Article Writing and Distribution Has a Sexier Name These Days

In the “old days” of 2009, during the height of EzineArticles, BUM Marketing, and article writing and distribution, no one really had a good name for what so many people were doing. In ’10 and ’11, we got a whole slew of slightly better names, like ‘SEO content production’ or ‘Article marketing’. But it wasn’t until the middle of last year that the process of writing stuff and putting it online for everyone to see was finally sexified into the umbrella of “Content marketing”.

Content (Marketing) Is King
People have been saying for years that ‘content is king’, and it’s never been untrue. If you want to win the Internet game, you have to write stuff — A LOT OF STUFF. A lot of good stuff. The old BUM marketers would pick a product they wanted to affiliate market, put up a website promoting it, and then write 5-10 articles a day every day for a month all promoting the product. Considering that 350 words is pretty much the minimum standard for avoiding a “thin content” penalty under Penguin, that’s a minimum of fifty-two thousand, five hundred words per month — but they made a living doing it.

Can you imagine what a professional content producer — someone with a Gladwellian ten thousand hours of article writing experience under his belt — does with that kind of word count? I’ll tell you: they make companies like Travelocity a snogging snotload of money by writing about Cancun and Thailand. They make companies like WalMart a bragging boatload of money by writing about The Avengers’ Loki Figurine with Spinning Staff Action.

And they — or perhaps a slightly less experienced, slightly less pricey variant on the theme — could make your company a lesser loadout of money by writing more than fifty-thousand words per month about your industry and putting them up on your blogs, other people’s blogs, article directories, and independent websites. It’s a traffic funnel, it’s a sales funnel, it’s organic SEO, and it’s reputation management all in one — it’s Content Marketing. Welcome to the twenty-teens.