Article marketing is one of the most widely used methods of promoting a website and making money online. It’s not just those people submitting articles to article directories who should be considered to be an article marketer. Every hub on hubpages.com, every lens on Squidoo.com was put together by an article marketer. Whether they call themselves that or not.

Article marketing is changing rapidly with the advent of “Web 2.0″, Social Media and social networking sites. What worked back in 2006 isn’t so effective any more. But article marketing and marketing with articles will continue to grow in popularity and become even more powerful than it was back then.

Back in the day, you could submit an article to hundreds of article directories and everyone of them would give a reasonablly powerful “back link” to your site. For a time is was a marketers paradise, but you can see why the good times had to come to an end.

When something becomes “easy” it tends to become low quality. This is definately what happened to traditional “old style” article marketing.

What killed old style article marketing?

In my logical opinion, old style article marketing was killed by 3 things.

1. The proliferation of article directories on the Internet. So called “Internet Marketing Guru’s” made it too easy for “wanabees” to own their own directory. This in itself would not have been so much of a problem had it not been for….

2. Automatic article submission software. These were the real killer. With all that spammy content being submitted to all those spammy directories, Google had to do something. The changes they made hurt even the good quality content and top authors. (Traditional article marketing is less effective for everyone as a result of this).

3. All the hype about making easy money with “Google Adsense” that has been stuffed down the throat of everyone in Internet marketing circles since 2005. Without this hype they would have been less people wanting to own their own article directory.

With all that unmoderated, duplicate, “spammy” content filling up the article directories, the “Big G” had to do something. So they stopped passing link authority from all but a handful of article directory sites. You can no longer use Article Marketing alone to increase your Google Page Rank and SERP’s.

But that does not mean that you cannot get traffic from traditional article marketing or that it does not have it’s place in your overall online marketing strategy you just need to be more selective about where you submit your content and more importantly, the content that you submit.

Dan Blackburn is the owner of the popular article directory article content king.

(c) Dan Blackburn. This article may be republished as long as all links are left in tack.