Arguably one of the simplest and most cost-effective marketing tools available on the internet today is article marketing. Most if not all professional internet marketers have used and continued to use article marketing to promote sites, products, or services, and why not — all it costs is writing and research time.
Another term for article marketing is “bum marketing.” As the name suggests, the marketer bums free advertising by writing articles and gaining exposure for product by publishing the articles throughout the internet. Since there is no up-front cash expense, this process is considered free (or very cheap if you ignore your labor costs), hence the popular term, “bum marketing.” Once the article has been completed, however, how do marketers spread the news and generate interest?
Typically, with article marketing, there are two options for reaching a broad audience. The first involves the marketer publishing the article on as many internet sites as possible. Internet magazines (like this one), blogs, databases, and other free advertising sites would be a great place to start. However, the second option would be to enlist the assistance of an article-posting program like the one listed in the resource box at the end of this article. These programs generally do all of the back-end posting for you, but more importantly, they will publish your article on hundreds of different sites.
The biggest drawback with mass submissions is that it can backfire rather quickly. Most people who have struggled through article marketing understand that the key to a successful article campaign is to have their articles indexed by the big search engines (thereby resulting in free, natural search rankings). However, all of the big engines search the internet regularly and if they find multiple submissions of the same article, they may flag it as the equivalent of SPAM… and all of the work invested in posting the article would have been for nothing.
To avoid this, most submitter programs tackle this problem by switching up paragraphs or substituting words. The best programs like the noted below will actually have the author re-write part or all of the article. Understandably, it is much easier to rewrite an article than to write three completely different articles. When you consider that a typical article will have roughly six paragraphs, these three versions result in 729 unique articles, meaning your article will have to reach the 730th version before any duplication is ever picked up by the search engines. With seven paragraphs, there will be 2,187 unique versions. However, the message itself remains the same, so reader of version 1 will walk away with the same message as a reader of version 576.
If you are looking to increase your exposure through article marketing, look into an article submitter program. Keep in mind that some will cost as much as $200 or more per month, but that the price does not have a linear relationship with quality. The program quoted here runs a lot less on a monthly basis and consistently reaches more than 1,000 directories while maintaining the integrity of the article.
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