This Is What Article Marketing Is About

If you visit some forums and popular blogs you’ll see real soon that many article marketers are ticked off about a certain practice by some marketers to snag their articles and place them on AdSense sites. Here are two examples of sites that I’m talking about.

Sorry, but this doesn’t make me angry at all. In fact, it makes me very happy because both of these sites are doing precisely what they should be doing with my articles – publishing them and giving me credit.

If you examine these sites carefully you’ll see that the first site is an AdSense site and the second one is promoting another Internet marketing company. The first guy wants you to click on AdSense and he’s strategically placed his ads in locations on the page that are highly visible and that historically get a high number of clicks, and he’s using the ads that, according to AdSense guru Joel Comm, achieve the highest click through rates. I really hope this guy makes a lot of money on my article because if he does then he’ll probably publish more of them. I’m OK with that because he’s using my author resource box with links intact, a practice that too many such publishers don’t do (and that actually pisses me off).

The one problem I do see with this web page is that the website owner is promoting a credit card site at the bottom of the page. That site isn’t in any way related to the topic that my article is about. Other than that, I hope he gets AdSense clicks, and based on the placement of the ads on the page, he is more likely to get clicks on the AdSense ads than on the credit card link.

The second guy might make a little bit of money on AdSense, but I think what he really wants is for his visitors to click on one of the two links at the bottom of the page that point to his website, a competitor of ours. So I’m basically promoting my competition. That’s cool. But he might also be happy if visitors clicked on the Rich Jerk ad at the top of the page because it’s an affiliate link and he’ll likely get a commission on sales made by people who visit the Rich Jerk’s site through his site. I’m OK with that too.

In Web economics, a link is payment. It’s money in the bank. It may not be a lot of money, but it’s money. And I see both of these transactions as being a trade in value. I’m getting a valuable link to my web properties while the owners of these two sites get content that they don’t have to write. And, if that content is successful in doing what it’s suppose to do, they might actually make a few dollars on my content. More power to them.

The purpose for article marketing is to provide content that other publishers find valuable and will use for their own purposes. If they place ads on the same pages with your content or use your content to promote sites that compete with you, don’t get angry. As long as they link back to you then you’re getting paid. Those links are relevant, valuable, and serve to push your own web properties up in the rankings for the key terms that you use. As long as web publishers follow the rules and “pay” for their articles with ethical links to me, they can make all the money they want from my articles. That’s a fair trade.