The History of Article Marketing (Part 1of 2)

Article marketing has been around for nearly as long as
the Web has been around, even though the web certainly
wasn’t invested for marketing purposes! In the beginning,
back in the 90’s), people were very involved with sharing
information with one another. I recently read some place
that this sharing activity was sometimes referred to as
"the spirit of the Internet," and, to some extent, that
spirit still exists today. Mind you, it isn't always quite
as obvious as it was back then.

The Internet was configured for the free and fast exchange
of information. People wrote articles on a variety of
subjects, for the purpose of sharing information and for
educating others. Initially, there weren’t any article
repositories, as such. As a matter of fact, the newsletter,
also referred to as an ezine, came into play earlier than
article banks or repositories.

So, in the early days of the web, if you wanted to share
an article with the online community, you placed it on
your website, or in a Usenet newsgroup, or a newsletter.
Eventually, people allowed other newsletter publishers to
use their articles, and in this way the author’s resource
box was born.

Since articles had such an impact, well-informed marketers
saw the potential for writing and distributing articles.
They quickly saw this as an effective way to promote their
businesses. They began writing and distributing articles
on a regular basis. In this way, article marketing was
born, even though it wasn’t necessarily called that back
then.

The articles were formatted in much the way that they are
formatted today, except that html tags were not used. In
other words, articles were all basic text, just as many
are today. However, while links in articles are usually
hyperlinked today, they were not hyperlinked back then.

In case you aren't aware of it, when a link is hyperlinked,
the reader can simply click on it and visit the webpage.
When it is not hyperlinked, the reader must copy and paste
the URL into their web browser, or type it in.

Over time, marketers realized that copywriting skills were
valuable in article marketing. Those skills helped in writing
outstanding, attention getting headlines, and in creating
an effective author resource box.

The early articles were usually of very high quality, even
though marketers did largely write them to promote their
businesses. The "spirit" of the free information-sharing
internet was very strong!

All the best,
Laurie

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