There has been a ton of buzz about the future of article marketing for the last several months. Is article marketing still effective? Are backlinks from article marketing still valuable? Should we continue article marketing as we always have? Lots of questions followed up by even more speculation. We have an answer…from Matt Cutts himself:
Don’t have two minutes? Here’s the rundown:
You know the deal with article marketing. Write something up, stick into an article bank like EzineArticles, hope you get that backlink and maybe backlinks from people that love that article so much they post it on their own sites. Mr. Cutts thinks this marketing method stinks.
- Article banks have a lot of junky content. Yours may be great, but…
- The sites that republish content from article banks are most likely junky, also. I don’t republish EZA articles. You probably don’t either. The ones that do are often low quality, thin sites looking to get their five posts up so they can submit their site to the search engines. These aren’t “votes” for best content. Mr. Splogger probably didn’t even read them. He grabbed the first five articles that popped up. (Splogger = Spam Blogger)
- These article banks generate a ton of duplicate content.
- The same anchor text is likely being used over and over and over again. That isn’t how your peers are likely linking to your content.
Matt says if he had to project the future of article marketing, the buzz around Search Engine World tells him these backlinks are most likely going to lose more and more of their value. Surprising? I don’t think so.
Where does he think we should be focusing our time? Creating great content on our own sites and getting involved in social media so our peers are sharing that content socially and backlinking to it naturally.
Image by EmaStudios via Flickr
But I can’t control that!
No, you can’t force your friends to start mentioning your content on their blogs or share it socially. But, you can start trying to make some friends. You can start churning out some great content that you think people would like to link to on their own sites. Those are two pretty good places to start.
Are you surprised to hear this may be the future fate of article marketing? Does it make you panicked to rely so much on your online peers?
About Angie
When I first learned how to generate traffic to my website, Article Marketing was a big hit. It’s funny how things changed so quickly.
Twitter: thewahwife
says:
I’m sighing in relief here, Carla. When I first started, it was all about article marketing. It was the end all and be all. It was all about “100 articles in 100 days” over and over and over again. I couldn’t keep up with that for even a week. And I sure wasn’t getting the return on that investment that I felt was necessary to keep going.
I always say I’m a lazy marketer, but in reality I think I just don’t like all of that pressure. I accept these days that not everything is going like gangbusters around here. I just pull out the keyboard and get back to work.
Twitter: wahadventures
says:
I love this! The guilt of not actively writing and posting all over the web is gone!!
This just declutters the entire process. Letting go of all these headaches to gain traffic and just focus on creating stuff that people will like enough to think, “hey I should share this on Facebook!”.
Twitter: thewahwife
says:
For sure, Miranda!
Twitter: RealWaystoEarn
says:
I have to say this is a relief as well. Who wants to sit and write ten articles just to promote one article? I know I don’t, and I also don’t have the time. The end result is usually a low-quality piece of content that quite honestly doesn’t deserve to get shared everywhere. I agree it’s much better if you rely on others to do your backlinking for you. Impress people enough with one piece of high-quality content and you won’t have to worry that much about getting the word out on your own.
Twitter: thewahwife
says:
I would rather make friends with 10 new people than try to write 10 new articles, Anna. And hopefully one of the 10 will share something.
Twitter: kdbbiz
says:
I agree. I recently started a new blog for home cooking. I tried doing the articles for blasting out to the many directories but I hate the thought of spun articles so the work was just too much. Like you, I think I kept on top of it for about a week or 2. Then I just decided to do a hub, lens and article for wizzley along with my blog post and bookmark those. I went from no visitors to 70 in like 2 weeks. Now that is not much but I have a blog on skateboards from 3 years ago that I have done hardly anything on and it gets the same traffic.
I still do not know how many people are back linking to me but if you keep being social and even commenting on blogs and in forums, to me it is a lot more fun and something I will want to keep up with because it doesn’t seem like so much work and a strain on the brain.
I am glad you wrote this post and thankful that I can now focus on social media aspects and making new friends instead of boring stuff.