The Internet Marketers Blog

Written by Admin on January 25th, 2009

3 Essential Factors to Consider Before You Submit To Article Directories

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One of the oldest yet still more effective techniques in driving targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers is information-based marketing. This is why article writing, submission and publication is at an all-time high.

There are many tools that you can use to make the process of distributing your articles easier. However, although this is invaluable in getting your article exposed to more sites, there are common mistakes that many people make before submitting their articles to directories.

Let’s take a look at the more common mistakes made in 3 key areas:

1) Confusing the reason to promote articles with the reason to write them.

In article marketing, the main benefit to you is branding, lead generation and promotion, which are all part of your optimization efforts.

However, there is one main reason why anyone should write articles, and that is to inform your audience about a subject. It is extremely important that your article achieves this goal, or you stand to fail in the promotional benefits as outlined above.

Of course, it’s also highly important that you figure out how to get people to read you article and then click on your site link in the resource box. There are plenty of resources out there that explain how best to achieve this and I recommend that you search them out.

2) Failing to realize and maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing.

You more than likely already know that your article can generate links back to your site from the article directories themselves, and also from any sites who publish your article from these directories.  However, did you know that you can attract more visitors and better search engine results from the same article?

The first step to achieving this is to provide relevant keywords in strategic places within the article. However, do not overdo this.  A good benchmark is to aim for between a ten to fifteen percent keyword density. Each particular keyword should show up in about 3 percent of the article.

Don’t just aim for your article to be accepted by article directories, instead aim for it to eventually be used by publishers who scour the directories for website content. You should not underestimate the potential that this can have on your promotional efforts, as many of these publishers may have hundreds or thousands of regular visitors who could then view your article.

Start out by having a plan of what you want achieved and make sure that you reach your targets. It’s important to do this so that you can reap the maximum benefits of every article that you write.

3) Creating articles with content that does not help your readers.

Maybe your only plan is to create an article and get links back from article directories, and that any visitor that you might get from this is ok.

Well, you might need to think again. Many article directories don’t accept articles that are not up to standard. And even if a poorly written, uninformative article does in fact make it into the article sites, the potential of that article being picked up by webmasters seeking quality is almost non-existant.

The benefits of one publisher with a hundred thousand website visitors picking up your article should be enough incentive for you to write an informative article. This is not at all impossible, and you may find that this value is conservative in what you may achieve from a number of publishers running your article on their sites.

Researching a topic that is sought after is not only important, it’s imperative. There may be those of you out there that will feel that this information is all well and good but feel that they can’t write a decent article, or may not know enough about a certain subject to write an article. This is not a dead-end. There are many places where you can research a topic. Hiring a writer is an option worth considering as well.

The choice really is yours on how dedicated you are in increasing the exposure of your article, and consequently the exposure of your website. On a basic level you can gain a few backlinks from article directories, but with a little more effort you can enjoy massive exposure from providing quality content.