Article Marketing is by far the most reliable long term internet marketing strategy for one primary reason. It provides web content which is the reason millions of users worldwide surf the internet daily. They seek for information.

Articles are the core of information on the net, whether they are objective or subjective about any issue. Search engines were built to provide content and actually the struggle was to provide the most relevant web content according to the search terms the user provides.

Article Marketing is a relative new internet marketing industry with great potential. However many pitfalls and misunderstandings have been released lately. That was expected because it's a market principal, whenever there is growth and opportunity, "opportunists" and "scammers" step in.

The first subject is the article submission software and article automation procedures of any kind. The promises sound great. Massive submissions to article directories with push button software solutions. As tempting as it may seem, it is too good to be true. That happens because the algorithms the huge search engines corporations developed are so advanced that they detect any instant massive growth of links of any website. They are programmed to consider this "growth" as unnatural and then take precautions. These precautions could be a downgrade on search engine results for the spamming website or ban it completely form the search engines.

In simple words do not try to fool search engines giants like Google for example. Their spam filters are extremely advanced. Even if you succeed the spamming temporarily you will be discovered sooner or later and if you have a serious online business you jeopardize it.

The same applies to instant and massive web content growth of the website. For example if you had a website with five sub WebPages and after 3 days you have 2000 web pages. Google spam filters will detect it again as an unnatural web content growth of your website and proceed to the according measures. You must realize that search engines will do anything to protect the quality of their search results because this will bring targeted traffic and consequently the advertisers. You must grow your website and internet exposure step by step. This way you will gain long turn results and you will not be afraid of Google's frequently algorithm's alterations because you follow the rules.

The next subject is the PLR industry (Private Label Articles). Since most of the people are not writers or they despise writing, there comes the PLR solution which is monthly service (most of the cases) providing a number of articles each month to the subscriber. These articles are written by ghost writers and provided to hundreds of paying subscribers. It seems ideal but it's not.

The spam filters are here too and focus on duplicated content. The same article by dozens of websites will not give you any advantage. What you can do is to modify them or by hand (which is time consuming) or with using some of the anti-duplicate content software titles. But there relies a problem. Most of these software titles do modify the articles for search engines but it's not readable by the users. So you must be careful and check constantly what the PLR software provides and how alters the article.

The last subject relates with the article directories which have been increased massively the last two years. Should you consider submitting your article to 500 article directories without examining the quality of each one, or you should improve the quality of your article and submit it to qualitative ones?

The second case is more effective in the long run because you maximize your possibilities to have your article published to a huge online publication with thousands of unique visitors daily. In that way you gain massive exposure and most important credibility to your industry.

Finally the conclusion of the above is that shortcuts will not help you. The future on web content industry belongs to people who are not afraid to write (they don't have to be novelists) and produce Unique content. The entrepreneurs who grasp the value of unique content and apply it to their marketing efforts will definitely gain the advantage.