Tech and Trends:- Is article marketing as powerful as it used to be? It used to be decision maker when it came to who was top of the Google rankings, but not now. Now, article marketing is all part of a bigger concept which is known as ‘content marketing’. A few years ago, around about 2006, you could completely dominate in your niche by submitting your articles across websites like ezinearticles.com. Just by providing backlinks, you could give Google all the ammo it needed to put you right to the top of the table. For SEO services, it was all about volume then, sheer mass of quantity.
Now, Google and the other search engines look for quality. With so much protection now against spamming and spinning software, as well as copy and paste content, it’s extremely hard to just create a series of random articles and hope it propels you to the top of your niche.
Now, with the results-driven side of things over with and more people turning towards less keyword heavy, but content driven articles, the marketplace is much fairer. What the search engines look for now is unique, original content. Before, one article could be given in to all of the big directories like Hubpages, Squidoo, EzineArticles, Isnare etc. Now, you need a fresh re-write of the article for every single page.
Content marketing is even more important now than it used to be. It used to be the only way to really improve your ratings beyond a certain point, but now the content marketing business has expanded beyond belief. The smart article writers created a business practice which involved having to do a lot more work, but they built a business around the right style of article writing. To do this, they just provided unique content on every single subject asked, so even writing three articles one after the other all saying the same thing, but in a different way.
Not only does this stop spam and stops somebody from monopolizing with easy backlinks, it also created a wealth of new employment opportunities for freelancers online. Whereas before the article did not need to have a specific point to it – it was just there to provide a link back to the website, now the content has to be good. Now, companies want content which pre-sells customers, or provides quality information or a good way to talk them up. It has to relate to the type of website that it is printed on, and this is all part of content management.
SEO WebPages, where your home pages are optimised to fit your necessary keywords, blog posts to pre-sell your content, everything all comes under the one banner. So whereas before shoddy articles could still bring you traffic, now a poorly written article will get you no new customers, and could even lose you customers.
So content marketing is a much more in-depth and much more of a risk than article marketing. No longer can you have a half-legible article full of affiliate links and stuffed with keywords just to bring traffic. Now you need well written, actionable content. So although the risk is much higher in that you can hurt your ratings with poor content, good content is so richly rewarded it certainly makes a difference.
