Ed Howes writes:

I can see technical and business articles could thrive and they could be a paid service, paying writers for the content and charging businesses and individuals subscription fees. If they grew large enough, they might be able to adopt the free content model as they could attract the big bucks advertisers. If they could do noth as commercial magazines and newspapers do, why wouldn’t they?

When consumers weary of overt and subtle sales techniques, they will again become customers and demand some respect. At that point they will deserve it. Yet, I suspect those who will treat consumers as if they were customers or potential customers, will have a substantiail competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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Trish Lambert writes:

Laugh! Well, you made my day! How great to pose a question that you’ve not been asked before!

I’ve been in the “content creation as a marketing tool” business since before the internet (imagine!), and now work with a lot of business owners who are new to the article method of marketing. The questions you list here represent a few of the questions I get asked by them when I tell them about this very effective marketing channel.

And you picked three key questions from my list. Mine is a B2B company, but many of my clients are B2C firms, and I have found that articles, and putting articles on EzineArticles.com in particular, are one of the best guerilla marketing techniques a business can pursue.

I also often need to explain the difference between what you call the “give” and “take” of the article itself and the resource box. The article itself conveys your expertise and credibility, while the resource box conveys the pitch for your particular product or service.

And I asked the 3rd question out of curiosity, because I couldn’t think of ANY business that this wouldn’t work for! Your response is excellent; I hadn’t thought of “reference heavy” articles, but do see that they might not work well here.

Anyway, long story short…thanks! I can now cite this entry when my clients ask these questions!

Trish

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Trish,

Thanks for reminding me today that “Article Marketing” is really the old “Education-based Marketing” strategy that so many folks have forgotten in today’s instant gratification-based marketing ideologies…

Clearly the companies that educate their markets will be looked upon as the leaders of their industries. :-)

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Lance Winslow writes:

Well, I have had incredible success with B2B Industry only related articles. So, I would say that I believe that B2B is suited for this venue. In fact my B2B articles always seem to out perform my Consumer or Internet Casual Reader articles. I cannot imagine a category that this venue would not work with. Although an online submission site entrepreneur may believe the venue works best in certain aspects, as that is their target, I see this venue working well in aspects never mentioned before. Such as a Politician wishing to get a message out. It works extremely well for simple “Public Awareness” articles, which sell nothing. It works for free advice on “how to do Something” even if that person is not selling that particular thing. Many authors write how to articles or put up cooking recipes, but they are not Cooks? They might be mortgage brokers. Nevertheless the article is well received. So, limiting the Article Online Submission Category to a certain B2B or B2C is something humans might do, but it may also be rather irrelevant to the reader who stops by due to a Google Search to read and article and is quite pleased with what they read, book marks the site and comes back for more later. Everyone wins. On this site are political commentary, non-fiction, insights, philosophy, commedy, entertainment and all sorts of things. B2B is important for those who sell to a target business sub-sector and B2C is great for those who sell directly to the consumer or end customers, but this Internet Category is so much more. Limiting or re-defining it into such tiny categories is silly. Indeed that misses the point of what it has now evolved into. B2B, B2C, yes works great, but that is hardly all it is good at. Expand your horizons, get out of the box and look around a bit. Read some of the off topic articles that folks are writing here. Someone who is a Real Estate Industry Participant may have 30 articles on that sector and 8-10 on misc. stuff and those too attract lots of readers to this site, which sometimes benefits them, but more likely benefits the traffic here and all the rest of us authors. When Internet Surfers come here to play, they browse and like to stay and once in a while they click away and maybe this is how you will recieve your pay? Please consider this today.

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Evelyn Lim writes:

As an owner of two article directories, I see a deluge of B2C article submissions lately. Mostly, they have no “real content”. The articles submitted are hardly educational; merely long lists of what services or features their products or services have. Needless to say, I tend to reject them. I’m wondering if there is any way that these authors can be educated on positioning their article content differently so that it has more information and education value.

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Thanks Trish for your blog mention:
http://trishtakeson.blogspot.com/2006/08/whats-old-is-new-educational-marketing.html

:-)

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Kevin McGee writes:

These are very well wrote bloggs keep up the good work

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