Article Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Over and over again I see Website owners making a number of article marketing mistakes. Make some of these mistakes, and you may as well not bother with articles. Avoid them, and watch your traffic grow.
And, guess what I hear a lot? Articles don't work.
Of course articles don't work if you don't do it right. There's a process to it. There are some loose rules to follow, as well as principles and nuances. If you mess some of these up, for whatever reason, your efforts will be for nothing.
If you've failed at article marketing before, it's time to give it another try.
If you're currently distributing articles and not getting the results you want, pay attention to my cautions and use these techniques and you'll see much better results.
If you've never tried article marketing, then I think you're in for a treat, and possibly more traffic than you thought you could receive.
What many people don't realize, though, is that article marketing doesn't work in the way most people think it does.
Are you making these article marketing mistakes?
These are mistakes I see often, or they're big ones that can ruin your chances of success. Article marketing is one of the best (if not the best) off-site methods you can use to increase website traffic.
Still, I hear people complain that even though they're working hard and submitting articles, they're just not getting the traffic. I've said it before and I won't shut up until everyone gets it... if you're not getting traffic from your article marketing efforts, you're doing it wrong!
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Improper expectations
Certain failure will result from having the wrong expectations about what your articles are meant to accomplish. If you understand the principles and benefits I've outlined here, then you're on your way to properly using article marketing. That puts you way ahead of 95 percent of other webmasters.
Remember that the main purpose of article marketing is as an SEO technique to increase website traffic. The way you do that is to create keyword focused backlinks to your site. These keyword focused backlinks then increase your site's search engine positioning for those keywords.
While article marketing has many benefits, your article marketing efforts should be directed towards the objective of leveraging the power of the article sites to increase your backlinks. Yes, you're exposing yourself to new markets, yes you're developing your brand, and yes, you're driving direct traffic.
We don't ignore these factors. In fact, we do everything we can to enhance these benefits and play them up. Too many people, however, seem to think that you can write one article, submit it to one article directory, and like magic, some hugely successful site is going to pick up that article and send them all kinds of traffic.
Nope. It doesn't work that way.
- Poor keyword selection
Our main objective with keyword selection is to actually choose a keyword to promote. I can't believe how many people attempt article marketing with no thought to keywords.
The idea here is that we want to generate higher search engine placement for pages on our site, and increase the traffic coming from particular keywords. Although most people do not do this correctly, if at all, proper keyword selection is vital to a successful article marketing campaign.
There are two main ways to choose your keywords for your articles. You can choose either the highest demand keywords, or choose the relatively low competition keywords that are easier to rank for. These are typically lower demand and so will not bring as much traffic. But, if you choose wisely that traffic will be very targeted. You know your market better than anybody, so you'll have to make that judgment call.
The reason why you can choose higher competition keywords is because you're using the power of other sites to overcome the usual inertia that comes from not having trust and authority.
Basically, you're "borrowing" the authority of these other sites. If that appeals to you, I'll warn you. It sometimes takes multiple article campaigns around the same high traffic/high competition keyword to see any movement in your site's rankings.
- Linking to an affiliate site
I've seen a fair number of people who don't even link to their own sites in their resource box. There are several problems with that approach.
First, you can't control what happens at an affiliate site. Second, you may drop that affiliate or they may drop you at some point. Third, you have no opportunity for branding if you don't send people to your own site or blog. Fourth, the whole point is to own your traffic so that you can do whatever you want with it.
You can't own your traffic if you're sending it to someone else's site. If you take home nothing else from this, it's the concept that you need to build your own business and not someone else's.
- Submitting non-unique articles
You can submit the same version of your article to each article directory and it won't do any damage. I have done this myself. I highly recommend, however, that you change your article content so that it is unique. In my testing I have shown that you will yield far greater results by submitting a unique version of your article to each article directory. The difference in results is on an order of magnitude. Do not, however, duplicate your Web pages as articles for submission.
To learn how you can combine article marketing and social media to gain first page Google rankings, visit my article marketing success series at the Free Website Traffic Tips blog.
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