Every once in awhile I peel off another layer of this thing we call the internet.  Last week it was “Article Marketing”.  I was reading a blog post that referenced article marketing and mentioned that it was a good way to get your name out there and get some “brand equity” around what you were in business about or interested in.

The ArticleMarketer.com site sounded too good to be true, but since I had some articles already written and there was a free trial I decided to give it a shot.  I was curious to see how it all worked, and if I’d see any results.

So I submitted my Blog-based Sites vs. Traditional Sites posted here a few weeks ago.

My article was forwarded on to some Yahoo! Groups and a Topica List.  Since I wasn’t a member of these groups and lists already, I first had to respond to several emails to confirm my request to join them.

Once I joined, it took from 2-6 days for my article to run through the list.  These lists are catch-alls for articles of every sort, so my article appears along with reasons to set a tee time for golf and how to choose a baby swing.

From there, my article popped out on three websites.  I had to categorize my article, and it appears that these are websites that do nothing but pull articles of that category and post them online.  This Google Search shows where my article ended up.

So - results?

Well, I’ve certainly not made a single dollar from submitting my articles through this channel.  The main benefit seems to be getting better search engine saturation around your name and a specific content topic.  The article-aggregation sites look to be indexed and placed well—as active as I’ve been online one of them is showing on page two in Google for “Michael Boyink”.

The key seems to be the “about the author” area, where you can link back to your own site.

The flip side of this content channel is that, as a site owner, these articles are available to you as long as you follow some simple guidelines.

Based on experiences in generating content on client projects, that might be the greater value of this system