Many companies are investing in publishing articles around the net as a way of advertising their site and services. This form of marketing is particularly successful as it taps into the concept of the internet as an information resource. In providing the information, companies establish themselves as benevolent suppliers of knowledge, businesses that an internet user can trust.
This kind of marketing is not for everyone. While there are numerous benefits that come with marketing your site in this way, there are also significant drawbacks. Some SEO experts even argue against article marketing, theorising that Google will eventually penalise companies that engage in it. While this is going a step too far, there are definite downsides to article marketing that every site owner should consider before jumping in. Talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about the pros and cons of article marketing.
Pro: Publicity
The first and most obvious positive aspect of article marketing is publicity for your site. If you manage to draw attention to your article, people become aware of your site. A well-written article that can compete on an article hosting site can get you significant, essentially free, coverage.
Con: Time consumption
Writing up and posting articles takes up a significant amount of time. Most site owners realise that writing up new articles all the time will take up their time, but this is not the only consideration. While fresh content is vital for article marketing due to duplicate content issues, discussed below, actually posting the articles is a time consuming process. This aspect of article marketing has so bothered some site owners that they purchase semi-automatic article submission software.
Pro: Reputation enhancing
The second angle is reputation management. Publishing interesting information enhances the feeling that your company is knowledgeable and reliable.
Con: Content theft
A significant drawback of the exposure a good article affords your site is content theft. Good content frequently gets stolen, and articles on article hosting sites are often seen as fair game.
Pro: Link building
Another angle, most important to SEO, is the links you can attract with article marketing. Not only is it possible to seed links from the article hosting sites, but a good article should attract links as well, and more if people find your site pleasing.
Con: Duplicate content issues
One factor of article marketing many experts overlook is duplicate content, a no-no in search engine optimisation. Any site owner that publishes a piece from their own pages on an article hosting site is opening themselves up to being filtered for duplicate content. Although it’s not certain that any content you post to an article site will trigger this filter, not many site owners want to take the risk. Posting only unique content obviates this risk.
It’s fair to say that although article marketing has its advantages, most of these can be had if you regularly guest post on an industry blog. For site owners that are still building their reputation in an industry, though, article marketing can prove beneficial.
