Article Marketing: Pro's and Con's

Article Marketing is when you write an article for public consumption and submit it to the many article directories out there (such as ArticleYou) for other webmasters and bloggers to use free of charge.

The benefit to you is that when the web publishers use your article they keep your author byline intact which should include a link back to your site. Thus building backlinks from not only the sites who use your article but the article directories themselves.

Thats the good part.

The bad part is that despite submitting your article to dozens of sites it may not be included at all. And just because it is included doesn't mean someone will use it on their site.

For instance, one of my article was submitted to half a dozen sites and only showed up on one. It has had 190 views but doesn't seem to show up anywhere on the web, either linking to me or in the search engines without the link.

Maybe I'm just a bad writer. Maybe it was content people really arent interested in. The good side is that the one site where it got listed has a Page Rank of 2.

Here's my Example

Thats just one article though, if I kept up the effort of pushing out articles on a regular basis I believe that it would help my website or blog. More for SEO reasons than for the Traffic.

My other problem is the whole duplication of content. Is it better to keep an article on my site or blog until well after it is indexed in the search engines before submitting to article sites? Or is it better to write something totally original for submission to article directories?

Thats something to think about.