Why I No Longer Teach Article Marketing In A Vacuum

By Author: Louis Patterson
Total Articles: 41
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A client asked me a few questions today about the last article about content marketing is the new article marketing. In it I might have given the impression that article marketing doesn't work, since I focused on the idea that you need you to do more to get Google rankings than just article marketing. One was he asked if since Google wants content and links, wouldn't article marketing work for both. And the thing is, yes, article marketing will work for both. But the problem is, what Google REALLY wants is good content. Links are only a proxy for assessing good content in an automated way. That has always been Google's aim - to have a search engine that provides great content. They don't want a search engine that has lots of links. But, the founders recognized that in absence of cheating and money, links proxy for good content, because humans react to good content by sharing it, and when content is shared, it usually produces links. So in a closed environment, you can use the number and quality of links to proxy for good content.
However, enter cheating, greed, etc. People discovered that Google uses links to proxy for ...
... good content, so now they can no longer use that as the only proxy - and in fact, it seems, links are becoming less important, especially links from places that obviously are designed for the purpose of "getting links" aka article directories, blog farms, blog networks, anywhere that sells links, and so on. All of that to say - just using articles CAN get it done, if you are willing to write 10, 20 articles a day like I did when I was cutting my teeth in the business.
But 5 years of coaching and teaching them, begging them, yelling at them (not really), scolding them, etc. and hardly anyone is willing to write more than about 1 per week on average. And in a vacuum, meaning, just using articles, one a week won't cut it. Sure, one a week might be fine if you also used your Facebook account and wrote an article there, and you wrote a blog post for a blog in your niche, and you wrote for an industry newspaper site, etc. But most people won't do it.
So, sure, article marketing works. Just as well as it ever did. The top authors of this directory can attest to that. But they are top authors, not people who are only willing to write 1 article a week and cross their fingers. Crossing fingers doesn't a business build.
So I have simply decided that instead of continuing to beat my head against the wall trying to get people to write more articles, I am showing them an easier way to get the same results. And that is by being well rounded. Write articles for your favorite and well-ranked article directory. Write a well-orchestrated Facebook post that leads to your articles. Put articles on your own site. Put blog posts on your own site and tell your friends and Facebook friends and twitter tweeters about it, and write blog posts for other sites, and become a well-respected expert in your niche. For most people that is easier than writing 10 articles a day.
PLUS - and this is the big one. I am a small voice in a big pond. I tell people, use article marketing to get traffic from Google, but do it my way. Then they look for how to do it my way, and they find that it is not easy. They either have to spend hours reading my articles to figure out how to do it (free option) or they have to invest a few hundred bucks to get it all in one place, nice and concise. So they think, OK, well I'll just learn from someone else, I can get a $7 eBook on it somewhere, right? But they don't realize that the person writing the $7 eBook hasn't been responsible for 24,000+ articles, and doesn't really know what it takes, and is, frankly, teaching it wrong. So they learn it wrong. And if you do article marketing wrong these days, you don't get Google traffic. So I have to be very careful with how I recommend article marketing. Therefore, I no longer recommend it in a vacuum.

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