It’s important to make the distinction between articles used in article marketing and press releases intended for news media, because they each involve very different styles of writing.
Let’s start with the similarities…
Article Marketing and Online Press Releases do have a few things in common:
- They both involve writing (duh, right? )
- They both involve building backlinks to a website
- They both have SEO benefits (they can increase your search engine rankings for your keywords if done properly)
- They have a submission process–articles used in article marketing and press releases both have channels of distribution that allow them to reach publishers.
Here’s how articles used in Article Marketing and Online Press Releases are different:
Time Sensitive vs. Evergreen
With press releases, usually the information is time sensitive and makes some sort of announcement, whereas the content provided in an article should be timeless (ideally) and educational.
Journalist vs. Teacher
You may talk about your own business in a press release, but only in a way that sounds like news (you cannot submit a hyped-up sales letter as a press release). If you write about your own business it should be in a style that sounds like you are writing as a third-party, sort of like a journalist in a newspaper.
With article marketing, you will not write about yourself or your business in the article body, and you can’t quote yourself or refer to your business products or website in the article body, even if it’s in a 3rd person style.
With your articles, the appropriate place to reference your business and website is your resource box, which sits below your article.
Part of the difference between a press release and an article used in article marketing is the difference between a journalist and a teacher. Usually a journalist will focus on news items and time sensitive material, while a teacher will be instructing students (readers) how to do something, or explaining some concept that is timeless.
Speed vs. Endurance
Article marketing is a long term marketing strategy that results in an increase of links over time (after submitting an article the number of publishers who re-publish the article multiplies and the article popularity tends to go up over time, which results in an increase in traffic), whereas the time-sensitive material conveyed in a press release usually limits the burst of traffic or links generated by a press release to a short span of time.
The upside of press releases is that they receive a different type of exposure than articles. Press releases are published on networks of news syndication websites, news portals and sometimes they even reach large news websites. Also, Google seems to value what it considers to be “news”, as it’s fresh and up-to-the-minute information, and therefore content appearing on news syndication sites may rank higher faster in results pages than content published on an article directory or website.
The other side of the coin is that content considered to be news is time sensitive, which means that a high ranking for a press release can be brief – when fresh news is published, the rank of older press releases falls.
So, while a press release with its time sensitive information can make a strong start and become less relevant very quickly, articles tend to increase the traffic they drive to websites the longer that they are published.