Article marketing has evolved, but it is still effective in terms of traffic generation.
Do you know how traditional content marketing works? Here is some interesting information on how article marketing used to work.
In the past, article marketers want to generate page views from 2 sources.
You may already be familiar with the first source - search engine traffic.
The articles get picked up by the search bots, and they get included in the search index.
Expert marketers used to recommend publishers to submit their content to as many sites as possible.
The rationale is that the more sites you submit to, the more traffic you get.
On paper, the traffic numbers look something like this: Submit to 1 site - 10 visitors a month.
Submit to 100 sites - 100 x 10 = 1000 visitors a month.
The numbers look good on paper but unfortunately, that's not how the reality works.
In reality, some articles never make it to the first page of the search results.
The content is filtered because it is flagged as duplicate content.
The search engines are always changing their algorithms to ensure that the user experience stays a positive one.
The second source of traffic comes from Ezine publishers.
Some site owners run Ezines with a list of subscribers.
They are always on the lookout for good content to share with their subscribers.
Publishers are hoping that their articles are good enough to be featured in such Ezines.
When an article gets sent to thousands of subscribers, the rewards can be substantial.