One of the best ways to promote a website certainly is the use of article marketing. If you don’t know what article marketing is, I can explain. They are short articles, usually related to a specific industry, made available freely to the general public, through any printable or electronic media. At some point in the article, the reader will find reference and contact info about the person or company that published it. It’s a marketing tool that has been around since the birth of mass print, but its use grew considerably with the advent of internet.

Extremely effective, relatively simple, and generally free (or at least very low cost), article marketing can help you promote your site, magazine or any other business. But, as with all good things, there is a catch (as Constantine uses to say, “there’s always a catch”). For it to work properly, your articles will have to be accepted by the webmasters and publishers you send them to.

1st SIN: POOR WRITING

You don’t have to write as good as Stephen King to get your articles accepted in most article directories. But your writing needs to be at least interesting. Not everyone was born with natural literary talent, and writing about something can be quite challenging at first. If you’re starting now, it would be a good idea to ask someone you know (a teacher or a friend who’s good at this kind of thing) to review your text and help you improve it.

2nd SIN: BAD GRAMMAR

Most people are not very good at grammar, specially when writing and submitting articles in a language (usually English) other than their native one.

When a publisher searches an article directory for fresh content, he expects to find articles ready to publish, with no editing required. Minor mistakes may (and probably will) be overlooked, of course, but when hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of articles are being submitted on a daily basis, the first ones to be rejected will be those with bad grammar.

“This does not mean that you have to give up on article marketing if your grammar is not perfect or if English is not your native language”, says Arif. “Just find someone who can help you.”

And that’s a very good advice. A friend with good knowledge of the English language and of its structures could review your article and put it in publishing condition in no time. Most of the articles that get rejected because of their bad grammar could have been fixed with just 5 or 10 minutes of editing.

3rd SIN: BADLY EDITED ARTICLES

“I am continually surprised to receive articles where the author obviously did not check the spelling or read through the copy before submitting it”, states Arif. Many well-written articles have a good deal of minor typos (misspelled words, missing words, etc), and this is the kind of error that any word processor would catch. Even reading the article before clicking on the “send” button would be enough to notice these mistakes.

With the advent of private label rights content and “article spinning” software, this problem certainly increased considerably! You don’t know what “article spinning” is? Let me enlighten you, then. Some people buy the rights to articles written by other people. Then they run these articles through an special software that randomly replaces words and phrases, the way some people would do manually, with the help of any electronic dictionary. They are, of course, trying to improve their article marketing by submitting a good number of unique articles. Unless you overdo this (that will be our 4th sin), there is only one small problem: article spinning software tends to produce text with very clumsy wording. In fact, the task of determining whether an article was written by a non-English speaker or by article spinning software often proves to be a very hard one.

In both cases, the solution is very simple: edit your articles manually before committing them. If you’re not confident in your editing skills, ask someone else to edit them. Never forget to check your spelling and grammar (twice, if you have the time). Try reading the article out loud, to feel how it flows. Lots of articles would probably have been edited by their authors if anyone had tried to read them aloud before them. They just don’t “sound” good.

4th SIN: CLONED ARTICLES

Following the lead of sin #3, private label rights content and “article spinning” software have really become a plague in this industry. There are some authors who constantly submit multiple copies of the very same article, with only a few (and sometimes very few) differences.

“I have literally had to ban authors from submitting articles, after spending an hour or two per day for several days, trying to weed out 5 or 6 unique articles from 50 or 100 duplicates”, Arif told us. “I quickly realized it just isn’t worth it, as there are many other authors and articles to publish.”

Editors and publishers get really irritated when confronting these situations. And believe me: getting banned for such a stupid reason is just about the second dumbest way to try doing article marketing!

5th (AND WORST) SIN: PLAGIUM

I’m not sure which is worth, cloning or plagiarizing articles, but the number of people who copy and paste articles right out of Wikipedia and submit them as their original work can’t be calculated by head. And believe me when I say they don’t change anything! Not a single letter or space! Even knowing Wikipedia is “copyleft” not “copyright,” there are still rules. Ethic is as important in marketing as it is in any other business.

There is nothing wrong in using Wikipedia as one of your sources (and it’s an fantastic source), but there are other sources out there. In many cases, the facts will always be the same, but each source will present them under a unique perspective. And when you’re done researching, add your own original thoughts to the content and write everything in your own words. Pretty please?

So, there it is! Five ways to avoid having your articles filed in the round drawer and succeed in article marketing. If you can write and submit a good number of articles and manage to avoid these five (not so) little sins, there’s a good chance most of your articles will be accepted and you will be extremely successful in this field.