Let Me get this straight (Articles are really a waste of time now)?

No they are not a waste of time one bit. This information floating around is from newbies who claim they are gurus after reading an article by another guru saying articles are pointless.

What would the web be without content and articles?

-Owen

Articles are not a waste of time - far from it. It seems apparent that article syndication is going to make a comeback now.

Post your articles on your site. Make sure they really offer some value, not just fluff that points to some "real" answer that your readers have to pay for. Submit them to article directories for the purpose of syndication - being picked up and put right in front of your target audience by other webmasters and ezine publishers.

I am just starting in this area, and I *nearly* made the success-crushing mistake of starting a whole mass-spinning-article-backlinks debacle. With only a couple of articles on my site and those same two out there on directories, the time my visitors have spent on my site is over EIGHT minutes. That's because they felt my articles were worth reading and they hung around on my site. Isn't that the whole idea??

Obviously, I need to kick myself into gear and continue putting more articles like this on my site and out for syndication. However, this brief bit of evidence confirms that I am on the right path. As one wise article marketer here on the forum has already said today, I just have to "keep on walking".

If you open your mind to the concept of article syndication marketing, you can surely make those articles and future ones part of an entirely different foundation to your business. Best wishes!

Article writing and syndication is a very effective way of creating long-term backlinks that will help your blog/website increase it's position in google's rankings.

I see it in action everyday. Can you write a couple of articles and expect immediate or overwhelming results? No. Article marketing works best when it is practiced religiously over time.

Much Success,

KateD

I know that this is a bit confusing but article marketing is not dead. What has happened from my understanding is that certain article directories have lost some placement due to being so called content farms.

Read this searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173

and ezine articles has put this out.

blog.ezinearticles.com/2011/02/search-engine-algorithm-changes.html

I can not post links so you will have to copy and paste these.

I understand your concern, but you need to look at article marketing from a broader standpoint. Go find the recent post about article marketing by Dr. Mani, read it, don't skim it.

I do have one question for you. If you could spend all week researching and writing 1 article. Yes, an entire week. Then you could have it published as a featured article on Oprah's website, with a link back to your own site, would it be worth it?

(No, I have not accomplished that, YET!)

Article writing and marketing evolves, it never dies. This is the internet and an article is the most basic form of publishing information - which is what everybody wants.

If you're going to post articles on the directories and syndication websites, there's so much there that it's much harder to attract good publicity.

I think if you want to publish really good content, publish it to your own blog and build a following with social media. Those kinds of articles are worth spending an entire day or two on because you'll get bookmarked, tweeted, etc and your OWN site will rank better in the SE's instead of the page on EzineArticles.com, for example.

Distributing articles for syndication is a good way to build backlinks and get your name out there a little bit, but the returns for that approach have diminished. It can still happen it just takes more work - which is what most article marketers are looking to avoid right?

I would recommend a great course by a well known warrior member - Gogetta - He has a course called article blitz - super cool course

Unique articles will never die. If you spin all the garbage that google hates, then yeah that way is over, (thank god). If you build a quality site with unique content, google will love you.

Why in the world would article marketing not work? It still works. Just that, with a lot of people jumping on the board the obvious mainstreams have become more competitve than earlier on an average.

But nothing's changed otherwise. Write a good article, that will still get accepted/syndicated. Write an actionable article of high quality and send visitors, and it will still convert like always. Write a good article with acceptance/syndication, and it will still pull you backlinks.

Every other day I keep reading, something or the other is dead. Yes, things do die, but the basics never die. Article marketing as an art is a basic foundation of marketing. It's alive and kicking.

I agree, articles are still a good idea, just be sure to provide valuable content in your articles. If you provide good content people will want to read more articles from you, this will help build your reputation online.

There are two type you can use articles one is just for information passing or write a killer article to get traffic,Web is rolling with articles.

Right now the only thing that has truly happened is a purging of low quality content which is great news.

If you focus on creating high quality articles offering exceptional value you will find that your ROI will be much better.

Also, don't view article marketing as simply writing and submitting articles to just directories. Morph your content into various other mediums (as a Yahoo Answer, as a YouTube Video, as a PDF on Scribe, as a posting on your Facebook fanpage...etc).

The synergy created from those mediums will also dramatically increase your ROI.

Respectfully,
Tim

Article marketing is not a waste of your time... cutting corners, spinning, and scraping and calling it "article marketing" is a waste of your time (and was before Big G changed up its algorithm, but even more so now)

If you're publishing quality content with quality information, article marketing is a very good way to drive traffic to your site and establish yourself as an expert in your niche. Like anything else, when it comes to article marketing, you have to keep up with the times and evolve with it. Otherwise, you'll get left behind.

I just published an article on my own site about this very topic that may help you out:
"Google’s Big Algorithm Change – How It’s Changing Your Article Marketing Strategy"

No the bar has just been raised in terms of quality.

Detectable spun articles, dupe content, shorter articles and generally poorly written articles will produce much worse results than previously, and are a lot less likely to be accepted.

The rewards will still be there if you can put out higher quality articles, and higher quality article producers should be more rewarded from here on out.

Before 2005, article marketing was about writing articles that helped people answer questions and solve problems, then submitting them to publishers who had an audience for consideration of publication.

In 2005, someone proclaimed article marketing works and the quality of content does not matter. He said that so long as you get a link back to your website, in order to make your website better ranked in Google, then that was all that mattered.

Last week, the 2005 version of article marketing was crippled, hopefully condemning it to enter the dust bin of history for ever more.

I love that people think article marketing is dead

Articles are not a waste of time and the web will always be content driven. This is just another one of the changes that internet marketers will have to adjust to. My traffic is still about the same from my articles, so it cannot be that big of a deal. The biggest thing is that if you are putting out crap, then it will affect you. However, if you are writing quality articles you will be just fine.

Benjamin Ehinger

Written an Article is not a waste of time at all, because that's how you get a lot visitor to come to your website..whoever told you that Article marketing is dead tell them that "BS"

I can explain the importance of article writing with an example. I wrote an article for a client of mine and published it on EZA, after the changes in google algorithm, and to my surprise the article is ranked first in google! For the past 4 days it has been saying a 40%+ click rate. Which means that an article written well and posted in the right directory, is one of the best sources of traffic for your business.

Articles are better than ever - just as long as they are unique and aren't duplicated from anywhere/to anywhere else on the web. When I'm building links I write one article a day and put it either on the site or externally and link back - that's 30 articles per month... this would cost you a lot to outsource so spend 10 mins a day doing it yourself and save loads!

Hi

Article writing as has already been stated is by no means a waste of time, and will always be effective especially for the purposes of backlinks. The argument revolves around quality and value. Those articles considered low quality and not providing any real value have undoubtedly dropped in the rankings. As have so called "Content Farms". Look at the top 25 biggest losers, what does that tell you?

# Domain Change SISTRIX (before) SISTRIX (after) # KWs (before) # KWs (after)
1 wisegeek.com -77% 121,58 28,22 74.024 21.940
2 ezinearticles.com -90% 65,08 6,65 184.508 54.277
3 suite101.com -94% 54,04 3,28 178.373 36.904
4 hubpages.com -87% 55,16 7,40 152.998 50.178
5 buzzle.com -85% 43,25 6,55 86.472 24.423
6 associatedcontent.com -93% 38,29 2,57 216.429 53.512
7 freedownloadscenter.com -90% 30,26 3,01 42.486 7.992
8 essortment.com -91% 25,73 2,32 27.501 7.459
9 fixya.com -80% 28,78 5,83 62.034 36.167
10 americantowns.com -91% 24,88 2,18 26.000 9.799
11 lovetoknow.com -83% 25,75 4,28 49.544 17.833
12 articlesbase.com -94% 19,96 1,16 82.274 31.365
13 howtodothings.com -84% 21,20 3,39 33.222 7.601
14 mahalo.com -84% 20,49 3,23 33.875 9.740
15 business.com -93% 17,24 1,13 21.556 4.813
16 doityourself.com -77% 20,89 4,90 23.256 6.870
17 merchantcircle.com -85% 18,43 2,67 93.347 34.681
18 thefind.com -83% 18,95 3,27 74.506 45.495
19 findarticles.com -90% 16,98 1,74 64.810 20.189
20 faqs.org -91% 16,52 1,46 33.648 11.142
21 tradekey.com -89% 16,83 1,79 37.364 16.268
22 answerbag.com -91% 12,93 1,11 67.314 26.054
23 trails.com -87% 12,05 1,62 38.346 8.511
24 examiner.com -79% 10,54 2,19 70.781 31.272
25 allbusiness.com -88% 8,86 1,08 16.457 6.034

Write quality unique content and you will not have a problem. If you can't outsource it the cost is minimal, don't bother with copied content. Whilst there is no penalty for copied content as such, the originator will be given priority in search results.

Regards
CD

Writing articles is incredibly time consuming, there is no doubt about it. Writing articles alone, you'll be hardpressed to see any show stopping results. However, if you spin your articles into other forms of media, such as blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc., your marketing efforts will be quite a bit more potent.

Articles = content. How can writing content be a waste of time?

Make it good, stick it on YOUR site (why build someone else's business?) and you'll do fine.

Oh and there's more to the internet than Google.

people come in here ever 2 days and say article market is dead.

LOL

one day you will be right, but that will be in the year 2145 or something... so good luck to you on that one

I don't think it is a waste of time but it is if you don't know how the heck to do it!