Before I get into the future of article marketing, let me first talk about the past history of article marketing. In fact, let me go back even further. Over the last few years, as the internet has made many people millions of dollars each, people have tried to find easier and better ways of making that money. For example, when email marketing became popular, people began to abuse email marketing, sending millions of unsolicited emails daily, raking in large fortunes doing so. Now it is practically impossible to do that, and it is even more difficult to be an honest email marketer.

Next came advertising – when pop up and then pop under ads came out, many people made fortunes advertising using them, then they became overused and their effectiveness fell apart. The same thing has happened with the pay per click programs – my opinion on those right now is that the people making the most money with ppc programs are the ones who are selling templates for web sites!

Another area of incredible profits over the years has been search engine marketing – taking different measures to get your web site into the top ten for a particular keyword. The search engines have done an incredibly effective job of eliminating junk and computer generated content from the top ten results.

Now, people online are often looking for good, original content, since they cannot computer generate it and make it pass for search engine worthy content. Enter article marketing. Many web sites are willing to take your content, personally written by you, and use it as content for their web sites. Because this was an incredibly easy way to get around the content problem, article directories popped up like crazy over the years, with their peak proliferation in 2006. Literally hundreds of article directories popped up, trying to get people to submit content to them.

The result of that has been interesting. Most of the web sites that were created for that purpose, are in my opinion, only good for creating multiple back links to your own web sites. Of course, since that is highly important, the web sites continue to grow with original content. But what has happened is that a few article directories have kind of risen to the top of the article directory chain, achieving pageranks of 6 or 7, creating an interesting place in terms of search engine optimization techniques, and an easy way to get your own url listed on a pr 6 or 7 page. Even more important than that, I think, is the opportunity to have your personal content on the top ten pages of search engines, due to the page ranks of the directories to which you submit. This means that, without any optimization on your own web pages, you can achieve top ten rankings for your own content, and of course you have links back to your own web page on each of these article pages.

Now, why do I think that this is so interesting for 2007 and 2008? Because the article directories that have page rank 6 and 7 are somewhat careful about the content on their web pages. What this means is that the only way for someone to play in this game is to write their own content. That means that you are on equal ground with everyone else out there, except perhaps the person who is willing to pay a team of people to write their own content – but even this content would probably not be as effective as the personally written content. You see, writing compelling copy is a skill that is learned, and I think that most internet marketers will not be willing to go through the process of teaching that skill to paid workers.

I think that another thing that is going to be very interesting for 2007 and 2008 in article marketing is that since article writing is such a laborious task and cannot be reasonably automated, that only the hardest workers of all will be involved in it. This means, in my opinion, that it cannot become abused, at least not with the highly ranked article directories that are responsible for most of the profits derived from article marketing.

I think that for 2007 and 2008, if you are willing to work hard and write consistently for a few hours a day, you can achieve incredible wealth through article marketing. Now, the income itself will not come directly from the article marketing – it will come in whatever field of internet marketing that you are promoting and driving traffic to in your article marketing.

So, for example, you might be a list builder – I think you can grow huge lists online in 2007 and 2008 using article marketing. Maybe you are a pay per click marketer – I think that 2007 and 2008 are going to be great years to send traffic via article marketing to your ppc web sites, and I think article marketing can generate huge returns for you their. I think that anything you do online that requires traffic can be maximized in 2007 and 2008 using article marketing.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘