How to get it wrong with article marketing

Oh my!

Where to start with this one…

As a buzzword, the term article marketing has gained no end of momentum over the past couple of years or so.
Much like an avalanche, things started in a very gradual manner a few years ago with a handful of clued-up writers providing valuable information to less knowledgeable individuals whilst craftily promoting their own web sites in the process.
Blinder!

Not only did these articles get spread all over the web and provide endless sources of fresh traffic to their author’s site(s), each article would also act as an inbound link to add to their overall link popularity score.
Double Blinder!

During the early part of 2005, the movement had finally gathered enough momentum to attract the attention of the mainstream promotion crowd, which promptly leapt upon the bandwagon with much gusto.
The result was a growing torrent of badly written (yet still mainly informative) articles joining the rest on its journey down internet mountain.

By itself, this would have been easily sustainable, had it not been for the appearance on the scene of the sort of monosyllabic slack-lipper who is incapable of writing even a bad article.
Aided and abetted by shoddy pieces of software* promising to ‘Rewrite Articles Automatically’ to produce original content, these idiots are flooding the web with a barrage of toot which is not even remotely readable - in the full expectation of getting a huge number of inbound links to boost their site’s standing with the major search engines.

Here’s a quick newsflash: “Keep on waiting for those inbound links boys and girls, because nobody in their right mind will want to embarrass themselves by subjecting his or her visitors to the kind of incomprehensible waste you’re producing.”
“Oh, and if you’re relying on automatic links, these aren’t really worth anything much in the greater scheme of things, so you’re wasting your time there as well.”

A well written, authoritative article will still get far more exposure and expert standing than an entire week’s worth of automatic output.
If software could write coherent articles, authors and journalists would be out of business.
The last time I looked, they were still honourable (sort of) and well paying professions. 

*These programs rely mainly on substituting synonyms and jumbling the original’s grammar to produce something ‘original’.
On a readability and comprehensibility scale from 1 to 10 they score somewhere around minus 267.

Now, as this avalanche is nearing the unsuspecting village at the valley’s bottom, it is a mess of blinding spray, sticks, boulders and other assorted detritus which hits the unsuspecting web-mountain folk full in the face and buries them under a heap of meaningless junk, to suffocate slowly amongst the nonsense and grammatical errors whilst searching for something worthwhile.

Thank heaven for Alpine Rescue in the form of Social Networks like Digg and Delicious which allow users to rescue worthwhile efforts leaving the rest buried under a pile of their bretheren.

Food for thought?
Damn Right!