Search Geeks' SEM Smart - Article marketing

Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses or companies write short articles related to their respective products or services. These articles are made available for distribution and publication. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business' credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.

With the rise of e-commerce and Internet marketing especially the Search Engine Marketing (SEM), article marketing has made a move to the online world as well. As in traditional forms of media, online article marketing has served the dual role of providing publishers with essentially free content, and advertisers with essentially free advertising.
Article marketing has become increasingly popular as a marketing method under the Web 2.0 generation of business on the Internet. Many subjects have gained popularity through viral propagation of articles via social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Article marketing has proven to be a useful and effective way to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which deals with the order in which web pages are ranked for specific keywords. One method of SEO encompasses the idea that a website's rank in search engines will be higher as it obtains more back links. Therefore, writing and distributing articles that contain a link to a business owner's website result in more links back to that website. Theoretically this process will increase that website's rank within search engines. This theory has led to a trend in online marketing toward writing articles solely for SEO purposes. This trend has been matched by a wide selection of article marketing directory websites which accept, vet, and provide redistribution of such articles to online publishers.

The free distribution of articles has, however, led to a large amount of duplicated content appearing on websites across the Internet. The sudden popularity of article marketing has caused an overall reduction in quality in many subjects, mainly due to individuals writing low-quality articles as a quick way of achieving exposure. The quality of articles can also suffer as some authors seek a large quantity of back links at the possible expense of content quality. Efficient use of article marketing as a form of promotion requires invested effort in writing high-quality, relevant articles which is apparently not every business or company can do.