Article Marketing Will Die Without A Revolution!!

Article Marketing has treated me very well in my IM career. It has enabled me to make affiliate sales on keywords where my sites could not rank. A keyword-rich article in a buyer's niche on EZA has returned awesome results for me. The best thing it has helped me do is list-building.

The advantage is the low cost. The disadvantage is ranking for a high-competition keyword is tough and the results dribble in. The list builds slowly and sales come in slowly but with no overhead (like costs for PPC.)

But if it wasn't for my lists, I would have no relationships. And only 1 out of every 3 emails I send contains an offer, or my readers revolt. That's not a relationship in the sense that I want to create one. I want them to WANT offers from me because they value my opinion.

The current state of Article Marketing is somewhat grim. Too many publishers are pushing out low-value content because they get it cheaply. This is beginning to drive users to blogs in the niche they are researching, and steering Google in that direction as well. Blogs about a particular niche generally have shown more value. After all Google will pick a linked post on a blog before an EZA article for the same keyword. Users are starting to get that.

Article Marketers should consider a few big changes:

1) Find a knowledgeable person in your niche and hire them to write for you on a per article basis. If they aren't a writer, then hold interviews with them to get the high-value nuggets and write it yourself. Be willing to pay for high-value information, not speed or word-count.

2) Change the venue where you publish. Everyone knows to diversify your publishing locations, but seek out opportunities that go beyond good placement in the search engine. Find the blogs in your niche and ask if you can write a guest post. Make sure it is a GREAT piece. (oh, and have a sample ready.)

3) Use community publishers that build relationships with mainstream media outlets. I created one to solve this problem for myself (link in my signature). The purpose of a community publisher is that the aggregated quality contributions of the community attract mainstream media outlets as they scan the web for related content. This also gives you more flexibility on your writing style, making it easier to add high-value content (including images or videos) and attract readers and links. Add in the ability to easily socialize that content and the results grow with time, as opposed to being at the mercy of search forever.

My belief is that Article Marketing is morphing into a process that requires socialization to survive. As people move to a "recommendations-based surfing" mentality and less a "Google-everything" mentality, your articles need to be positioned on the cutting edge.

Are you prepared?