What's helped me see Article Marketing for what it is, is to put it into perspective with the rest of the scheme in Internet/Affiliate Marketing. It's a teensy part in what a fully operational, passive revenue machine that is an IM campaign.

The problem is, even professional IMers will neglect this teensy part from time to time, wasting their time and money on what most likely could have been a really profitable campaign.

As far as I know from what I've read around and about on WA and whatnot, one process for a successful IM campaign is...

article marketing (niche research, keyword research, niche profitability) --> PPC --> list marketing.

Now can you see why So many campaigns fail from the very start?

People jump on the boat and spill over heaps of money into the web that could have been focused on their campaign.

I'll drill it into you: Article Marketing is primarily for measuring niche profitability.

A highly successful and professional Article Marketer can gauge niche profitability by setting up converting landing pages on blogs, lenses, hubs or the like and writing highly targeted articles that point to those landing pages and bookmarking them. That's it.

But I'm not going to compromise my dignity by talking the talk but not walking it, unlike some gurus. I'll show you what I mean on the next few tabs.