Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

The submission sites can only do so much. Yes, they generate some backlinks. But it's the value of the article, located in the right place, with the right set of eyes, read at the right time. Ultimately, you want people to know that your website is the "to-go" place for great information, not an anonymous article bank.

Articles can be very good for business. They are inexpensive means of marketing. Also can make the author/author's company recognized as experts in the industry.

But the articles must be written correctly for the magazine to publish them. Few magazines will accept articles that are barely hidden advertisements. Instead, the magazine has a target audience and editorial goals - and an article written that targets the audience and meets the editorial goals has a greater chance of being run.

Most articles run by people in the industry are called by-line articles. A brief bio and contact info is listed in the "by line" at the end of the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline

Oh, how do I know what I speak of? One of my side jobs is as editor for a for-profit a regional kayaking magazine. I've seen many articles submitted we just can't run, and others that are well written (so meet our needs) but are also effective at promoting the author's business.

The main goal of my role as a Public Relations Specialist is to write articles for trade publications. As mentioned above, if they have editorial credibility, with some relevancy for the audience, then editors are generally happy to receive our submissions (that doesn't mean they'll necessarily run the articles).

In my experience, after one of our by-lined articles runs in a publication, we do receive incoming calls and inquiries to our sales department as a result, which is great. So, for us, articles work quite well.