Article Marketing or Video Marketing?

Article marketing and video marketing are two aspects of online business promotion which are very common and very popular as well. The reason is that both are free and both are capable of pulling in visitors if properly targeted with related keywords. However, video marketing is relatively newer to article marketing, which is there from the very beginning of online business and web promotion.

Article marketing – an overused strategy?

Initially article marketing was doing well. Many search engine marketers have made money by creating one article, stuffed with keywords and links back to main site’s landing pages and submitting it to several article directories. But increasing competition, innovation of automated article writing software and spreading of viral articles degraded the quality of content inevitably. Moreover, Google got busy in improving its search algorithms almost everyday. So, the things got tougher and an alternative was required to stay ahead in the competition.

Video Marketing as an effective alternative

With the growing popularity of social media as internet marketing platform video marketing came as an alternative. Multimedia attracts people more than a plain article. A video with sound and moving images can instantly impact viewers mind. There is no denying that video has a larger target market. So, interesting videos were created and distributed across various social networking sites and video sharing platforms for branding and marketing. With time creating, viewing and downloading high resolution videos have become a lot easier. And it has been proved that like human users search engines also love videos provided you upload them with relevant keyword or key phrases.

Which one to choose?

And there arises the question, which one to focus – video marketing or article marketing? Well, from experts’ point of view, both are important. Both are capable of boosting your website’s rank on SERPs if targeted properly. Video may have a wider spectrum but articles are still valued as good resource. Google values contextual links as more authentic and natural way to earn backlinks these days. And in addition to article directories, blogging and guest posting on related blogs have opened up a new horizon for article marketing. However, good quality of the text content is a high priority. So, the best possible way is to combine these two strategies – article marketing and video marketing in your web marketing campaign to get the best result.

Today I noticed an interesting thing.

I was searching for some linkbaiting tips and found this article “13 linkbaiting tips that may sell”. I knew it was written for article syndication.

I searched the title in Google.com as “13 linkbaiting tips that may sell” to find out how many sites syndicated that article. (There was nothing great in these articles being syndicated all over the web.)

But the interesting thing is that, Google showed the original site (outgoing links in that article were pointing to Vertical-Leap.co.uk) in the result page though that sentence (13 linkbaiting tips that may sell) was not there in that site’s home page.

That article used the following anchor texts:

SEO company, SEO content writing, search engine marketing

Among these three key phrase only ‘SEO company’ was pointing to the home page (others were pointing to the internal pages of that website).

I looked for the cached page of that site and found an interesting note by Google: “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: 13 linkbaiting tips that may sell” (highlighted in the image).

[Click to enlarge]

In fact the site is getting some rank for the keyword “linkbaiting tips” (within inverted comma) too.

So what is the big deal? I got some questions for webmasters:

• What about the duplicate content issue?
• While link building, we emphasize on the anchor text number of outgoing links, relevancy of other links etc. Now, should we also start considering the title of the page from where we are getting links! (‘13 linkbaiting tips that may sell’ is the title of most of the pages.)
• Should webmasters stop article promotion or should they start it with more energy?

Any idea?