Article marketing is a method of advertising that has been around for almost as long as mass print media. The fundamental idea of marketing articles is to advertise a service or product not by crafting a concise advertisement, but by writing a specific, beneficial article that is tangentially connected to the product or service under consideration.

So for example, to advertise marketing the articles, one might write an article about the purpose and history of article marketing. Or, less directly, a marketing article for a company selling flood protection and water damage services might be about historic or recently relevant floods. The idea is that readers attracted to the article by way of interest or a requirement for information will then be informed about the business providing related services or products.

All through history, such articles have shown up in essentially all kinds of printed media: pamphlets, brochures, magazines, and most frequently, news papers. Publishers in need of content are often willing to accept article marketing, which is given to them for free in exchange for the business’ right to publish their contact data alongside the article.

Because the articles are more than mere adverts and actually consist of useful information to entice readers, the publisher benefits from a growing readership, while the article writer gains from expanded awareness of their service or product. It is a proposition that is essentially valuable to all parties engaged.

The advent of the internet revolutionized and widened the use of article marketing. The principle nonetheless stays largely unchanged: publishers - i.e. websites and blogs, as opposed to newspapers and magazines - accept articles from companies looking to indirectly advertise their products as content for their web site. Given that a webpage is relatively cheap, if not entirely free depending on the web space, companies are now also able to support their own publishing efforts. So as an example, a company might have its own blog - or even dozens of blogs - to host the articles pointing towards their website. This is where article marketing starts to intersect with another popular factor of online advertising: search engine optimization.

With search engine optimization, a web site through which a client hopes to sell a product or service hires a company (or someone internally to do it for them) to write articles that are once more tangentially associated to the service or product being offered. The articles are then hosted on numerous blogs or websites. The difference is that in said articles, hyperlinks of key words are placed leading back to the client’s website, and the articles that are composed are rarely, if ever, even read by actual human viewers. As an alternative, when a person searches for the keyword (to reuse the above example: flood protection) in a search engine such as Google, the search engine encounters the hyperlinks with that key word pointing towards that website, and then returns the website in the search at a better ranking, as more appropriate.

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