Almost everyone who wants to promote a website is already employing article marketing or is seriously thinking of doing so, and with good reason. That’s because there is no more effective way to promote a site, but only if you do it properly. If you can stay away from the five article marketing mistakes below, article marketing can produce significant results for you.
1. Many authors give too little thought to titles. What you should do is choose your article titles extremely carefully. Be aware that they must appeal both to the editors of article directory websites and the owners of individual websites who visit the article directory sites in search of content.
2. Don’t view an article merely as a vessel for your priority keywords or a prelude to your author’s box. Give your readers helpful information. If your articles are good, they’ll be spread all over the Internet, along with links back to your website. If they don’t have good content they won’t have legs. It’s really that simple.
3. Don’t limit your articles to the subject of your website. If you do, you will limit the number of websites interested in using your articles. Unfortunately, many website promotion “experts” offer exactly the opposite advice. If you do a little math you’ll see just how bad their advice is. While you might want to produce up to two thirds of your articles on topics related to your website, at least a third should be on a variety of topics of high general interest.
4. Article writers often tend to be formulaic. In some instances they try to cram a prepared list of keywords into an article. In other instances they try to ensure that 3-4% of the content consists of keywords. While such formulas may make sense from an SEO point of view, they often make articles unreadable.
5. Many articles suffer because their authors fail to get a second opinion before submitting them. It is not enough to hope that your word processing program will catch your spelling, typographical, and grammatical errors; you need someone to read your article critically to catch those and other potential problems. You can proofread an article several times and miss opportunities to improve it that someone else might recognize almost instantly.
There are numerous ways to promote websites, but none give you the upside of article marketing. If you can stay away from some simple, easily avoidable mistakes, a few articles a month can give your search engine rankings and your traffic a significant boost.