As an article marketer you have more than one choice in methodology.  You could do things the white hat way by writing and publishing each article from scratch.  You could choose a darker path of using an article spinner or a distribution service to leverage your efforts.  Of the different methods that people use in article marketing, the white hat path is by far the most challenging.

White hat article marketing is challenging for a number of reasons.  One of the biggest challenges that you will face is finding enough high quality places to publish your articles.  Don’t get me wrong.  There are plenty of places out there.  The problem is finding them.  You see, the good places and the bad places usually look pretty darn similar.  Until you submit an article to a site, you won’t really know for sure whether that site is a good one or not.

Many of the article directories that promise to accept well written articles will never even get around to approving your article.  Nobody tells you that though.  You don’t learn that key point until after you try to publish on there the first time.  The site looks perfectly legit.  You submit an article that you put a substantial amount of effort into.  Then you wait for months hoping that one day they will approve that article.  You can’t wait for it to start delivering traffic and SEO benefits.  But, that day never comes.  You wait and wait, but it seems like they never approved your article.  You search for your article by title in Google.  It is nowhere to be found.  You begin to wonder if it did get published and just not indexed.  Did they even publish it at all?  Was it rejected for some reason?  Who knows?

Since the Google Panda update happened a lot of the article directories have been somewhat neglected.  The owners of the article directories have moved on to new projects because the outlook for their article directory business model is uncertain.  Unless they put a spin on their site to make it different than the rest, then it is unlikely that their business model will survive long term.  So you can’t really blame them for moving on.  It would be nice if they would post something on their site to let you know about it though.

You would think that these website owners would fight, kick and scratch for authors like you who write and publish one hundred percent all original articles intended to attract readers.  That is the kind of content that really adds value to their directory.  In fairness, maybe they do really want your content badly.  Maybe it is just too hard to separate from all the spam they get overloaded with.

I suggest you keep track of every place you submit articles too so that you can track whether or not they approve them.  That way you can become more efficient over time.  It would be a major waste to submit to an article directory more than once if they didn’t approve your first well written article.   Once you have a nice long list of decent websites that will accept your articles, then your article marketing efforts will be a little less challenging than the other white hat people are experiencing.

Maybe you are wondering if article marketing still works or not?  With as much work as it takes to write all those articles and find decent places to publish them, you have to question that from time to time.  I built a website to conduct a case study about article marketing.  The study is going to prove definitively one way or the other about whether it is worth your time and effort to publish a bunch of well written articles as a primary means for website promotion.  So far the results have been quite interesting.  I share all the details on the website's homepage.