The argument between quantity and quality has raged on for quite some time in the article marketing arena. Some believe most readers will look at an article title and scroll down to click the link, much like most people do on a sales page. So it really doesn't matter, in their opinion, if any reasonable substance goes between the title and the link in a bio box or not. But is that true?

The problem with this theory is, most people who make it to a sales page just want to know what the "bottom line" is. They want to know how much of an economic investment they'll have to make to commit to the product being offered.

This stands to reason because, why read about a product and get all excited about it, if you can't afford to get it? So many will scroll down to the bottom of a sales page to see how much something will cost before finding out exactly what it'll do for them.

But articles aren't sales pages. Or at least they shouldn't be.

Articles are bits of information much more likely to be read thoroughly. People read articles to learn about a topic, often with little thought of commitment, so they aren't interested in what the bottom line is. They want to know what the author knows, and that means reading every word.

It also means substance matters greatly if a reader can be expected to follow through with a link click once they read through the article. And if there's still a question about it, getting people to click through is ultimately the main reason for writing articles in the first place.

Another reason the "quantity first" proponents give for mass producing articles is to get the search engines to list multiple times on a search query. Whether the latent semantic indexing the search engines are doing now will catch the ruse, is likely, but hardly the most important downfall of this idea.

The truth of the matter is, search engines don't buy products!

Designing an article campaign to appeal to search engines may get you listed more than once, but for what? Poorly written articles generally won't appeal to readers, and so the odds are they won't click through. No click throughs then, makes getting listed pointless.

So in the end, writing good, substantial content with the appeal of the reader in mind will get you a lot further than mass producing. Not only will you impress your potential customers with quality information, but you'll also be playing into what the search engines are really looking for, solid and coherent viewpoints.

Next we'll talk about how to make your articles pop in the highly competitive market of article promotions.

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