great articles for their customers to read.
• Articles may go viral - if a company writes a great article, it may become viral and they would get a lot of readers and their site traffic would increase as well. An article going viral can create a lot of advantages for the company in the long run.

If there are advantages in using article marketing, there would also be some disadvantages to it, which are the following:

• Stolen content - if a company uses article marketing, they publish their article to another website. Some editors may omit the company’s resource box, which makes the whole article marketing useless for the company. The company may not get the credit and site traffic that they deserve.
• Can be expensive - a company might need a ghost writer to help them write a great article that would lead customers into their website. Hiring a freelancer can cost the company some money especially if they want to hire a really good one.
• Time-consuming - the process of presenting articles to distributors can be time-consuming. The company needs to plan to present new articles regularly and make time to write and submit those articles on time

Traditional article marketing

Article marketing has been used by professionals for nearly as long as mass print has been available. A business provides content to a newspaper, possibly on a timely topic such as an article on tax audits during tax season, and the newspaper may use the article and include the business's name and contact information. Newspapers and other traditional media have limited budgets for gathering content and these articles may be used in the business section of the newspaper.

Traditional article marketing is advertising a company’s article through the use of magazines, newspapers and any print media. (Daniels, 2013). This way of marketing has been going on for a really long time but it is still very much useful and still in style to this day. It still produces results to offline establishments.

The method of doing the traditional article marketing is very straightforward. The company will choose a print media business they want to work with and discuss the conditions of the article they want to produce. Once the article has been written, the print media will then print and publish it. Both companies will benefit from this project. The print media company will have content to print and the business will gain exposure for their products and/or services. (Ekanem, 2015).

Internet article marketing

Internet article marketing is used to promote the authors expertise of their market, products or services online via article directories. Article directories with good web page ranks receive a lot of site visitors and may be considered authority sites by search engines,leading to high traffic. These directories then give PageRank to the author's website and in addition send traffic from readers. Articles and article directories attract search engines because of their rich content. This practice may have been effective in the past, however, changes in Google's algorithms over the years have negated the benefit one would have received from this practice. Both Google's Webmaster Guidelines and comments by Google's Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts discouraged, if not outright prohibit, the strategy of using article directory marketing as a means to build back links.^[3][4]

Business Owners, Marketers and Entrepreneurs attempt to maximize the results of an article advertising campaign by submitting their articles to a number of article directories. However, most of the major search engines filter duplicate content to stop the identical content material from being returned multiple times in a search engine results page. Some marketers attempt to circumvent this filter by creating a number of variations of an article, known as article spinning. By doing this, one article can theoretically acquire site visitors from a number of article directories.

Most forms of search engine optimization and internet marketing require a domain, internet hosting plan, and promoting budget. However, article marketing makes use of article directories as a free host and receives traffic by way of organic searches due to the listing's search engine authority.

The primary goal behind article marketing is to get search engine traffic to the article so that the author can strengthen their authority and influence within their field, while also leveraging that traffic for their own site(s). The key to article marketing is that the author should be providing value with their articles, not just promoting their site, products or services.

See also

• Article directory
• Article video marketing
• Astroturfing
• Digital marketing
• e-zine
• Geo (marketing)
• Marketing
• Web syndication

References

1. "Article Marketing | What is Article Marketing?". www.marketing-schools.org. Retrieved 2016-03-31.
2. Fleischner, Michael H. Article Marketing Made Simple. SEO Made Simple. ISBN 9781619791411.
3. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo75Og4M34Q