The Top 10 Article Marketing Mistakes

In no particular order, here are 10 of the most common mistakes that Article Writers make:

# 1) Creating an un-targeted title: The title of an article is arguably the most important factor in getting it read. If the title is not eye-catching or interesting, you have most likely wasted your time in writing it, as no one will read it.

# 2) Including the article summary in the article body: The summary of an article is meant to provide some insight as to what the article is about. The summary is not supposed to be the first paragraph of the article. Many article directories will reject your article if you include the article summary in the Article Summary field as well as the Article Body. After reading the article summary, your viewers should not be reading the same paragraph over again.

# 3) Including your Website links inside the article body: When you are writing the body of your article, you should have the interest of your viewers in mind, not yourself. This is not only frowned upon by most article directories it is also poor marketing. Use the signature block to promote your links, as that is what it is for.

# 4) Using hard-link breaks in your article: Many people believe that the use of hard-line breaks will make the article easier to read. Whether this is true or not, it looks very unprofessional and most article directories will reject your article because of it. A hard-line break is created when an article does not wrap naturally. In other words, the writer hits the return (enter) key in the middle of a sentence to make the line shorter. Just write your paragraphs in a normal format (like this article) and you will not have anything to worry about.

#5) Submitting to an irrelevant category: This is a common mistake that constantly costs Authors valuable Website traffic. Most article directories offer email alerts and RSS feeds. These alerts and feeds are used more than you may think. Ezine publishers frequently sign up for email alerts in the categories that are relevant to their list. If your article is submitted elsewhere you could easily lose valuable exposure.

# 6) Including an irrelevant signature block: Contrary to popular belief, the primary benefit to article marketing is not link building. Even if it were, having a link on an irrelevant page will not do you much good. It is all about getting people to first read your article and second to follow-through to the links in your signature block. With this in mind, why would you talk about your dog care Website in the signature block for an article on SEO (for example)? It just doesnt make sense. But, the article directory publishers love it, as the viewer will stay on their Website and click on their adverts rather than yours.

#7) Failing to include the http:// prefix within links: This is normally an honest mistake. Although link building is not the biggest benefit to article marketing, it is a factor. Also, most people who are browsing the web are looking for quick resources. If they cannot just click on a link they will move on. Even if the article directory software makes the link active without the http:// prefix, it will most likely not be active when/if it gets picked up by ezine/newsletter owners.

#8) Stuffing keywords into the article body: If you are not familiar with Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) I will tell you that it is the future of search. Many people believe that Google, for one, has already implementing this new complex software that more or less relates certain keywords with other related terms. This means that keyword density is a thing of the past and may actually hurt you if your keywords are placed in a unnatural way. You should always be writing for people, not search engines!

#9) Submitting Private Label Rights (PLR) content: Submitting content that you do not own the full rights to is not only going to do you little to no good marketing wise, as it is either all over the Internet or will be in the future, it may very well get your account suspended with the sites that you submit it to. I still see it on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis though.

#10) Submitting to hundreds of different article sites: Mass article submission is a method of the past and is not longer effective. The Search Engine algorithms are getting more and more complex by the day. Not only is it considered a light form of spam to the search engines, serious Ezine and Newsletter publishers frown upon it as well.

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