Article Marketing from the Customer's Perspective

This post is directed toward those who write and post articles in the hopes that sites publish them and give them publicity and search engine traffic. If you're writing and posting articles only to game the search engines, this isn't for you.

Last week I went on an intensive search for articles to populate my new site for a vacation rental condo in Maui. Since Maui is a very popular tourist destination, I assumed it would be easy to find some good-quality content about it. In fact, this was a difficult and frustrating search. Here are the pervasive problems I encountered in my hunt as an article marketing customer.

1. Insipid content. Some articles appeared to cover a topic I was looking for, but nearly everything they said about it was silly and uninteresting. For example: "Maui has great places of attraction and people have lots of fun filled activities. This place has got bountiful fun activities for children too. This is a perfect place for people of all sorts of ages. Parents have to inquire about the various activities that are present for the children to enjoy." Gag! Would anyone in their right mind actually want to read something like this?

2. Poor writing. Some articles that had decent content badly needed grammatical editing. If I had a choice, I would select the article that didn't need me to go through it fixing it sentence by sentence. However, I rarely had a choice because of the next issue.

3. Poor topic coverage. I had hoped to find and feature an article on each adventure sport that is prominent on Maui. Nope - many of them were not covered at all, or had just one article that was unsuitable for other reasons. Examples: windsurfing, kayaking and parasailing on Maui.

4. Too short. For my site, articles have to be at least 400 words, and over 500 words is much better. Otherwise the layout will look funny. Occasionally I ran across a very good article that was 350 words. It was going great but quit too soon.

5. No personality. It was a relief to come across articles that read like a real person, not some term-paper machine, wrote them. An article written in first-person ("I") worked well for me, but a third-person style with some pizzazz and spunk in the wording was also welcome (and rare).

6. Stupid resource boxes. By far, this was the biggest flaw in what I found. For example, one very good article on whale watching in Maui had a resource box promoting discount tours in 2010. There was no way to contact the author to request a change in the resource box, so I reluctantly had to eliminate this candidate. What I wanted to see in the resource box was something about the author that would tie into the topic and indicate how they knew about the topic they were writing on, along with their link. This was extremely rare in my search.

Of the 15 or so articles I published on my site, I ended up using a few that were on the topics I wanted but guilty of problems #1, 2 or 5. When I have time I will replace these with my own articles.

So there you have it - insights on what one genuine article marketing customer was looking for and what I found. Is that helpful to any of you?

Marcia Yudkin