First of all, my name is Donovan Baldwin and I have been using article marketing for years. In fact, I presently have over 400 articles alone at EzineArticles.com.
Several years ago, article marketing was incredibly simple. You made up some diddly little article related to your online business and posted it on as many article directories as possible. At one time, this was not a large number, so, while time-consuming, it could be very effective in creating a lot of backlinks...especially if the article was informative and well-written. If it was, it got picked up by a lot of other websites and blogs, creating even more backlinks and traffic.
I actually remember posting a new article and seeing an increase of website traffic and sales within about 48-72 hours!
In those days, search engines simply made note of the number of backlinks, and, in their eyes, the more the merrier.
Over time, it became obvious that this was a little bit like spam as anybody could use one article to get hundreds or even thousands of backlinks. Another problem was that people were putting articles anywhere they could! This meant that an article on health and fitness might wind up on a website dealing with car repair, for example.
You could go from site to site seeking information and often see the same article repeated over and over!
As search engines became better at weeding out duplicate content the value of having a given article on multiple sites became less valuable. In fact, search engines such a Google began not only ignoring duplicate content but actually penalizing article marketing entrepreneurs who were trying to follow the old pattern of putting one article everywhere possible.
Many websites began to offer "article spinners" as the solution for article marketers. These spinners would take an original article and create new versions of it.
One problem with many of these products was that the resulting articles were often little more than babble which contained keywords and keyword phrases relevant to the website or product being promoted.
As you can imagine, this made the articles of little interest to humans, and, as you have probably figured out, the search engine "spiders" became more adept at figuring out whether the text on a page made sense or not.
So, where are we now?
Well, the concept of having lots of articles with good content on as many pages as possible is still quite viable. The problem is that it can be very time consuming...and sometimes beyond the skill of the amateur content writer dabbling in article marketing.
Most article marketers will have essentially two choices:
- Write lots of articles and post each one in a different place...or,
- Find a way write one article and get similar but significantly different copies of it submitted to multiple sites.
I do a little of both, but then, I enjoy writing and have ADHD which means as soon as I finish writing one, I'm planning, or even already writing, the next one.
Most people just don't want to do that, so I recommend that THEY take a look at SubmitYourArticle.com.
As a member of that website, you can write one article and use their software to create multiple different versions, each of which can be submitted to different websites.
Check it out! If it doesn't sound like anything you're interested in, let it go. However, if you are serious about making money with article marketing, it's the place I recommend.
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