Article writing and distribution is a tool that has a lot of function. It’s like the Swiss army knife of SEO — it can build backlinks, expand your sales funnel, drive your online reputation, act as a secondary landing page, prime readers into a buying mood, and it bring business overnight and for life. But the cutting-edge market analysts are starting to talk in terms of entrepreneurs becoming “market leaders” rather than simply starting a website and profiting from affiliate sales or other such techniques from yesteryear. Can our favorite all-purpose SEO tool keep up with the changing demands from the gurus?

Of course it can! Becoming a market leader, if you talk to the likes of Ed Dale of The Challenge, is essentially an exercise in developing a reputation. Ed suggests a blog, and of course that’s a great centerpiece of on online presence, but it’s never enough. Blog posting is just part of what should be a larger, organized effort to get your name into the mouths of everyone in your target market.

And of course, the other parts of that effort are going to rely on techniques that SEO has used for decades. Get a static (non-blog) website, write and distribute articles about your market, start a few Web 2.0 properties (and maintain them!), and get yourself some expert credentials by putting on free talks at local community colleges.

Market leadership is about two things: actually learning the details about your target market, and showing everyone that you’ve done the learning and you know your stuff. The first part takes a lot of hard work — but the second part is actually mostly about old-school SEO. In the end it all comes back to the oldest truth in internet marketing: if you can’t drive traffic, you aren’t going to succeed, period.

Fortunately, there are several ways that you can use other people’s SEO efforts to boost your own visibility and traffic. Article writing and distribution happens to be one of the best, which is why it will always have a place at the heart and soul of every online company’s arsenal.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of Bum Marketing, it works something like this: you have no website, no money, and no nothing except a computer, an Internet connection, and a basic understanding of the English language. You go out and find a product that has an affiliate program and an article directory that will allow you to post affiliate links. You write articles about the product, include your affiliate links, and post them.

At some point, someone reads your article, follows your affiliate link, and buys the product. You make money. It’s article writing and distribution at it’s most primal and unpolished.

The thing about Bum Marketing is that it actually works for some people. To figure out how this relates to SEO, we have to look at which people it works for — and more specifically what they do to make it work.

What they do is simple: they write a strong article. Then, they spin it on both the sentence and the word levels. Then they take the spun articles and they distribute them across hundreds of article directories. They link all of the spins to one ‘main’ article, and then they attach their affiliate link to the ‘main’ article.

This works, and it works well — because not only are they weaving a wide sales funnel to guide visitors down, but the linking structure makes that ‘main’ article look very nice to the search engines, so it’ll get maximum natural traffic and exposure.

We SEO nerds would do well to look at this humble, grassroots practice when we build our backlinks. If we take the time to identify the best pieces of off-page content and build link structures around them, we could end up benefiting our clients even more in the long run than if we had simply built those structures around the parent site.

It might run contrary to some people’s ideas of SEO, because those secondary links obviously don’t help the main page achieve first page placement. On the other hand, if the off-page content is good enough to drive traffic and get conversions, will the client really be that upset that there was an extra step between Google and his pocketbook?

Directory submission is one of those everyday SEO activities that most people think they have pretty much down pat. You find a directory that accepts websites, you turn in your link, and then you find another directory. It’s almost the most idiot-proof, dead-simple kind of website SEO you can imagine. But there are complexities to directory submission that many SEO novices might not imagine; one of those complexities is the difference between free directories and paid directories.

Why would you ever pay to have your website listed in a directory if there are free directories out there waiting to be submitted to? We’ll explain that in a moment. Before we get there, let’s look at the things that make one free directory better than another.

Age — Obviously, Google values links from older domains more than links from newbie domains.
Relevance — There are lots of generic directories out there, but there are also plenty of niche-specific directories that will earn your backlink extra ‘juice’ for their relevance to your site’s subject.
Static Links — Directories with dynamic links are pointless for SEO; your link might not be listed on any given crawl of the Google spider. Static links are a must.
Dofollow Links — Should be pretty obvious.
Controllable Anchor Text — You can’t focus on a specific keyword if the directory forces you to use something like your URL as your anchor text.

So, now you know what makes a good free directory. When you discuss paid directories, you have to take all of those rules into account as well, but you also have to add in the extra factor of “cost-per-juice”. It might be worth it, for example, to spend $300 for a year of listing on the Yahoo! Directory — it’s got a cubic boatload of all of the attributes mentioned above, and it’ll be a powerful link.

It’s probably not worth it, however, to spend $300 to get listed on the Alive Directory. They’re trying to become as authoritative as Yahoo!, and they think that charging the same amount will lead to the same quality — but they’re far from worth it at the moment.

So, paid directories can be totally worth the cost it takes to get listed, but only if they’re everything a good free directory is and then some — so be cautious, but don’t hesitate if you find a few good ones.

If there’s one complaint that webmasters have about article writing and distribution, it’s that it takes a long, long time to do it right. Not only do you have to know all of the rules that the biggest, baddest article directory (you know who you are) lays on its writers, but you also have to research and write articles relevant to your business. Then, you have to submit them — and if you don’t syndicate them over at least a dozen directories, you’re losing out on a lot of the potential of those articles. That’s several man-hours just in submissions!

So, how do the experts do it? The answer is “very much the same way that they do Forum posting.” That is to say, they start with a subject, they find a source that says something interesting, they rewrite that interesting thing so that it’s in completely different words, and they post it. Only with article writing and distribution, they add a couple of extra steps. The end result is the four-star method.

• First, they find a source. Sometimes it’s SGoogle News, sometimes it’s EzineArticles, sometimes it’s a cribd document. The point is that they choose source material that is clean, well-written, and of course relevant.
• Next, they rewrite the source material — often combining two or more sources — and they work in the keyword according to the rules of basic SEO (and EZA, of course).
• Then, they submit the article to those directories that manually go over all of their entries, and they wait for those to get approved.
• Finally, they go autosubmit to hundreds of less discerning directories, often after adding a backlink to a copy of the same article on the more discerning directories.

The end result, assuming the writer has a decent command of the English language and actually understands the topic at hand, is a few articles on a few powerful sites that each have dozens of backlinks to them from other iterations of the same article — making them much stronger to the search engines than if they were simple standalone articles.