My name is Donovan Baldwin and I have been successfully using article marketing for years. In fact, I presently have over 400 articles at EzineArticles.com alone and hundreds more on other websites.
When I first started writing and publishing articles online, article marketing was easy and effective. You wrote an article, put it on an article directory website, added an "about the author" section with a few links to your website, and you were in business!
It was a successful tactic. With the right article and website, you could actually watch sales go up and up!
It didn't take me, and other people, long to figure out that putting more articles out there produced more traffic and/or sales.
The problem was that most people, me included, did not want to sit around writing new articles all the time and so we adopted another tactic.
We put the same article on lots of different websites.
You know what?
It worked!
For a few years, at least.
However, the code makers over at Google eventually figured out this little article marketing trick and came up with some tricks of their own. They taught their search engine spider to identify duplicate content on multiple sights and...Voila!...the concept of "content spam" was born.
Spam is sometimes viewed as putting out a bunch of duplicate stuff to a bunch of different people in hopes of getting some sort of return.
Although the content of many of the duplicate articles might have been of great value to all the visitors to all the sites, the concept of content spam was still viable, unfortunately since a great many people posted relatively worthless articles on huge numbers of sites in hopes of getting a lot of backlinks, visitors, and sales.
Just like many other things in life, it's the actions of that wild bunch that led us to the point where duplicate content, although content is still king, became spam.
Search engines take spam, even content spam, pretty seriously. They take it so seriously, in fact, that not only do they often ignore multiple backlinks from the same article and give only credit for one backlink, but will even penalize, or even remove, a website which might have shown up in their search returns.
Again, just like with so many other things, when the search engines started actually penalizing websites for duplicate content, the article marketers fired back with various techinques. One of the most popular of these was the "Article Spinner".
An article spinner essentially takes an original article and creates multiple versions. Spinners range from pretty good to pretty bad. Some are free and some cost money.
The problem is that many times the resulting articles, while of some interest to search engine spiders, turn out to be anything from sounding stupid to being pretty much incomprehensible.
In the good ol' days many of us liked to use an article submission service. These services would take your article and shoot it out to multiple article directories. There was even article submission software which you could download to your computer and by-pass the article submission service.
However, you still had the "content spam" ax hanging over your head. Here and there, a service had a better than average method, and the one I used for many years, was SubmitYourArticle.com which had software for creating pretty decent alternate versions of each article.
I have no real problem with their service, I just dropped back on my Internet marketing efforts and didn't want to pay a monthly fee to stay with them, even if they had a good article submission service and their way of avoiding duplicate content was pretty good.
So, we are back to the point in the article marketing world where it seems the best thing you can do is post one article on one website and go back and do it again.
Getting enough valuable oooomph out of your article marketing activities seems to mean hours of creating and posting original content...lots of original content. Very time consuming, very boring, and, due to those constraints, usually very UN-rewarding.
So, what are your options if you don't want to write and post hundreds of individual articles?
Well, there are actually only a few options.
You CAN write an article and then rewrite it for each posting. Re-writing an article allows you to get several relatively original articles out of one. This is less time consuming than specifically writing a new article each time, and I often use it to create "original" content for my own blog or website.
This is still a little time consuming but this often produces better results than most article spinning software. Again, if you have your own website or blog, one way to get more mileage out of a single article is to write an overview of the information on that blog or website and link it to the actual article.
You can also hire someone to write original articles for you or use "Private Label Rights" articles. However, this is expensive, often the articles are of poor quality, and sometimes you are sold duplicate content.
It is a good idea to ALWAYS re-write ANY article you buy from someone else! It's like you tell your kids, "Don't play with that! You don't know where it's been!"...or going to be, when it comes to purchased content.
There are a few good article writing products out there which are relatively cheap and which can help you avoid "content spam" punishment.
One of these is Magic Article Rewriter. With this product, which costs about as much as two months membership at a site like SubmitYourArticle.com, you can rewrite any article quickly and easily and create thousands of unique, well-written articles in minutes.
You can also find more article writing products at http://website-home.ws/directory/business-and-money/e-business-and-e-marketing.html#articlemarketing.
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