Whether you fancy yourself another Hemmingway or not, it’s time to break into some serious creative writing. Why? Because article writing will drive online traffic to your web pages (or anywhere else you want it to go). This was one of the first methods used by savvy internet marketers for harvesting traffic, and it remains the most effective to this day. That’s why it is still so popular, and why article directories continue to flourish on the internet. In fact many tools have evolved to help in the online distribution of articles. While extremely useful, they should not be your primary focus. Always start by producing good, useful content.

Let us take a look first at the common mistakes that some people make before submitting their contents to article directories:

1. Confusing the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them. In article writing, there are three key benefits why you are promoting them: Branding, lead generation, and promotion - which are all part of your optimization efforts. But there is only one reason why you write an article, and that is to inform your audience. If the article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits because no one will be interested in reading them. You need to figure out first how to get people to read what is in your article, then make them click on your resource box. You can achieve this by producing better content.

2. Failing to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing. You may know already that your articles can help you generate additional links back to your site. But do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from that same articles?

Mention keywords at strategic places. Just be sure not to overdo them. Some are even using anchor texts which is also an effective method. But it is important to know that majority of the directories are not able to support this. Remember that is not only about the links back to your site. Part of doing well in your article marketing is getting picked up by publishers with a large number of audiences and gaining the ability of leveraging other brands because of the quality of your work. Better search engine results also are great benefits.

But these things do not put much money in your pocket. There are other factors that can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity that can boost your earnings. Not just increase the number of visitors to your site. Start out with a plan and see to it that your article will serve the function that you intended it to have.

3. Publishing content that does not help your readers. Maybe in the process of writing articles, you are thinking that all that is you wanted is links back to your site. And any visitors it can generate are fine.

But guess what? Not all article banks and directories are going to accept your content automatically. Oftentimes, they have some guidelines and specifications on the articles that they are accepting.

You can double the number of sites you can submit to by writing articles that the directories want to share with other people. All it takes is one publisher with a hundred thousand readers to increase your potential audience overnight. Write the articles that publishers want in their publications if you want your article marketing to work the most effective way for you. This also means you have to obey the standard guidelines, spell checks, researching on a good topic, and perhaps even hiring a writer to produce a good content on your behalf.

You’ll have to make some choices as to what your main objective is. If you are just looking for backlinks, fine. But focusing on the right kind of content can bring massive traffic just from the article as well. You should understand the difference between an article that will just sit on the directory and one that will be published to a highly-targeted audience. It helps to get lucky as well. Just remember the words of Thomas Jefferson: The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get. When it comes to submitting articles, put your hard work into the quality of content.

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