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It's stunning sometimes how far article marketing has come over the last few years as an effective means of promoting business through educational articles. But precisely because it is so useful to online business, it is getting perverted by overzealous marketers. Some are using software that "Blasts your Article to 10,000 ezine publishers!" and others are simply SEO copywriters who write horrible so-called articles disguised as keyword lists parroting repetitive keyword phrases 15 to 20 times in a 700 word article. Some submit their article perversions for their clients or even to benefit their own Adsense filled sites.

Other article marketing perversions include a sort of "advertorial" article, clearly written by copywriters, purely for promotion of client interests, in deceptive testimonial form to sell a service, software or product and gain links to client sites. Some using this technique loudly proclaim a service as though they just discovered it themselves when a simple search for their name beside the product they recently "discovered" shows that they have been hired wordsmiths for the newly "discovered" company for several years.

Further web content and article marketing perversions include the submission of press releases disguised as articles by clueless PR people who have little to no understanding of article marketing. They submit their client releases to article distribution services and article archives mindlessly without even attempting to change the distinctive form of a press release into something resembling an educational article. They even include the outdated -30- or ### which signifies the end of a press release.

As an online marketer myself, I've written and distributed press releases through appropriate PR forums such as PRWeb and the like for clients. They are used as one means of gaining visibility and exposure for online businesses. Sometimes we do rewrite them as articles and distribute those through article distribution channels if they can actually be adapted to a semi-instructional or entertaining form of web content. The standard journalistic five W's are entirely out of place in article marketing. The factual reporting must be converted to an educational "how-to" format or a form of instructional and entertaining short article.

Next among web content clueless come the newbies who have been told that article marketing is useful for gaining links. Often these newbies will include a half dozen of their own URL's without the http:// portion - unaware that web content management software will NOT turn those web addresses into clickable links and losing the value of those links wherever the do manage to get published. These dimwits fill the article with links to their own sites and affiliate program or ad-tracking redirect links, very nearly turning the article into a directory menu of their own site in the hopes of gaining multiple links from a single article.

Just one thing stands in the way of that silly expectation of easy link popularity - NOBODY will publish the article except those worthless Adsense filled automated sites which blindly publish EVERYTHING distributed through some freebie article distribution lists. Those links will do the author very little good coming from worthless, poorly ranked sites. That is if the distribution list will even publish that type of blatantly self serving article. Most article sites refuse to accept and distribute articles with self-referencing links within the article body and say so clearly in their guidelines for submission.

But then - Keyword Parrots, PR shills and linking fanatics don't read web content article submission guidelines.

Copyright August 12, 2005

Mike Banks Valentine operates http://Publish101.com Mike Valentine Provides content aggregation, press release optimization and custom web content for Search Engine Positioning http://www.RealitySEO.com