Article marketing can really be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. Most people get better at it as they go and settle on a style and voice that fits them. It’s really not that bad once you set your mind to it and get your feet wet.

The hardest part of all, I think, is staying current on what the search engines are looking for – they change the rules so often. That not only applies to articles but all content – blog posts, sales pages, squeeze pages, text ads, PPC, etc.

Oh well, it’s just the nature of the beast, I suppose. The only constant in business is that everything changes, all the time. lol

Mike

I appreciate your in-depth comments. I was in no way trying to provide a complete textbook on article marketing, but to give people a way to think about the process that is simple and not overwhelming.

Best,
Ellen

As a professional article marketer (I ghostwrite for others), this is a good starting point for people just entering the field. It should get the creative juices flowing nicely, but it only touches the surface of this marketing process.

Sorry to hear of Bruce’s tribulations, but alas, it’s a common tale. My main advice to him would be, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

I have written in the employ of two of the largest article distribution services on the Internet as their preferred writer of choice: Article Marketer and Content Crooner. I still guest blog on CC time to time. I have learned quite a bit about article marketing over the last 5-6 years as a result of that experience.

While article marketing is not rocket science, is it also not an effortless, get-results-quick endeavor. As the old saying goes, “the only place you find success before work is in the dictionary.”

Article marketing is a long-term marketing process, not a “publish a few articles,” proposition to see meaningful results. Chris Knight, owner of EzineArticles estimates that you need at least 250 unique articles/per site promoted, published across the Internet to sustain long-term benefits from article marketing.

That’s no small undertaking for many people. It requires either a lot of personal effort on the part of the marketer or substantial money to outsource the work to achieve that goal. To that end, you get what you pay for and good writers are not cheap.

My team of writers, editors and myself have produced thousands of articles over the years. I feel that qualifies me as an expert of sorts in the field to share my observations here.

Well researched and carefully crafted content, optimized for the search engines, takes skill and time to produce. I scoff at the notion of those “8-minute articles” you hear about and discount them as sub-standard before even reading them. It takes between 1-2 hours to write a conversational, well thought out piece of truly informative content.

You likely will not get that from $2-3/article guys (and probably not from many $10-15/article writers). You may, in fact, do more harm to your brand by marketing with such content, but I obviously hold a certain bias on that subject.

Then comes the matter of relevance. As the Internet and search engines evolve, this is increasingly important. Keywords must not only allow searchers to find your article, but to rank high in searches, landing page pointed to in the resource box must be rich in the same keywords.

This has become critical in this past year alone and made it very important to write optimized content for the specific pages you target for traffic. This is even more import when you target “deep pages” on a site. I don’t make the rules, you’ll have to talk to “the Googles” about that.

In a nutshell, article marketing is still one of the best, most stable marketing assets in the toolbox. It just requires consistency and well thought out campaigns to get the biggest bang for your efforts.

The days of Travis Sego’s “Bum Marketing” with a handful of articles is a thing of the past. With tens of thousand new pieces of content published daily across the Web, if your content is not remarkable somehow, it will simply be lost in the crowd.

Regards,

Mike