Is Article Marketing Dead?

It was a part of any good online marketer’s method of using social media top drive traffic back to a website.

Article Marketing is a way to promote one’s expertise in a niche by first writing an article and posting it to one’s blog, and then creating similar articles on the same subject, written entirely fresh and not duplicating the original article’s purpose and tone.

This is done in a number of ways including doing things such as:

• submitting similar articles to article directories
• Tweeting an article
• Posting to Facebook
• Using other social media bookmarking sites including Squidoo, Digg and Hubpages

There is even a way to do this via using video, but the question becomes is this method of promoting one’s articles through these media channels a dead medium or is this still a practical way to raise one’s authority in a specific niche?

Well…that all depends on who you ask.

opinions vary as to the continued validity of this method of online marketing. One opinion was voiced back in August of 2011.

In an article featured on SEO Moz by Aaron Wheeler points to a video by Rand Fishkin featured on the site for “White Board Friday” that talks about article marketing mostly being a scam…here’s the video below

 

In the video I agree with much of what Rand has to say, because when it comes to using spinning software to just toss that content out of a Yahtzee cup…well that’s not a good practice…but that doesn’t mean that article marketing is a dead tactic.

Someone who I have a lot of respect for is Yaro Starak, and he has an article on his blog Entrepreneur’s Journey titled Is Article Marketing Worth Your Time and in that article Yaro shares some of his results with his audience. Here is one little snippet from the article…

Is Article Marketing Worth The Time?

Yes and no. I don’t feel at this point with only 20 articles published, my on-again, off-again efforts and no testing of an automated system that I can make a conclusive judgement. I like the concept, I think it’s better than link exchanges in some ways because you get one-way links but bad in others because many of the links come from poor quality websites. The potential for a viral explosion makes it very tempting and certainly if you work in mainstream niche industries (is that an oxymoron?) then your results may be fabulous (I’d love to hear about it if you have stories to tell – leave a comment please!).

Something else worth noting is the benefit of appearing as an “expert author” at EzineArticles.com. This is a powerful credibility tool and handy search engine optimization trick.

and that’s Yaro’s take on the matter.

I could look up many more articles that have been written on this topic but I’m not going to bother at this point because in my opinion Article Marketing isn’t dead just yet.

If you really want to understand the power of article marketing and it’s place in web marketing and establishing niche authority than go to Ezine Articles and judge for yourself whether it’s a justified tactic or just something that’s going to be found dead along side of the internet roadways in the very near future.

Personally I would recommend doing article marketing to any client that I have who has a business that’s in a niche that has a bunch of competition. When done the right way (and that means content that takes time to actually create…not spin!) it can be a very effect tool as part of a businesses online marketing campaign.

So what do you think?

Is article marketing dead or is it still a viable business practice?

I’d love to see your comments about this.