Is Article Marketing Dead?

This is the question many people ask today. Especially guys and girls with no money in their pockets who are trying to succeed online and make their first dollar on the internet. Yes, people do suggest article marketing as a way to drive traffic (actual visitors) to your website. And yes it does work. But it may not work the way you think, or at least with your first try. Because with everything that requires some skills, there are small things that make up the whole technique. You fail to do correctly one and all your efforts go down the drain.

Well, I don’t to put in a negative mood right away.

Of course article marketing is not dead. And you can bring many visitors. Actually I brought in over 42,584 visitors from my articles submitted to EzineArticles.com. And that’s just one place! Of course those are niche websites of mine and some perform better than the others. You just have to find a winner yourself. But it shows that articles are a great way to drive traffic.

More false alarm claims have been spurred after EzineArticles (the largest articles directory in the world) have claimed they lost about 30% or so traffic from their site due to Google’s new algorithm change. Yes, we’re talking SEO here. Apparently Google cracked down on poorly written, duplicate content, even spun content articles on their site. It’s not very sexy when you’re getting millions of unique visitors each month. So people started talking that article marketing game is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Search engines love content. They need content. Fresh, new, quality, unique content. So it will never go away. And articles are one of the best sources of quality content you can produce. So do not listen to what others are saying. As a matter of fact, no matter how search engines are striving to provide valuable information to users, I constantly see that their system can be gamed.  What I mean by that?

If I look for some niche keywords I usually see very poor quality websites, usually WordPress blogs at the top. Why? Those sites have like 2 to 3 articles and that’s it. Then, when I looked at the backlink sources, I usually see some even lower quality blogs, forum posts and other links pointing to the site. So although Google says that you should get “quality” links, they obviously still favor quantity of poor links that you can buy fr $10.

For the purpose of SEO, writing such low key articles, spinning them and submitting to hundreds or even thousands of blog directories still works. Although I’m not suggesting to do that, but for link building it works and very well from what I’ve heard. But I suggest you to focus on value and real traffic. That should be the main reason for your article marketing campaign.

Forget just getting a link so the google cold index it and you could rank well. Start thinking about actual visitors. If you write good articles and submit them regularly to some of the top article directories, you’ll get real quality traffic to your niche website or blog. Of course you need to do a proper keyword research prior to that, but writing articles is really a great way to gain visibility. And it’s free in terms of money. So if you got time, start writing some articles and submitting them to main article directories. Ezine Articles, Articlecity, GoArticles, AssociatedContent and so on. You can even make money for writing for some of these, but now we’re talking about driving traffic to your own niche blog and making money. So all in all, I just want to say that articles are great. Article marketing is not dead and it will live long time.