Article Marketing -- Conspiracy or Legit?

I should warn you that what you're about to read might be very controversial for some of you. Afterall, many of you have been taught the opposite, and many big name internet marketers are more than happy to convince you that what you know is indeed a fact. I want to encourage you to read what I have to say here with an open mind and a little bit of logic and reasoning.

If you've been doing online marketing for more than a day, you've probably heard about article marketing (writing articles to submit to article directories in hopes of getting some traffic, links, and the article itself ranked well in the search engines). There are tons of guides out there on it, as well as several gurus swearing by their success.

Some entire internet marketing techniques (even some very popular ones) are based solely on article marketing.

There are TONS of PLR membership sites that hand out articles, thousands of writers willing to ghost write articles for you, etc.. Clearly article marketing is here to stay, and there are a lot of people who might not like what I'm about to say due to them making money on what's widely believed.

If you ask a real SEO expert about article marketing, you'll find that many of them don't like it too much. Sure, you CAN get some links, even some traffic from it, but you're always trying to get readers of that article to go to your site (so you can make a sale, get a subscriber to your mailing list, or do whatever you want to do with the visitors to your site).

Here's a thought -- instead of focusing so much on article marketing and submitting those articles to tons of article directories, why not ONLY write those articles for your own website?

Instead of being happy with 5% of your article readers visiting your site, you can get 100% of them.

Oh but wait! You might say that submitting your articles to directories gets them ranked better. This is sometimes true, but it's almost always a short term gain. This is because the search engines visit such directories a lot more and are able to crawl them faster. If you're a bit patient, you can still get ranked very well (if not the same or better) if you target the right keywords and can be a bit patient. The long term gain can be quite substantial -- it's not even funny how big of a difference you might see.

If you bring this up in any forum, a lot of people will lash out at you for even suggesting this, as too many people have their hands deeped in profits by selling guides or services that revolve around article marketing. Go ahead, try it and see what happens. :)

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that article marketing has no benefits or that you should never do it. If you want to get a site indexed fast, submitting one or two articles with a link can surely help speed things up. With some short term marketing strategies, it can even be beneficial to take advantage of the temporary search engine hike.

Putting up articles on directories is also far easier for some people who don't even have a website or blog (although seriously -- if that's you, you need to learn to make one -- it's really quite easy once you get the hang of it), so it might be a good solution for you.

If you need to, sure, you can rewrite your own site's articles for directories, but why not spend that time providing more content for your own site.

Here are a few advantages of writing articles mainly just for your own site:

• You add more and more content exclusive to your site.
• 100% of the readers end up at your site, instead of 5% to 10% clicking through to it.
• You can advertise whatever you want on it -- have affiliate links, banner ads, etc..
• Over time, you'll be able to hold search engine rankings better.
• You have complete control over it!

If you really are set on article marketing, I'll suggest you do something VERY easy that can often bring in far more traffic (and better links) than article directories: Submit one or two exclusive articles to targeted sites and tell them that they can use it anyway they want, as long as you get a simple link back. About.com is a good place to look for relevant niches that might want to show your articles. This works better than most people might think. I've gotten thousands of visitors in the past (and even to this day) from ten to fifteen minutes of work I put into writing one article.

And if you still want to do article marketing, I'm NOT suggesting that you completely stop. There are still some nice benefits to doing it. I'm merely suggesting that you focus more on your own sites/blogs with those articles.

If you don't believe me, look at many of the big name internet marketers out or big name websites out there and see how often they distribute articles to directories. If some of them promote it so much, surely they should have hundreds to thousands of articles in the directories by now, right?!?!

Any comments are always welcome!