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Article Marketing is a time-honored promotional technique that bear minimal costs for maximal gains. It is nothing more than soft-selling your goods or services, the better to breeze past consumer defenses in our age of ad-awareness and ad-sensitivity.

What article marketing does is present a business in the most innocuous light possible, in the role of a helpful and knowledgeable advisor – with no sales pitch whatsoever. The name of the business is only casually mentioned in passing, most likely no more than once – but the name gets out there, in the public consciousness, and that is what’s essential.

Article marketing isn’t advertising per se, however, for it doesn’t overtly promote anything. Indeed, its power comes precisely from not selling anything at all, ostensibly. Instead, it works by providing information that is useful and timely in an interesting way, info that is free to the prospective client.

For instance, a local accountant may pen an article in the local newspaper or be interviewed on the local radio or television station every April, tax season. He or she will freely share some general ideas, and somewhere along the way will probably be a simple reference to his or her enterprise. That is it. And that is all it takes.

Have a better mousetrap? Potential clients could be turned on to your product while reading an article about common household pests. Whatever it is you have to offer, you’ll be able to provide it within an article that puts your expertise in the best light! People simply don’t like being sold to. But whenever you take the initiative to share openly, they’re a lot more likely to be receptive to anything else you may have to say. As could be imagined, there is a great deal more involved to this proven technique of practically free marketing, but that is about all there is to the basic concept!

Adoption screening is a method that takes into account numerous factors in determining the suitability of a child and would-be parent. It’s normally used to ascertain that the prospective parent has the means, financial and otherwise, to make the adoption a successful one. Adoption screening could be complicated, though perhaps unfortunately it is often a mere formality in numerous parts of the world, including even North America, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union.

One of the most complex tasks of the overall adoption screening process involves a home study. This is when the home life of a potential mother or father is scrutinized to make sure that the home environment will benefit the child to be adopted. As can be imagined, such a thorough vetting can cost a lot of money, usually borne by the future father or mother.

Different laws, agency regulations, and industry standards may govern a home study, but generally speaking all such investigations will look into the employment history of the prospective parent, whether there is a criminal record, and so forth. Credit checks will possibly be involved, as personal finances would be one of the most important areas subject to an examination. As the name most immediately implies, however, a home study will carefully take into account the dwelling of a potential father or mother, with such aspects as cleanliness, fire safety, and even the condition of the surrounding neighborhood taken into account.

Naturally, given such levels of scrutiny, many criticize home studies for being uselessly intrusive and discriminatory, claiming that many otherwise perfectly capable and genuinely loving would-be adoptive parents are turned away on nothing more than whimsy and technicalities.

But such is the concern for child welfare in one of the most advanced societies that home studies are legally mandated and thus inevitable. And for all the criticism, it is arguable that a slow, even difficult, adoption method better helps ensure that only the truly committed will adopt.

New York is one tough town. And it prides itself on its cut-throat lifestyle, even while the number of charities blossom as nowhere else. The serial success story that is Zalman Silber is an example of the businessman-turned-philanthropist. But isn’t it ironic that a place which worships material success gained by one’s teeth and nails, as it were, should find itself so interested in appearing charitable, too? As if the rich are secretly embarrassed with their fortunes – as if Balzac was right, that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” or as if Jesus was correct, that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle….”

As if, to be frank about it, the rich give in order to assuage their guilt.

What is it about this world that should so often find the elevated so close to the base? One can observe dichotomies existing side-by-side, many times in peace and, even, complete ignorance of one another, even in New York, even in the 21st Century.

And one wonders if such philanthropy, targeted towards one’s own community, set up to benefit one’s own interests, are perfectly true acts of charity or just another way in which the ego manages to further inflate itself.

Such issues, of course, likely do not concern those like Zalman Silber, who give freely as they please and couldn’t care less about such quibbles. Indeed, it is safe to say that for those who do have the funds to give, giving is a pleasure in itself – akin to any other form of spending money.

Now that’s not as cynical as it may sound at first. For spending money is a form of experiencing one’s own power, one’s own ability to produce satisfaction and pleasure. It may well lead to egotism, and it often does, to be sure – but at its root is a simple human joy at being able to affect one’s surroundings, one’s world. It is the same joy that accompanies a child who can crawl, then walk, then run, then ride a bicycle, then drive a car, then pilot a boat or helicopter or airplane. The proper spending of money can be life-enhancing in a very deep way, far more so than the mere accumulation of creature comforts. The proper spending of money – as in charitable donations – allows one to give of oneself, in a sense, a very important sense. For money is power, and in cases of honest work to give money is to have given of one’s time and one’s very life – the time spent earning the money, the life devoted to productive work.

And such is, as the humanist Erich Fromm had noted in his many works on human psychology and human society, the most demeaning aspect of poverty, that one cannot give of oneself. For it is not he who has much, but he who gives much, that is rich – and yet, to give requires one to first have! And it is the misfortune of the poor that they can hardly provide for themselves, never mind share with others – though, interestingly, survey after survey has found that the less money one has, the greater a percentage of one’s income tends to be given away in charity. It is as if the poor know something which escapes the rich. It is as if the New York of lights and smiles is unaware of something so basic that it can only be known to those whose lives involve the basics and no luxuries.