There is no doubt about it. It’s not 2006 anymore and the glory days of article marketing are long dead and gone. Long live article marketing. I know this article is going to ruffle a lot of feathers, but somebody has got to let you in on the real deal or you’re going to be working under a premise that simply doesn’t exist anymore. While I can’t possibly cover everything in this article, I will cover the main areas where things have changed…drastically.

For one thing, if you’re submitting articles to article directories, the standards have changed. Directories are a lot stricter today than they were years ago. For example, I just recently edited an article from a few years back by changing the resource box. When I went to resubmit, even though the article itself didn’t change, it was initially rejected because the keyword percentage was 2.8%. Years ago, this was fine. But now, with Google cracking down on keyword saturation, anything above 2% is toast. So I had to do some keyword cutting to get the article approved. So standards themselves have gone up.

In addition to that, the niches themselves have become more saturated. There are more article marketers out there than ever before. So you have more people fighting for the same piece of the pie, or in some cases, even less of the pie where markets have actually decreased in demand.

Then of course you have competition from other sources of promotion. You have things like Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo and other web 2.0 platforms that are making it harder for article directories to rank. Years ago, if you found an article on a particular subject, it was most likely from an article directory. Today, that isn’t necessarily the case. You have a lot of niches where your top results are now video and NOT articles at all. YouTube has become a powerhouse for the SERPs for many niches that used to be dominated by articles.

And the above is just the tip of the iceberg. In short, article marketing is no longer just that. It has now become content marketing where you need to take your articles and re-purpose them in many ways, including turning them into free PDF downloads and even videos.

If you’re going to play the old article marketing game the way it used to be played back in 2006, you are going to lose that game. You’re going to need to step things up and ramp things up.

Those who don’t are going to be left behind.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Sick of not getting your articles read? Fed up with resource boxes that don’t get the job done? Want to write articles that will turn you into a killer article marketer? Get my book on article writing and marketing located at http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/tcawamg.html - This is my own book written from over 30 years of writing experience.