Stop Wasting Time and Money With Your Article Marketing
Copyright (c) 2010 Bill Platt
the Phantom Writers
http://thePhantomWriters.com/

Online marketers are always arguing for or against the value of
article marketing. Many will argue that article marketing could
provide real traffic and sales to ones’ website, and
furthermore, article submission has the potential to offer some
serious SEO value to the marketers’ websites. Many more will
tell you that article marketing is an utter waste of time and
money…

The difference between those who do well with article marketing
and those who do not is usually a matter of education, or lack
thereof…

Those who succeed with article marketing generally know a few
things that others don’t, and just as importantly, these people
understand the nature of the article marketing landscape.

Those who fail with article marketing do so for a number of
reasons, although most importantly, the reason for failure is
rooted in a lack of knowledge about how to truly make article
marketing work for them, and the lack of understanding about an
always shifting landscape of article marketing.

Other reasons many online marketers fail with article marketing:

* They think that one article is a good test of the technique.
Even the greatest baseball player in history (Ty Cobb) only
batted .367, which is just a hair over one hit for every three
“at bats”.

Even the professional article marketers, who have a track record
of making hundreds of thousands of dollars with article
marketing, do not produce winners at the same level as Ty Cobb
provided hits… There are no article marketers who hit it out of
the park every time… As with anything else in life, article
marketing success is dictated by the Law Of Averages.

So consider this: If the professional article writers do not hit
it out of the park with every article, what makes YOU think that
your one article is a “good test” of the technique?

* People suppose that since article marketing is a method of
advertising, then they should “advertise” in their articles.
But, it does not work that way. People want information, so in
articles, we give them the information that they want. All
advertising should be reserved for the Authors’ Resource Box
that follows the article – this is also where you will place your
anchor text links, to influence your websites’ rankings in the
search engines.

* Press Releases are for sharing news about your company.
Articles are for sharing information that people want to know. In
your press release, you should mention the name of your company /
website inside the main body of text. But with articles, you
should only mention your company / website in the Authors’
Resource Box.

* If people will not want to read your article, reputable
publishers will not want to publish your article.

The Always Shifting Landscape

Websites that are willing to accept your articles directly fall
into two categories:

* Those who will publish anything; and

* Those who have editorial standards and are very selective
about the articles they are willing to accept from marketers…

Those who will publish anything generally find it difficult to
attract repeat visitors… Therefore, they find that attracting
visitors is a struggle that never ends.

This results in websites that do not provide profits to the
website owner… How many websites do you own where you will keep
pumping money into them, once you have come to the realization
that those websites will never turn a profit for you?

New website owners will frequently prepay up to two years of
domain registration and web hosting. As you can imagine, if after
two years the website has never turned a profit, the site will
close when its registration expires.

The other side of this coin is that if the website is not earning
money, the website owner will frequently quit working on it, well
before the website expires… So if it is an article directory,
don’t be surprised when you realize that the website works, but
no one is home to approve your article submissions...

Those webmasters, who do have editorial standards, find
attracting and keeping visitors to be much easier… And as a
result, they find that earning a profit is not only realistic,
but it is a way of life…

Article Directories that have editorial standards, like Ezine
Articles, will continue to be around for a very long time. Chris
Knight has owned and operated EzineArticles.com at a profit since
November of 1999, and so long as he continues to exercise his
perogative to have editorial standards, you can bet that he will
continue to attract repeat visitors and to earn a profit from his
website.

Quality information is the key to the survival of websites and to
writing articles that will stand the test of time, delivering a
lifetime of traffic and sales.

Here Today… Gone Tomorrow…

If for one minute, you rely on websites that will publish
anything, to make your article marketing campaigns work for you,
then you will find that most of your article submission efforts
will be wasted…

The owners of a vast majority of the Article Directories are not
even approving the articles that have been submitted to them…

And even if they are approving articles, most of those websites
that will accept your article submissions will close within two
years, due to a lack of profits, resulting from a lack of
editorial standards on the part of the website owner.

The vast majority of websites, which accept articles from the
public, stop approving articles within just a few months…
Thereafter, when the domain expires, the website and your
articles on it will disappear into the dust bin of history…

In Conclusion...

If you focus only on you or your products / website in your
articles, then you will have no one to blame for your failure,
but you…

But, if you focus on providing your readers information that they
can use and will enjoy reading, then your article marketing
campaigns could provide the level of success to you that you
seek, just as it has provided success to the many authors, whose
names you know and websites you recognize by name…

———————————————————-
My name is Bill Platt. If you enjoyed this article and
found it useful, then you will love my newest ebook titled,
“How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your
SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information
about how to make your article marketing truly profitable.
http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html
Or, you can get warmed up with my free
“Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” ebook at:
http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html