Article Marketing: Avoid these 2 Common Mistakes

Article marketing is every successful Internet marketer’s secret weapon. Investing time into writing quality content for submission to article directories can pay dividends. Not only does it increase your credibility as an expert in a niche but it is also a great way to drive targeted traffic to your website. But it’s not enough just to put some words down on paper and then submit them to directories; the submission is only half the process. Here the two common mistakes that you’ll want to avoid.

1. Confusing the reason to promote the article with the reason to write it

There are three key reasons that you would want to use articles to promote your website: branding, lead generation and promotion.

But you won’t achieve any of these benefits if you don’t pay attention to the reason why you want to write the article, and that is to inform the reader.

Your first goal is to get people to read your article and the next is to get them to click on your link in the resource box. in order to achieve both of these goals you need to write good quality and focused content.

2. Overlooking the promotional opportunities of article marketing

Most people think that the only reason you would submit an article to a directory is to earn a backlink from the link in the resource box. That is certainly true, but it is this misunderstanding that leads people to submit low quality content to the directories.

There is another, more powerful, benefit and that is targeted traffic.

Firstly, if your article ranks well in Google for your target readers then it will be found by someone searching for those keywords. And if that article is well written and stuffed full of useful information that person is more likely to click through to your website to see what else you have to offer.

Secondly, if your article is well written and informative then it is more likely to get picked up by a publisher. Think about it, there are lots of people out there with websites and ezines and they need content. Most directories allow people to publish the articles for their own readers as long as they don’t make any changes and keep the resource boxes intact. This means that your article has the opportunity to be picked up and published on countless other websites. Which means not only more targeted traffic, but also more backlinks.

Make sure you get the most out of your article marketing campaign by writing high quality articles with the reader in mind and the traffic and backlinks will come naturally.