Article Marketing Success: Are You Shooting Yourself in the Foot?

If your article marketing success has been less than stellar lately, it could be that you’re shooting yourself in the foot without even realizing it. Successful articles are more than words thrown up on a page. Rather, they’re strategically written and placed so as to induce the reader to want more information of their own accord. Let’s take a look at three of the most common article marketing mistakes. Mistake #1: Thinking that article marketing is only about building backlinks. While it’s true that one of the benefits of article marketing is to build backlinks to increase search engine rankings, that is far from the only reason to put in the effort required to build a successful campaign. Instead, you want your articles to be of high enough quality that owners of newsletters, ezines, blogs and websites want to republish your material because it adds real value to what they’re offering their readers. This becomes a win-win situation -- the publisher gets good material that keeps their audience coming back and you get your material viewed by a wide audience you couldn’t have reached on your own. Mistake #2: Missing the opportunity to use your article as a lead generating machine. In order to get a reader to open your article page in the first place, you’ve got to have a sufficiently enticing reason for them to do so. Whether that means that you make a killer offer that they can’t resist or simply excel at catchy headlines, your first objective is to draw them in. Once they’re in, your next objective is to keep them. Keep your page free of clutter, add a picture, put social bookmarking buttons at the top and bottom of the piece and keep your opt-in box in a visual hotspot. Make it as easy as possible for the reader to find more information and share what they’ve learned. If you have a resource box, use it to expound on the numerous other interesting tidbits you have available if they click your link. Mistake #3: Leaving your article to fend for itself. While a high quality article will naturally spread itself around over time, there’s a lot you can do to speed up and multiply your results. Start by submitting it to as many article directories as possible. Bookmark and ping your submissions. Write up unique versions of the same piece and use them to build social media pages. Interlink your articles with each other to create a resource of increasing value. Offer exclusive material to those who sign up on your mailing list. Optimize every page for ease of search engine indexing. Solicit the services of your network to spread your promotion efforts far and wide. Hire a social media service if you don’t have your own network. Article marketing success is not rocket science. It’s about providing high quality information in a highly visible, easily accessible way. If your article marketing attempts have been failing, today is the day to step back and learn new techniques for article marketing success.