The best way of article marketing is open to debate. Is it quality for consumers or quantity for back links?

If you look around the Internet there are several recommended styles of article marketing so how do you decide which is the right way for you? On the one hand there are those who swear by writing several articles a day and submitting them to as many directories as they can. Then there are those who write one article and either use software to spin them into several articles or make small changes like title and first paragraph and submit the similar articles to the same sites. Then there are those who write one quality article daily, weekly or monthly and just submit to a few sites.

All of those ways of article marketing may work, but which works the best? Lets just go through the different ways.

1. Most of us do not have the time to write several articles a day and if they are about the same subject, intending to promote one particular site those articles can become repetitive and lose quality to quantity. Of course some people can write several good articles a day but I do not think that I am one of them.

2. Spinning articles might be a great time saver, but when you look at the results of spinning they can be laughable. The articles often do not make sense to the reader and can be difficult to understand in much the same way as badly translated articles. Many directories do not want those articles; I know that I do not want articles on my site that visitors may have difficulty in understanding.

3. Changing the first paragraph and or the title of an article and submitting it to different sites is great, that means there is not so much of a duplicate content issue. Submitting the altered versions of the same article to the same directories is not on. Last week a joker submitted the same article to my directory with slightly different titles 4 times using 4 different accounts. As if I was not going to notice the similarities when I looked at the list of articles waiting for approval!

4. Then there is quality and submitting to fewer sites. A quality article is a pleasure to approve. I enjoy reading the article, I know that the quality of my site is going to improve and I know that the quality articles are going to bring in more traffic to my site. I also know that a quality article does not need to be submitted to hundreds of sites or spun. A quality article will be picked up on by publishers and replicated pretty darn quick.

You can guess which article marketing style I prefer; its quality all the way. Looking at number 4 I sound like a proper know it all. I do not think that I know everything but I do know what my site stats tell me. The author articles that get the most hits are nearly always the articles that I have regarded as high quality, or have been interesting enough to read all the way through.

I have different ways of defining quality that may make me seem contrary, but I have always looked at things in different ways. A business colleague calls me a lateral thinker, I think he means a pain in the b**t!

Quality that is extremely well written, but on occasion no matter how well an article is written if the content is dry and boring the article is not going to fly for the majority of readers unless it contains specific information. I do not claim to be an extremely good writer, I think that I am an adept writer who can occasionally pull off unexpected great results almost by accident. I have had enough of those accidents to be able to figure out why those articles are hitting the spot and why articles such as this one is unlikely to produce masses of hits.

One of my accidents was an article about where I live. I wrote it as an example because I wanted members of my travel site to write about where they live. It started out as an article about a regular town and without initially intending to I added paragraphs about places of interest and tourist spots within 10 miles. It dawned on me after writing the article that although I live in an industrial town that would not be considered on it’s own a tourist centre, like most places there are tourist spots close enough by to include a mention in an article.

That article does better for hits than most articles of my own and those of authors on my sites that have been especially written for article marketing. I asked myself why and came up with 2 reasons. One was that I had added a good variety of keywords and phrases without thinking about it. The other reason I suspect is that the article is unique, very different to any other travel article that I have seen out there. It is also obvious that I know the place well whereas most article marketing travel articles don’t give you a sense of the authors knowing the places that they write about and show little personality.

Another accident was an article written a month ago about my bad experience with a spyware fraud. I was so cheesed off that I turned to writing to make myself feel better. I have never known an article get so many hits in such a short time. It has been picked up by a lot of webmasters, bloggers and ezines and I am sure it still has plenty of scope. I have even seen it on some geek sites, now that’s something I never thought would happen to an article of mine!

I think that the article is doing well because it is offering information written from obvious personal experience that people want and need and those people have had the common sense to do a search before being scared into parting with their money.

The top 2 articles on my directory every month are my own scam warnings. They are only on a couple of my sites so the hits are not spread between zillions of article directories. Again I am providing information that people want and need. Neither of the articles were written for the purpose of article marketing and a variety of keywords and phrases happened naturally.

So to me a quality article is reasonably well written, packed with information written from experience that people want or need, unique or as different to other articles as possible and showing some personality.

The fatal flaw in my accidents is that I have not used the articles to promote money making ventures, just my sites in general. I will have to get a grip and accidentally make some money from them!

I’ll end this far too long article by including a quote from a forum that made me think. ‘Thats a major problem I see in article directories -- its so difficult to find good content in them that they are not nearly as useful to article consumers as they could be.’