One of the most popular ways for someone to market their website is through article distribution. Article distribution is the process of writing articles related to the subject matter of a person’s website, including links in them that go back to that website, and then submitting them to various article databases. These article databases then provide these articles, usually free of charge, to anyone who needs to use them in order to build up content on their website or blog. In most cases this can be done again and again with different articles and also the same article can be submitted to more than one article database.

There are those out there that seem to indicate that in their opinions that article marketing is a waste of time and not worth it. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of article marketing.

Pros

Link Building - When someone uses an article from an article database it comes with links, either in the text of the article or in the author’s resource box at the end of the article, that point back at the author’s website. These links are useful both in terms of search engine ranking as well as traffic.

Relevant Linking - Logically, any website that reprints these articles would be in relatively the same niche as the site belonging to the author who wrote the article. This means that most links gained through the article marketing process will also be highly relevant to the subject matter of the website gaining the links. It is very important for search engine rankings to have links point to a website that share similarities in content as these are easily seen as legitimate links.

Establishing Credibility - By having articles in article databases and then spread around the internet on websites belonging to other people, the author gains a certain amount of credibility based on name recognition and the fact that so many people cite or present his work. This can go a long way towards making a website or blog successful, people flock to websites belong to people they see as experts in their field.

Passive Link Building - One of the best parts about article marketing is that after the article is written and has been submitted to the article database, the job of the author is pretty much complete. From there on out the article and the article database site do the work for the author. There is no more labor in building those links as all tasks are handled either by the database site or the website owner who is going to use the article for their purposes.

Cons

There are people that claim the amount of time it takes to write an article and go through the submission process is not worth the benefits that these links will then provide.

Writing and submitting articles is a labor intensive process and those that lack good writing skills could end up doing damage to their reputation by giving the appearance that they are not educated or informed.

Concentrating too much on article marketing and not enough on updating or building a website or blog might be detrimental to that website or blog ever achieving a certain level of success. If there are a great deal of links out there pointing to a website that a viewer sees as incomplete or not worth going to, what use is the link building serving?

Article marketing is one of the most popular forms of website marketing for a reason, the results show that it truly does bring solid verifiable results. There are a number of tricks and tips that someone can learn to do make their articles work even better for them once they are uploaded to an article database. Overall, marketing a website using article submission databases is a great way to not only get more backlinks for a website, but also to establish both the website and the author as experts in that subject matter or field. Article marketing is definitely all that it is cracked up to be.

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