Go visit any Internet marketing forum, go study article directories themselves, and you’ll find many of the world’s most prolific article marketers are no longer submitting their work to major directories like Ezine Articles - ezinearticles.com - and the site’s leading competitors. 

Shockingly, even marketers who submitted thirty and forty articles a day to some directories have uploaded nothing in recent months.

Does this mean article marketing is dead and gone forever?  Is it no longer a very easy and cost free way for you and me to market our websites?  Personally, no I don't think that is the case at all, in fact I think article marketing is getting better by the day as a means of driving traffic to Internet marketers' websites and blogs.

Of course, the very best way to get your articles consigned to the scrapheap by Google and other search engines, is by uploading them to directories allowing other publishers to copy your articles on their own websites resulting in your articles being replicated hundreds or thousands of times across the Internet.  If that’s not duplicate content gone crazy please tell me what is!

However, I don’t agree with wholesale abandonment of article directories, or what other writers say about articles no longer generating traffic and sales.  In fact I’ve found my own article marketing efforts growing more profitable in recent weeks, and soon I’ll tell you why! 

For now, let me tell you why I personally think Google’s dislike of duplicate content should not concern you:

By implication, (i) and (ii) above suggest you have to choose between backlinks and search engine ranking.  You’re unlikely to get both!

Let me expand on points (i) and (ii) and reveal why I personally think writing articles is - and I think always will be - a very profitable way to market your own online and offline promotions.  And this works whether you’re selling on eBay or Amazon, or promoting other people’s products at ClickBank, or you’re driving a taxi or trading at boot sales and flea markets or selling chips on the high street.

Importantly, if your business can benefit in any way from having its own website, your website can benefit from having its own traffic generating articles.

Articles placed at major online directories offer three main, and to my mind hugely profitable advantages, the first being the likelihood of your article ranking higher in search engine returns through a major directory than from your own website.   There’s a long and interesting reason why most people receive more traffic to an article uploaded to a major directory than to the same article at their own website or blog, sadly too long to explain in this short article today.  So please just believe the theory for now.

Secondly, articles drive traffic to promotions mentioned in your article’s resource box.  That’s the place where you get to promote your own websites and blogs, as well as products you’re recommending or selling online.  Including on eBay!    So if your article gets listed high in search engine returns for specific product searches, that can tempt readers to click on a link in your resource box and buy direct from your eBay listing or other promotion without studying rival sellers first.

The other benefit is ‘backlinking’, being a process where every article placed on high Page Rank sites and featuring live links back to your websites and blogs, also your eBay and other promotions, acts as a kind of recommendation for your business from the site hosting your article.  Ezine Articles and other major article directories have high Page Ranks*.  So if your product review article on a major article directory links to your eBay Shop, for example, backlinks might favourably impact on search engines like Google and Bing and get your eBay Shop listed higher in search engine returns than others selling similar products on eBay - without those backlinks!

*  DEFINITION OF PAGE RANK: ‘The more high-quality-web pages that link to a webpage, the higher its Page Rank.’  (Source: http://www.motive.co.nz/glossary/pagerank.php)

Now let me reveal why I personally think article marketing remains one of the very best ways to make money online and why it might soon become even more profitable!  These points will explain:

#1.  Although heavily duplicated articles might plummet in search engine returns, that’s not going to prevent backlinks working in your favour.  In fact my experience shows the more times an article is copied and links back to one of my sites, the more visitors I get to that site.  And that happens even where the article itself ranks low or nowhere at all in search engine returns. 

As an example, I have several hundred articles at Ezine Articles directory, most promoting separate pages at some of my own websites.  Even though most were heavily duplicated, those articles once showed high in search engine returns, many occupying the number one spot on Google.  But since Google’s recent changes those articles are nowhere to be seen in search engine returns.  However, traffic to my own websites has stayed high which, given articles are my sole promotional technique for most websites, suggests backlinking was unaffected by Google’s recent changes. 

#2.  Not all articles placed on directories will be duplicated by other publishers, and an article that remains unique to one specific directory should be unaffected by Google’s recent changes.  And that means it should still rank well in search engine returns.

To illustrate, I have several hundred unique articles at Ezine Articles that have never been accessed by fellow publishers.  And that’s why those articles frequently feature first page on Google returns. 

The reason they remain unique is because I no longer duplicate my own articles between several article directories or on my own websites.  Today all my submissions to Ezine Articles are one-off, and many are ranking number one in search engine returns.  As long as publishers avoid replicating my one-off articles they should remain ranking high.

How do I ensure other publishers avoid using my articles at their own sites?  No, making them grossly poor quality won’t work because Google ignores articles that are badly written or lacking in valuable content, as do all major article directories.  So badly written articles won’t even be accessible for others to use.  

The way to deter others publishing your articles at their own websites is to make your content specific, not generic. 

So a generic article, about raising children, for example, or growing better roses, can help promote thousands of different goods and services on other people’s websites, and hence those articles might be replicated by countless other publishers.  Make your articles specific, however, such as featuring your own product or business from beginning to end, and they’re much less interesting to publishers seeking content for their own websites.

#3.  Here’s a technique I’ve just discovered for doubling or further growing visitors to my articles at major article directories and compensate for a reduction in traffic from search engines.  The idea is based on the fact that telling people ‘9 out of 10 cats prefer ….’ made a specific brand of cat food a household name, and using numbers and other statistics in my own titles have increased my articles’ click-through rates by more than one hundred per cent.  ‘Click-through rate is the number of visitors to your article who click on the link in your resource box.  I’ve called it my ‘XYZ’ technique.

No, I don’t know why, but I do know using the ‘XYZ’ technique in your article titles is likely to grow traffic to your promotions, where X, Y and Z are numbers or statistics, such as:

That kind of thing! 

In most forms of marketing, numbers and statistics generate curiosity and make the claim more believable, even if it’s false or exaggerated, and the same applies to article titles.  So try using statistics in your article titles, make them genuine figures, and even if your search engine traffic has decreased by 50% since Google’s recent rulings, the shortfall can be matched by a 100% rise in your articles’ click-through rate.