Article Marketing Campaign - Who uses them, Who doesn’t? Why or Why not?

[marker-311528]

Im just curious to see if Article Marketing is still a common practice amongst SEOers? If you don’t use it, please explain why. If you still use Article Marketing any best practices would be much appreciated!

[malachiii]

Article marketing can be a great tool for SEO and general Lead Gen if you are in the correct environment.  We do quite a bit of Article marketing in the telecom (b2b) industry.  By promoting thought stewardship and branding through articles (both online and print) we associate ourselves as experts to decision makers in a longer sales cycle process.  You're also generating quality content that is inherent to the direction google is headed.  Some issues with articles include dupe content if you host your articles on multiple sites etc.

message me offline and I can go into further detail with you.

[marker-311528]

Malachi, thanks for the in site, I will message you once I get a free second.

[EGOL]

We do not use it.

We believe that it feeds existing competitors and creates new ones.  Giving another site an article about your industry niche puts them into your SERPs.

[KeriMorgret]

For a less-than-favorable view of many types of Article Marketing, view the recent Whiteboard Friday that Rand did at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/article-marketing-mostly-a-scam-whiteboard-friday about this topic. There are 209 comments on the post. Reading those should give you a good idea of the community's opinion about this.

[malachiii]

I can understand the competitor issue, but aricles and whitepapers can offer legit backlinking from news sources, etc. could be very beneficial

[EGOL]

Let's say I have a big PR7 website that is trusted and authoritative.  Your site is rather new, not very strong.

You offer twenty articles on keywords related to your business.  I grab them and put them on my site.  You get twenty links from a single domain.  I get my site into the short and long tail SERPs for twenty articles.  Maybe it ranks above yours?  Could be, yes?

Maybe I make a category page for your root keyword and link it to those twenty articles.  Now I am in your root, short and long tail SERPs.

You just lost a pile of money - every day - from this day forward - forever.  Was that worth 20 links from a single domain?

I really enjoy making money on this new subject so I buy one of the sites in your niche and power it with fifty links from my own site.  In the army they call this... "calling in fire on your own position".

[malachiii]

I understand and see your point on 50 articles to a single domain.  We create blog content 3 x a week on our own domain and from that once a month create an article that is generally hosted on one of 3-4 industry news sites.  I think outsourcing "article marketing" to a 3rd party could be devastating, but if you're creating fresh, unique content that offers real value from a branding perspective having that content hosted on a website that has 1m+ uniques per month versus 30k uniques per month will have a bigger impact on ROI.

I suppose my biggest mistake was leaving out clarification of oursourcing to a 3rd party and the type of content being created vs where its being hosted.

[chronicle]

I say YES to article marketing.  I write articles for my business and then I submit them to third party article submission sites.  I notice immediate impact on my rankings for my targeted keywords.

[KeriMorgret]

Thanks for adding your comment. I'm curious, is this for the research chemicals site in your profile, or a different site? For the research chemicals it looks like you're targeting "buy (brand name ED medicine)", which has a bit of a different competition landscape than many peoples' sites.