Article promotion popularity soars...with consequences...

Immediately after writing about Lee Gomes' Wall Street Journal article on web content, I was reading my email and found an article by Glenn Murray in the Site Pro News newsletter about using articles to promote one's company or online endeavor.

Most of you are probably familiar with using articles as a means of promotion. One sumbits an informative article to one or more article repository sites. The free article includes a resource box providing a backlink to the site of the author/supplier. The article then does triple duty as a promotional tool. Those finding the article may visit the backlinked site directly. They may also opt to republish the article, link intact, on their own site. All the while, the supplier's site is receiving search engine placement benefits from the increased number of inbound links.

These articles can be used widely, and article promotion is an incredibly effective viral marketing strategy. Its effectiveness is leading to more frequent use by online entrepreneurs of all sorts. What was once an "insider" trick used primarily by those expert in SEO has gone mainstream.

Murray notes that the increased use is helping his business as an online content provider. I would have to echo that sentiment. More and more people are commissioning articles to be used in this fashion.

Murray observes that the increased use of article-based promotion is also leading to some changes in the field. Article repositories are being flooded with new material and editorial standards are being increased. The top article repositories are utilizing human editing to separate lousy articles and "informative" pieces that are really barely-disguised ad copy from the content they want to disseminate.

I mention all of this for two reasons. First, I always enjoy an opportunity to remind people they can really improve their online business by hiring a quality content writer to produce great articles. Second, I think it is another example of the content market's self-regulating nature.

Repository sites found themselves flooded with articles, many of which were of questionable quality. As a result, they have embraced tighter human review standards in an effort to separate quality content from junk.

In my last post, I argued that the market would solve for many of the problems folks like Lee Gomes see in the online content business. I think Murray's article serves as an example of this. Article sites are figuring it out already, and the folks at Google and other search engines will be similarly motivated unless they are willing to default their market share to alternatives.