In my work with article marketing I solicit questions from people who want the free, prequalified, targeted traffic from writing simple little articles, and one question keeps coming up time after time:

Q. Does article marketing still work?

Sometimes the writers are wondering about backlinks, or search engine optimization techniques, or any of the other tactics for which they’re using articles, but it all boils down to the question of whether it still works…

…and whether it will continue to work in the future.

Here’s Why Article Marketing Will Always Work

The simple answer is that getting free traffic from articles happens for many different reasons, and there’s no way every one of those reasons will vanish.

For example, the search engine aspect — even if every search engine in the world vanished overnight there are still many ways you can use articles to drive traffic to your sites.

Even if the search engines stopped indexing links in articles, so the use of backlinks ceased to work, there are still many ways to drive the user to your web site.

The only way article marketing will stop working is if people stop reading — and that’s never going to happen. A lot of reading has switched from physical books, magazines, and newspapers to the digital versions, and articles used to promote products or service have switched right along with them.

Just to get your thinker working, let me give you three ways to use articles for marketing on the internet that don’t rely on search engines in the slightest.

1. Become A White Knight – In general, you help people who write ezines/newsletters, blogs, etc., come up with new content for their readers, so they win, and you win because your resource box is exposed to a new audience.

2. Long Term Sales On Autopilot – Use your articles as a “passive sales pitch” in a series of autoresponder messages. Once people join your mailing list, start sending them sales messages in the form of articles (that also give them great information).

3. Automatic Special Reports – Combine several articles on the same topic together and publish as a PDF file. You now have a “special report” that can be given away as an incentive to join your mailing list, or even sold as a stand-alone product.

I’ve written entire articles on those techniques, so look them up if you’re interested in all the details.

No matter how you slice it, article marketing has been around for decades and will be around for decades to come, driving free traffic to our web sites.