Mark Daoust said in this article The Misunderstood Marketing Method, that most people use articles in completely the wrong way to promote their sites. I completely agree with him and in fact, the research that I've done into the success of various of my article submissions is bearing this out.

Since the concept of 'Article writing is the best way to promote your website' became the vogue recently most people think that it is enough to dash off a couple of words and then mass submit these articles to the slew of Article Directories that has recently sprung up all over the place. Even worse, they think that it is enough to string together a bunch of keywords and submit them to the Article Directories.

Being an Article Directory owner myself, I can attest to the amount of garbage that is submitted under the guise of 'articles'. Frankly, I am actually quite happy to see these types of spammy articles since I can press the 'delete' button with a clear conscience. But they just keep on coming regardless. As with all good ideas, article writing has fallen prey to the spammers and scammers of the world.

Let's take a good hard look at article writing as a marketing method.

There are really two reasons to write articles

1. To get as many cheap and easy (or is it cheap and nasty?) links to your website as you can with the least amount of effort.

2. To establish yourself as an authority in your field (with the added benefits of getting more traffic and getting high quality links back to your website).

Unfortunately it IS easier to do the first than to do the second. Writing a good article is hard work. And I suppose that it all depends on what you want to achieve. If your aim is to promote your 'Adsense trap' website then a couple of low quality or Private Label articles might do the trick. But forget about building a reputation. But then, that was never the intent, was it?

So let's look at some guidelines:

If your primary aim is to get more links back to your 'cheap and nasty' Google Adsense website then I recommend that you write the highest standard of article that you can in the shortest timeframe. Do still write proper English, do not string spammy keywords together, do not use all capitals in your title, do not use exclamation marks and words like 'easily' and 'cheaply' anywhere in your title or summary and try not to use Private Label articles. Yes I know it is tempting since they are so readily available (heck, I am sitting with a whole folder full of them that I don't really know what to do with!), but even if you use the software that changes the wording here and there, frankly, they still stand out a mile and often the software that changes the words really messes up the sentence context.

Some article directories have software that checks for the type of duplication that you would get with Private Label Articles (lucky them). Other Article Directory owners just use their eyeballs and common sense and the delete button is always a handy tool.

But wait - IS the first way so much easier to get quick links back to your site? I recently went to do a check on some articles that I submitted in March and April. Sure, the article titles show up when you search for them, however, when you check the links back supposedly generated by those articles, only 4 links out of the 500+ that I would have expected, based on the number of article titles displayed, were showing in the Yahoo link results.

If you check in MSN, the picture is slightly better, but even MSN only shows 11 links out of the potential 500+

What is going on here? There could be a couple of explanations:

1. The various individual pages containing the body of the article and the link back are just not indexed yet. The question is why not? MSN, in particular, seems to be very good with indexing these days, so you would at least expect the links to show up in MSN. These articles were submitted in March and April respectively. Why are the search engines not fully spidering or indexing these articles in the article directories?

2. The other option is that the dreaded 'duplicate content' filter had struck again. I personally do not think that the duplicate content filter is such a big bogeyman as we are lead to believe. There is duplicate content all over the Internet. The argument though is that you might find an article that has been written by someone and submitted to be published on various websites. Now, it is said that the article might either only show up (depending on whose theory you believe) on the site that it was published first, or on a higher PR site offering the article as more 'relevant' content. The problem with this theory in this situation though is that the four articles that did show up as being fully indexed in Yahoo, are published on Article Directories that variously have a PR of 3, 5 0 and 2. Neither of them is the site on which the articles were published first. Scarcely a pattern, I would say.

But based on these results I would say that people are wasting their time writing and submitting their articles to article directories in order to get quick and easy links back to their websites. But then, common sense seems to be singularly uncommon when it comes to snake oil in the SEO and Internet Marketing space.

What I have seen is that some people write a LOT of articles, in other words, they basically spam the article directories with low quality articles. If you write enough of these low quality articles, SOME of the links will start to show up. But the chances that these spammy types of articles are going to be picked up and syndicated on other websites (apart from 'Adsense trap' websites!) are virtually nil; which means that the only links that will be pointing back to the website will be from the actual article in the article directory - and these are not indexed very quickly at the moment .

In summary therefore:

If you want to write articles purely for the sake of getting a lot of low quality links back to your website, you are going to have to play the numbers game - lots of low quality articles submitted through automated tools to the various article directories. Don't expect lots of links back from these articles soon, however. They will also not do anything for building your reputation or really draw traffic to your website.

2. If you are writing articles for the purpose of building a reputation, then I suggest you follow Mark Daoust's (http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Internet-Marketing/The-Misunderstood-Marketing-Method.html) advice and spend time and effort writing your article as well as marketing it (by hand) to some highly respected Article directories (I suggest EzineArticles and GoArticles) as well as to selected partner sites. The amount of effort is much higher but in the long term, so will the rewards.