SimpleArticleMarketing.com will try to give you an overview of what article marketing is and how to use it for one of the most important task any website owner has, improving their search engine ranking.

If you're wondering if Article Marketing works then consider this, article marketing is the only process I've used to get rankings for this site. Nothing else. If your reading this then it's because of article marketing.

What is Article Marketing

Well, the answer is there in the question. Marketing yourself or your products through writing articles about what you know. That's Article Marketing.

The Article

An article will be about a specific subject, up to 750 words long and should give the reader a good, basic, understanding about this subject. With every article submitted to an Article Directory will also have the authors details such as their name and website details attached to it, this is called the "Resource Box".

The Marketing

The other part of Article Marketing is the marketing, the article that has been written can be deposited with article directories and the articles can then be found by website owners who can then re-publish your article on their site as content. The real winner for the author of the article is that these, re-published, articles will be picked up by the search engines. The link, from the resource box, to the authors website will create a backlink to the authors website. This increases the authority of the website in the eyes of the search engine and improves the position of the authors website in searches. Having the article on the directory is also a backlink in itself. This is the crux of what we're tying to to.

In simple terms that is all article marketing is about, if you imagine an article getting picked up by a number of other sites then that's going to create some quality backlinks to the authors site. And backlinks are the lifeblood of any website, without them people are unlikely to find you.

So what's the catch?

Well there's always a catch. If it were that simple to create hundreds of links and get high rankings then everyone would be doing it, and doing it alot. If you were to take the above on it's own then you could, quite naturally, assume that if an article was republished on 100 other sites then you'd end up with 100 backlinks to your site. That would be enough for some niches to get your site on the first page of the search engines.

Unfortunately it's not quite that simple.

If the article is re-published 100 times then it will certainly gain more authority in the eyes of the search engines, it won't however give the whole 100 links of value because of what is know and the "duplicate content policies" that big search engines have. This means that it will notice that the article is a duplicate of one that's found on another website and not give the full credit for both articles to the score of the article. What's needed is multiple, different, articles about the same subject with the same website details in the authors resource box.

Creating multiple documents

There are a number of ways to create multiple unique articles, each with their own pluses and minuses.

• Write/edit each article by hand
• Pay someone else to edit your first article to create unique versions of the article
• Use a tool to create different versions of the article for you

Write or Edit Each Article by Hand

Undoubtedly the most effective method of article marketing, unfortunately also the most time consuming. If you can devote the time to creating a 100 or so different articles or versions of the same article then undoubtedly this will be highly beneficial and the you'll end up with a high quantity of quality backlinks to your site.

Pay someone else to do it.

Yes you'll end up with unique articles but you'll have to pay for it, in hard cash. Do a Google search for article marketing writers and you'll get a huge quantity of sites offering this service. Expect to pay up to $10 per article. Also the quality of the articles will be dependant on who you hire to write them. If you choose to go this way then try to get recommendations from someone you trust.

Use a tool to create different versions of the article for you

There are a number of tools and webservice that can create multiple unique articles from a base article. These usually use the process of replacing words with synonyms. These a known as Article Spinners. An article spinner will allow the author to highlight words in the article and flag this word to be replaced with another word of the same meaning, the better spinners will also do this for whole sentences or even paragraphs. When the spinning process is run it will create versions of the article using the different words. 1000s of unique article can be created using this method. Sounds good eh?. It does but I would expect that the big search engines are eagerly working towards spotting these types of article if they haven't already figured it out and implemented it. Take a look at our Software Reviews page for reviews of some of the article spinners available.

So what's the answer?

SimpleArticleMarketing.com believes that a combination of the first and the last is the way to go. Write a number of unique articles, then write a number of versions of each paragraph in each article. This means that it's easier to ensure the paragraphs make sense and flows. Then run these through a spinner and instead of replacing single words in an article, replace whole sentences or paragraphs to create the unique versions. At least that way most of the article is hand written but you'll end up with an amount of different versions that wouldn't be considered duplicate. After that feel free to spin some words as well.

One last thing, I'd then read each article, at least scan it, to make sure that it reads and flows correctly before submitted the articles to Article Directories.

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