• By William Gold
• Published 02/17/2011
• Article Writing

Article marketing is a method of advertising that has existed for almost as long as mass print media. The basic premise of article marketing is to advertise a service or product not by crafting a concise advertisement, but by writing a detailed, informative article that is tangentially related to the product or service in question. So for example, to advertise article marketing, 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 curiosity or a need for information will then be informed about the business offering related services or products. Throughout 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 often willing to accept article marketing, which is given to them for free in exchange for the business’ right to publish their contact information alongside the article.

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

al to all parties involved. The advent of the internet revolutionized and expanded the use of article marketing. The principle however 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 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 for 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 begins to intersect with another popular aspect of online advertising: search engine optimization.

With search engine optimization, a website 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 again tangentially related to the service or product being offered. The articles are then hosted on various 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 written are rarely, if ever, even read by actual human readers. Instead, when a person searches for the keyword (to reuse the above example: flood protection) in a search engine such as Google, the search engine sees the hyperlinks with that key word pointing towards that website, and then returns the website in the search at a higher ranking, as more relevant.