Content is king! Article marketing is the way to go! These phrases and more can be found on every marketing forum, website, in every advertising ebook and report on the web today. Internet gurus proclaim that you can get millions of visitors – targeted visitors! – To your website by simply writing articles and sticking them on free article directories. They say that hundreds of webmasters and newsletter publishers will copy your articles and information and propagate it all over the net, effectively advertising your website for you.
Well, they are wrong. And here are five reasons why they are wrong:
Your Article is Too Short – or Too Long
Do you really think that any serious webmaster is going to bother copy and pasting a two-paragraph article that he could write himself in a matter of minutes? If you article is too short – less than 400 words – it will be skipped over as just another sad attempt at mediocre marketing.
So, the other option is to write a nice long article full of great information and facts, right? Well, if your article is 700 words or longer, not too many people will bother reading through it. People, especially web marketers, have short attention spans.
Is it Keyword Rich or Keyword Overloaded?
Most article marketers have heard about making sure they have a good keyword percentage in the articles that they submit. There are a lot of tools out there that will tell you what the saturation is for different keywords and keyword phrases. Two percent? Too few. Five percent? Maybe too many! And besides, are a lot of people really going to search for your keyword phrase anyway?
The Article Directory from Hell
So, you think you have written the perfect article: not too short or long, a great keyword percentage for a keyword that is actually searched for. The next step is easy; you submit it to an article directory.
But… Do serious webmasters come to this article directory? Checking the PR (page rank) or the directory is a good first step. At least that will tell you that it can be found on the search engines. Unfortunately, that is not always a good thing. If the article directory is too easy to find, and too high a PR, every internet article marketer and his brother will have already submitted an article to it. Your article will be lost in a sea of articles about almost the same exact topic.
Well, It Doesn’t Work, So I Should Just Give Up!
Nope, article marketing will not work. Well, not if you do it wrong, anyway. All of these pie-in-the-sky promises of article distribution fame and fortune are as hokey as a three-dollar bill. But… that doesn’t mean that it is not still a viable option for a long-term marketing plan.
It really is, you know. Even if your article is too long or too short, has the wrong keyword density, and is put on the busiest, or most abandoned article directory in the history of mankind, it will still get you a backlink. It will still give your name and business one more result on the search engines. It will still give you one more opportunity to be found by webmasters, casual visitors, and potential customers and clients. And that’s not so bad after all.
