Article Marketing Myths And Facts

Everyone has heard of article marketing, and so many people define it in so many different ways that it has become hard for people new to article marketing to understand.

First of all, most of the SEO Gurus caught on to article marketing late in the game, then scrambled to create their definitions of it at the last minute, so it didn’t appear they were ever unaware of the power of article marketing.

In general, article marketing is where you write an article on a topic related to your website. Not a promotional article for your website, but an article about something informative to the reader. You use keywords and phrases that relate to your topic in the article, much like you would optimize a webpage. Your article, when reprinted, will be the text of a webpage or webpages.

The author bio section at the bottom contains some info about you and links to your website. It is suggested that you put in one link to your main page and one to an interior page that fits the article you are writing.

Suppose your article is submitted to websites that take article submissions and offers free content to web admins. In that case, web admins choose to repost your article on their websites; the links in the author bio section become links from their websites to your website.

Now let's go on to the myths and facts about article marketing.

MYTH: Article marketing doesn’t help you all that much.

FACT: Article Marketing can help you increase your link popularity and be a source of some of the most targeted traffic you can get.

MYTH: Reprinted Articles only get indexed as additional pages. Therefore, it doesn’t help enough to make it worthwhile.

FACT: Depending on where the article is submitted, the writing can reach a top 10 listing in major search engines and not as a supplemental page.

MYTH: Submitting your article everywhere creates duplicate content, and the search engines will punish or discount those pages.

FACT: If search engines punish duplicate content as the myth suggests, then all RSS feeds that cause a blog post to be reproduced are discounted or published, and they are not. The New York Times articles and CNN stuff is blasted all over the web and are not punished or ignored.

Duplicate content is two web pages that are around 70% similar, not two web pages that have similar text on them.

MYTH: The only way article marketing works is by writing an article and then submitting it to thousands of article submission websites.

FACT: There is more than one way to make article marketing work for you. The way mentioned above works okay if you are looking to get a lot of links back to your website, whether they are related or not, and can be effective if you currently have very little or no link popularity.

Another way is to hand submit your article to article submission websites that only accept articles related to your topic. This is more difficult, but the links help you more just through the submissions, and it’s more likely that the websites that pick up and repost your article will also be related to your topic, which can help you with better links and targeted traffic.

Yet another way is to write a high-quality article that you take your time on and research. You then choose a very high-traffic website related to your topic. One that has great PR and a lot of visitors.

Email them your article and offer them an exclusive if they will print your article with your links included in the bio. If your paper is of good quality and they get a whole, you have a good chance they will post your article there.

This one posting of your article can be more potent than the mass submitted article method if you choose the website you offer it to carefully.

Last but not least, posting your article exclusively on your website is a great way to add fresh content. If the article is good, people will link directly to the report, increasing traffic and PR for your webpage where you posted the article. But for this to work, you need to have already some traffic to work with.

MYTH: You should always post your article on your website first, then wait to get crawled by the search engines before submitting the report elsewhere.

FACT: Adding articles to your website is called adding content. Submitting those articles to other websites is called article marketing. With article marketing, you don’t want the article indexed on your website first.

Yes, you read that right. You do not want the article indexed on your website first. You are or should already be doing SEO on your website and adding fresh content to your website for the search engines to get traffic from them.

Submitting articles to other websites and having search engines find them first gives another gateway through which people can find your website.

If the websites you submitted your articles to get crawled often, then having your article appear there with the links intact will also get your website crawled.

If the websites you submitted your article to are getting indexed well by the search engines, then your article being found on their website first might get it in the top 10 results.

Placing it on your website with no or low PR might not have gotten the article indexed.

I hope this article will clear up some of the myths about article marketing and that it has helped you understand how and why it works.