Article marketing began with business owners providing useful content for newspapers to run for free. It reduces the cost of a publication producing its own content and provides free advertising for the company. Everyone's a winner.

The important factor is that the article is interesting, entertaining and useful to readers, rather than just being advertising copy. Readers seem to respect content (even if paid) a lot more than blatant up-front adverts, and often the content is beneficial to readers (i.e a debt consolidation firm offering advice on how to avoid having your house repossessed).

Article Marketing Online
With the rise of the internet, and online marketing as an industry, article marketing has made the move to the online world. As before, online article marketing provides publishers with free content and advertisers with free advertising.

Advertisers can upload their content to an article directory, and the directory syndicates that content across lots of article databases, blogs and other online publications, who appreciate free content and don't mind a small amount of advertising copy being included with the content. The article directory adds a small amount of ad copy to the content also, so the more widely the content is syndicated the more free adverts are appearing for content creator and article directory.

There is an additional benefit to article marketing online, in that the articles can be geared around a particular set of niche keywords, to establish target audiences and achieve greater search engine rankings.

Many marketers use this free advertising opportunity, writing hundreds and thousands of articles to provide many backlinks (links to the marketers website). These links are rated by Google in terms of volume and quality, and search engine results (at least in Google) will be affected.

Problems
Because of the incredible potential search benefits of article marketing, the directories have been swamped with often sub-standard content which is of no use to readers. Sophisticated search engine optimisation providers understand that it is imperative that the content being provided is of the highest quality, to ensure usefulness to readers, rather than simply weak advertising copy encouraging you to 'click here'.

Web 2.0
Article Marketing has increased in popularity under the Web 2.0 generation of the internet. Many have gained popularity through the syndication of articles through social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The increase in popularity of article marketing has caused an overall reduction in quality, with many writing low quality articles as a quick way to receiving advertising exposure. The correct use of article marketing is to syndicate relevant articles of a high quality.