Does Article Marketing Still Work?

Would WriterBeat be an example of a place from where my articles would possibly get picked up by site owners?

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it sounds like you're still talking about creating a ton of content and dumping it anywhere that will take it.

Since the Google menagerie laid waste to that approach, you're much better off creating a lesser amount of higher quality content and then focusing on getting it seen.

You may still want to outsource the content, depending on your skills and preferences (and budget), but the emphasis should be on quality.

You should be spending 60-80% of your time finding ways to piggyback on someone else's audience - real humans who might be interested, not spiders, crawlers or bots.

You want people who already connect with the people you want to share, link to, and republish your content.

And before someone whips out that old "duplicate content" nonsense, even Cutts has drawn a line between properly curated syndicated content and spray and pray link spamming. It's a total non-issue for email newsletters, ezine and even print publications (which are relying more and more on content found online, often with a little help from the creator).

Good question - and perhaps not easily answerable. I'm in 9 completely different, unrelated niches and it's worked in all of them. (I also know someone who's been using article marketing for 16 years, has I think about 40-50 different niches, and has always used it in all of them.)

However, it could be argued that that proves little, because I do select my niches partly in accordance with my estimation of whether there are places in which I can reasonably easily get articles published. (But then again, if there weren't, at all, there also probably wouldn't be much of a market anyway? ).

Online article marketing is only an internet variant of a time-honored and very productive promotional method. Article marketing has existed for (at least) decades - some would say "centuries"! - before "Al Gore invented the internet", and there's no reason in principle why it shouldn't work in any niche in which people read "information".

That said, I've seen people saying that it may not work as well for directly IM-related niches. (I have no experience of any, so I can't comment, other than to say that I do know a couple of people using it successfully in IM-related niches, but still, there could be something in the view that it's "less easy" in those areas? ).

I also wonder whether, possibly, it might be more limited in one or two highly "graphical"/"pictorial" areas such as some "fine arts niches", maybe some "photography" niches and so on, in which lots of images would be expected with the articles, which might throw up some inconveniences regarding copyrights/sourcing/licenses and so on? Not sure about this.

A subjective viewpoint, perhaps, but there's never been a niche I've wanted to try for which I've thought it might not work at all.

Personally, I think "enthusiasts' niches" are more profitable in the long-term than "problem-solving niches", overall. But that has nothing to do with article marketing, really?

I think it's more or less a "constant factor" regardless of what kind of traffic-generation methods are used.

I know a lot of "affiliate marketing guidebooks" tell you to "find something that solves people's problems and sell it to them". It seems to me, though, that they haven't quite thought it through.

When you're an affiliate marketer, once you've built your subscriber-list, established your credibility, formed your subscriber-relationships, and all the other basic, essential things you need to do to make affiliate marketing worthwhile, you're then going to promote your first product to each subscriber, according to the number of days for which s/he's been a subscriber and autoresponder emails s/he's already received from you (assuming that you have the sense to wait until then, and not lose most of the potential customers by promoting too early, as many people do!). A proportion of them will buy it.

At this stage, "in problem-solving niches", looking at it in very simple terms only, one of two things happens.

Either they like it, they think it's great and it solves their problem (the result is that you can't sell them anything else because they don't need to buy anything else, so you've just lost most of your potential future income) ...

Or they don't like it, they don't think it's great and it doesn't really solve their problem, (the result is that you can't sell them anything else because you recommended a bad product, from their perspective, and blew your credibility, and they don't trust you any more).

In "enthusiasts' niches", people gradually buy more and more and more, to feed their enthusiasm, so you don't have that problem to anything like the same extent. (Having bought things from this summer's Louboutin collection won't stop me from buying more things from their 2014/5 winter collection.)

Be aware that for successful affiliate marketers, most of the long-term money comes from making repeated sales to the same captive audience (your subscribers - that's why listbuilding is so important!). That's why "enthusiasts' niches" are better than "problem-solving niches".

TL;DR version - once you solve someone's problem, they may not still be a customer at all; and once you fail to solve it, they may not be your customer.

Note: this is an over-simplified perspective and explanation. Of course there are some exceptions. And I've edited my reply since your questions had changed since I originally posted this!


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The "article marketing" business model is extremely powerful, and actually it is being used quite successfully in IM niches for generating prospects. However, IMO it is perhaps among the least profitable niches of all particularly for beginners. The apparent reason is it intrinsically attracts people who are generally flat broke or have very little discretionary income to spend.

If one has the patience to carry dead weight on prospect lists for months (or years), can stomach the absurdity of hype required in promotions, and deal with complainers and whiners, then the IM niche can be very profitable indeed. But, it's just not for me.

Rather than chasing after niches, what I've always done was to develop an "affinity" with targeted demographics who were most likely to purchase my affiliate products. How I positioned my approach was as a trusted guide, or "concierge" - providing educational information with authoritative references leading to best options. This was never an "enthusiast" nor "problem-solving" focus.

For example, I had nearly a 14-year run in the "Mayan prophecy" controversy which attracted a wide swath of prospects from nearly every socio-economic demographic imaginable. Articles citing authoritative scientific sources led to massive mailing lists from which I would "recommend" further reading from books on Amazon debunking all that silliness. (As it turned out, I was right all along)

Subsequent marketing promotions through list segmentation and scaled up article syndication resulted in promotions and cross-sales within dozens of different and totally disparate niches. Using an "affinity" approach to targeted audiences effectively leaves options open for marketing in not only additional niches but often for much higher-end products.

The ultimate in article marketing is to build your own brand - sell yourself - not any specific product. Use articles to warm your reading audience up with great content that they value and respect. Get articles published in online/offline outlets that are already targeting your prospects. And always build lists of visitors to your site. That is the simple system I used to become my Competitors' Nightmare.

The method I used is very similar to an excellent detailed resource which I often recommend: "Turn Words Into Traffic", by Jim and Dallas Edwards (now available on Amazon)

The more I discover your posts, the more I get enlightened.

Just like this point on the "problem-solving" hype. I hate to admit it again, but you're right. It indeed becomes clear to me that of course, if you've already solved a problem, then you must be a god to have people coming back for something else--but what is it?

I haven't though about "enthusiast niches vs. problem-solving niches" and "obsessed buyers vs desperate buyers" like that. And it's true that a lot of affiliate marketing guidebooks and courses preach that we should look for "problem-solving niches" and "desperate buyers".

Sometimes I think it's weird to chance upon these kinds of information for free and understand them more clearly than those presented in guidebooks and courses, which aren't free!

Thank you, Alexa and John, for what you do.