Work At Home Information

Article marketing is not new; it has been around for as long as mass print has been around. Local newspapers who needed content to fill their pages would often use articles written by local businesses that contain useful information in exchange for publishing the name of the business along with the article.  The newspaper would get free content in the business would get free advertising.  Sound familiar?

Today, article marketing is done mostly online.  Instead of newspapers, articles are published in article directories.  Article directories are places that accept content in exchange for the author being able to link to his or her commercial website. The article directories make money by having advertising, often provided by Google’s Adsense program,  displayed along with the articles. Because of the high volume of content the article directory publishes on a daily basis, it can have pages and pages of content on which relevant Adsense ads are displayed.

Online article marketing has the additional benefits of search engine optimization and targeting articles to specific niches. Marketers have capitalized on this and will write articles on specific subjects related to products and services they sell and use the strategic placement of related keywords and keyword phrases in such a way that it gets indexed by search engines like Google. When people search out the targeted keyword or keyword phrase, the marketers’ articles will show up in the natural search results, bringing targeted traffic to the marketers’ sites.

Article marketing is often called "bum" marketing because it is a free form of advertising. For this reason, and because it does work, it has become very popular among the Internet marketing crowd. With its increased popularity come claims that the quality of articles published in the article directories have declined.

The decline in quality is probably the result of marketers wanting to write a large quantity of articles in a short period of time. In order to accomplish this, they have resorted to the use of article spinners to re-write articles in mass quantities. Used in concert with article spinners, are private label articles: stock articles that anyone who pays to obtain can use as their own. The resulting articles are at best, re-hashed versions of the original piece, and at worst, a mish-mash of words that convey no real information and make little sense.

Aside from the additional benefits derived from the online world, the purpose of article marketing has changed very little from the heyday of the print media. At the end of the day, it is still about exchanging useful content for free advertising.