Article Written By: Bobby Lee
Content is king. You have most likely heard that millions of times but it's true. That's why writing articles is among the most utilized Internet marketing media today. It's likewise one of the most abused marketing methods.The online advertising craze began picking up with the introduction of FFA (Free For ALL) sites. These sites allowed you to submit your link or ad, which gradually rotated off the page as new links were submitted. As soon as this method of advertising became known, scores of people rushed to FFA sites and started submitting their ads. Programmers invented ways to automate the process of submitting links to a huge selection of websites within seconds, causing it to become an ineffective marketing option due to the scores of people who began utilizing this system. Links would rotate off the page within seconds and this eventually led to the downfall and popularity of them.One more marketing method, which rapidly became useless, was banner advertising and exchanges. People covered their websites with banners, learned how to cheat exchanges and surfers started to train their eyes to ignore them completely. Because of this, image advertising likewise became ineffective.Automated page creation was also a problem as a large number of people started to create gateway pages as a means to draw in the search engines with numerous pages stuffed with keywords to increase their site's page rank. Gateway page generators automated the process of building these pages and shortly they sprang up throughout the internet. Ultimately this fad also became useless because of abuse as well as the introduction of smarter search engine spiders.The latest moneymaking craze is Google Adwords. As soon as pay-per-click advertising grew in popularity, webmasters found how easy it was to earn income by filling their sites with useless content to be able to make money from textual advertising. The automation monster appeared again making it fairly easy to submit articles to countless content sites by just clicking a couple of buttons.In steps PLR membership sites. PLR articles, also called Private Label Rights articles or public domain articles, provide individuals who are too lazy to write their own content with a way to get links back to their website and hopefully sell some of their products in the process.Search engines have begun penalizing websites for duplicate content. In response, new programs are being produced which randomize paragraphs and alter words within an article to make them unique enough to bypass the duplicate content filters. So now we have automated article creation?Publishers are beginning to recognize the different methods of article abuse and it is becoming more difficult to get articles approved. As editors start tiring of trying to keep up with the massive influx of articles which are clearly written for the sole purpose of gaining link popularity or to advertise affiliate links, we will see more article directories shut down.Is automation really the monster here? I think not!Automated article submission is a great tool for submitting articles to a large number of sites providing it's used properly. So what's the problem?Greed and laziness - plain and simple.Automation enables writers to submit their articles to many sites fast and easily, freeing up more time to write original content. The problem originates from those who are always looking for a quick way to earning money, instead of to work for it.Article marketing abuse will soon reach its peak just as FFA sites, banner advertising and gateway pages did. Eventually we will look at private label articles as another passing trend and online publishers will be able to provide their visitors with quality content once more. For now, we can only wait until those hoping to get rich quick find another marketing option to automate and abuse.
This Article Has Been Published on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 and Read 327 Times