An article marketing campaign can drive floods of targeted traffic right to your website. But submitting your articles to a number of directories is only half of the strategy. You need to avoid these two common mistakes to make sure that your efforts don't go to waste.
1. Confusing the reason to promote the article with the reason to write it
There are three key reasons that you would want to use articles to promote your website: promotion, branding and lead generation.
You have to pay attention to the reason why you need to write the article otherwise you won't realise any of these benefits. And the reason why you write is to inform the reader.
Your first goal is to get people to read your article and the next is to get them to click on your link in the resource box. in order to achieve these goals you need to make sure that you produce high quality, focused content.
2. Overlooking the promotional opportunities of article marketing
Most people think that the only reason you would submit an article to a directory is to earn a backlink from the link in the resource box. That is certainly true, but it is this misunderstanding that leads people to submit low quality content to the directories.
The other more powerful benefit is targeted traffic.
Firstly, if your article ranks well in Google for your target readers then it will be found by someone searching for those keywords. And if that article is well written and stuffed full of useful information that person is more likely to click through to your website to see what else you have to offer.
Secondly, if your article is well written and informative then it is more likely to get picked up by a publisher. Think about it, there are lots of people out there with websites and ezines and they need content. Most directories allow people to publish the articles for their own readers as long as they don't make any changes and keep the resource boxes intact. This means that your article has the opportunity to be picked up and published on countless other websites. Which means not only more targeted traffic, but also more backlinks.
Make sure you get the most out of your article marketing campaign by writing high quality articles with the reader in mind and the traffic and backlinks will come naturally.