Article Marketing At Its Prime
Article marketing is a method of advertising that has existed for almost as long as mass print media. The fundamental idea of article advertising is to advertise a service or product not by crafting a concise advertisement, but by writing a thorough, helpful article that is tangentially linked to the product or service involved.
So for instance, to advertise article advertising, 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 need for information will then be informed about the business providing related services or products.
All through history, such articles have appeared in virtually all kinds of printed media: pamphlets, brochures, magazines, and most commonly, news papers. Publishers in need of content are frequently willing to accept article marketing, which is offered 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 advantages from broadened awareness of their service or product. It is a proposition that is fundamentally beneficial to all parties involved.
The advent of the internet revolutionized and extended the use of article marketing. The principle nevertheless remains 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 cost-free based on the web space, companies are now also able to support their own publishing efforts. So as an example, a company might have its very own blog – or even dozens of blogs – to host the articles pointing towards their website. This is where article marketing will start to intersect with another popular aspect of online advertising: search engine optimization.
With search engine optimization, a web site through which a client dreams to sell a product or service hires a company (or someone internally to do it for them) to write articles that are once again tangentially relevant to the service or product being presented. The articles are then hosted on a variety of blogs or websites. The difference is that in said articles, hyperlinks of key words are inserted leading back to the client’s website, and the articles that are created are rarely, if ever, even read by actual human audience. 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 higher ranking, as more related.