The Shady Side of Article Marketing

There is much talk about the effectiveness of article marketing in getting backlinks to your site, and so on. but I am noticing a trend in my own stats.

Let me put it bluntly: article marketing doesn't work like it used to despite all the pomp and fanfare of those promoting related products.

Now before I gave you the proof I want to give you a little background.

More than a year ago I began using article marketing and had moderate success with it. In fact, it helped me to get decent backlinks to my sites and increase my Adsense income. I know I had backlinks because I use a programs that shows how many backlinks my sites have. In fact, most of these backlinks are still with the sites.

Lately, my submissions seem to go into a deep, dark hole and the expected backlinks do not materialize. I began noticing the trend last summer but did nothing until now.

Today I took three articles I recently submitted to less than five article directories. I logged into one of the directories and found these stats:

Article #1: downloaded 128 times

Article #2: downloaded 148 times

Article #3: downloaded 32 times

However, out of the three articles I have no more than 5 backlinks.

One website was kind enough to publish one of my articles, but separated the resource box from the article with two 3-inch sq. vertical image ads. This webmaster also included a "no follow" tag with the backlink.

This tells me (but I could be wrong) that somebody is downloading my articles but not posting them, or spinning them and then posting, or just enjoy downloading good articles.

My suspicion is many people are downloading and spinning articles and using them as their own.

Perhaps I should just join the band wagon and rewrite other people's articles!

batchos