Anyone involved with search engine opitmization (SEO) will be able to tell you about the value of article marketing and blog marketing.  While the two disciplines are very similar, this article will explore the difference between the two.

Article marketing, simply put is the writing of an article, which you then submit to as many article sites as possible.  At the bottom of your article, some of these sites will allow you to include a short bio, with some details about you or your business and a link to your website.

The idea is to write as many articles as possible and to submit them to as many article archive sites as possible.  The advantages of doing this are twofold.  The first is that when people are searching these archives for information about some or other topic, they may see your article listed in the search results and read it.  If they find it interesting enough, you may expect a click on the link in your bio and in doing so you can increase web traffic to your website. 

The second advantage is that of link building and this is really the big advantage.  You see, article archive sites are very popular with search engines and the good ones, frequently rank highly for even non-article related search terms in the search engines.

In order to include these sites in their results that search engines need to crawl the sites.  In so doing they will discover the link to your website in your bio.

For search engines, generic, one way back links are very important for a good ranking.  Therefore, if you frequently submit articles to such sites, the search engines will pick up more and more links back to your website.  The more quality, one way links the search engines pick up, the more highly your website will rank in the search results for the terms you use.

Therefore, if you want to promote your site effectively, one very good way of doing so is by article submission.

The problem with article submission is that it takes a lot of time.  Each site has its own rules and your article can be rejected, without you ever knowing why.  Some sites don’t even allow bio’s.  Another thing that can be frustrating with article submission is the moderation process.  You see, the article first needs to be approved and this can take a lot of time, sometimes even weeks.

Many article submission sites also promise to promote your article to 10 000 other sites, but if you have done any article submission, you will know that this is mostly not true.

While article submission can take long and be frustrating it could be worth your while, especially with a tool such as Articlesubmitter.  This is a free tool that makes the process somewhat easier and it can be downloaded here: http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com .

So what about blog marketing then, how does that work.  Blog marketing works very much the same as article submission, with a few notable advantages.

While most article submission sites are owned by corporations, many, in fact most blogs are owned by individuals.  I will explain the significance of this a bit later on in the article.

Effectively, with blog marketing you would be submitting your article to a blog, instead of an article directory.

There are many advantages and few disadvantages to this method.  The first advantage is that as I stated earlier, most blogs are owned by individuals.  This means that they are less likely to have such strict regulations as article directories.

It is also in their interest to include good quality articles on their blogs, because the search engines are also constantly crawling those blogs and looking for fresh content.  The more frequently a site is updated with fresh content, the more the search engines like such a site and that will in turn such a site’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP’s).

So, unless your article is of bad quality, or irrelevant, most bloggers would be keen to accept your article. This brings us to another advantage of blog marketing.

With an article you are submitting to a blog, you are not bound by the bio box.  Most bloggers will allow you to include hyperlinks in your article.  These links would of course point to your website with the appropriate anchor text.  These are also one way, generic back links (if the article is written in a natural style) and the search engines will love them.

In fact, the search engines will love these links even better because of the anchor text and because they appear naturally and not in some bio box.

A further advantage is that most serious bloggers work on their blogs daily and so they are more likely to include your article in their blog, much quicker than would an article submission website.  In addition, there are so many more blogs out there than article submission sites.

Of course you don’t want to be guilty of link spamming (having to many links in a piece of text), so you will want to limit your links to about three per article, but this is already two more than you would be allowed with most article directories and your one way links will increase exponentially faster this way.

It is clear that submitting your article to blogs have many advantages that you don’t have with article directories.

The only problem is to find blogs to submit to.  It is not really that difficult, though.  There are many blog directories, where you can find indexes of blogs within certain niches.  Some are free and some are paid for, but in my experience you really want to go for quality (and that mostly means paid sites – they are worth it though).

One such directory that stands head and shoulders about the competition is My Article Network and I will tell you why I prefer them.  Not only are they a blog directory, but they already have over 10,000 blogs subscribed to the directory.  This means that your article could potentially be submitted to 10,000 blogs at a time.  This will never really happen though, because not all blogs will fall into your category.

What is even better, is that they do all the work for you.  All you do is write your article, select your category and they will submit it to all blogs in that category automatically.  Even better, they do it in a timed fashion.  This means that the article is not submitted to all blogs all at once.  By doing it in a timed fashion, it looks more natural to search engines, not that there is anything wrong with submitting to more than one blog at a time.

They even keep statistics of all your articles, how well they are performing (acceptance rate) and allow you to add as many website (that other bloggers can post to), per subscription as you want.  So not only will your article get out there on the net, but you will also regularly have fresh content for your blog!

You can even choose to either automatically accept all posts to your blog or to select only those you want.

As I said, as far as blog submission directories go, My Article Network stands head and shoulders above the rest.  I have been using them for about three months and have already achieved over 4,300 links back to my website – that is some serious link traffic!  It has also helped me to rank significantly better for my selected keywords.

So there you have the advantages and disadvantages of article and blog marketing.  If it looks as if I am promoting My Article Network, it is because I am, they are simply without equal out there.

Hope you enjoyed the article.

Rian Schoeman
SilverFox Web Design