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Is Article Marketing Dead? It Might Be For You!

By Donnie Baird

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 17Mar2012 Word count: 1135 Viewed: 109 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

For many years one of the best forms of free website advertising has been article marketing, especially when promoting work at home opportunities. This focused mainly on writing and submitting articles to article directories. The goal was to develop search engine traffic through backlinks and website traffic from readers of the articles.

This still works, but article marketing has gone through some important changes in the past year. As is the case with many things online Google has been behind these changes.

In 2011 Google changed their search engine ranking algorithm to filter out websites of poor quality. Their main focus was to lower the rank of sites that focused mostly on advertising revenue and were built primarily with duplicate content. Duplicate content is content that is already online somewhere else before you add it to your site.

Affiliate marketing websites really suffered. Many of these were mini sites that contained mostly duplicate content and were filled with affiliate banners and links to affiliate sites that were all the same for every affiliate.

Affiliate marketers, and other Internet marketers who had developed websites with fresh content, were rewarded with higher rankings. This also set the model for all websites going forward. You must develop a site that contains unique content and rewards your website visitor with a quality experience.

This is where article marketing can be a big benefit to you if you do it correctly. There are a few things you need to keep in mind.

1. Add it to your site first. If you are going to use articles to develop website content post it on your own site before you submit it anywhere else.

Take one extra step and bookmark your new webpage so the search engines can find it. I suggest you use Only Wire which is a service that bookmarks web pages to social directories.

2. Unique content. A better approach after you add the content to your site is to spin it and make it 100% unique before adding it anywhere else.

People who work online from home and do article marketing focus primarily on submitting articles to directories such as Ezine Articles, Idea Marketers, and many others. These article directories are starting to crack down on article submissions that contain articles posted somewhere else on the Internet.

This has effected people who relied primarily on private label right articles, or using an article writing company. For this reason you need to submit articles that contain only unique content that has not been submitted anywhere else.

Submit Your Article offers a very good program called Article Leverage. This lets you develop unique versions of your articles before they are submitted.

SYA takes article variations and submits them to the article directories for you. This is good because you now have a unique version going to article directories which increases the chances of it being published.

3. Blogging. Posting content to your own blog is an excellent way to develop a large website of unique content.

Professional Internet marketers take articles they have submitted to article directories and re-create them into shorter versions for blog posts. Most article directories are looking for articles of 400 to 500 words.

You can re-create those into shorter articles of 150 to 200 words and post them on your blog. Again the key is to make the shorter article unique so you're not penalized by Google.

One way to do that is to take a shorter article and post it to your blog and then bookmark it with Only Wire. Then submit the longer 400 to 500 word version to the article directories. This way your site is always spidered first and you are credited with unique content if there's any question.

4. Article videos. Use an article converter such as Article Video Robot and develop article videos. One thing you can do is take the short version of your article and create a video of it in and then post the embed code on your blog.

Article Video Robot lets you submit your video to shared video sites such as You Tube. This is a good way to develop backlinks from your articles and do video marketing.

In summary article marketing is not dead if it's done correctly. It can still be an excellent form of marketing online, but you must focus on creating unique content in multiple ways when doing it.

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