Ok, this will be fun. Not that I'm such an expert on article marketing, but that it'll help me get my behind in gear and do more!

Top ten things not to do with your article marketing:

1. Submit one article and call it quits
2. Submit your article to only one place
3. Don't worrty about youior speling
4. Don't worry about grammar, k?
5. Skip the resource box, no one reads it anyway.
6. Skip the resource box since anyone who uses your article will clip your links out anyway.
7. Link only to your home page
8. Link to your page using only top level keywords (eg: Dogs, instead of rottweiler leash training)
9. Never use keywords on youir links, instead link to your pages with words like click here.
10. Never ever use tracking links
11. Skip the resource box since you can't think of anything clever to say.
12. Never use your keywords in the title or the body of the article.

This is certainly not an inclusive list of don'ts, but there are some important things here. Add more in the comments section and I'll probably add them to this list.

So now let's take this list and change it a bit to reflect the right things to do.

Ok, so let's take the above list and make it into a to do list.By the way, HubPages is an article directory for the purposes of this discussion.

1. Submit one article and call it quits- Article Marketing is a game of numbers. The more of them you put out there the more likely you are to get a hit. Think of it like baseball: what are your chances of getting a home run if you only get one chance at the plate? Even the best players only have a 40% success rate.
2. Submit your article to only one place- There are dozens of good article directories out there, and hundreds of others. Every place that your article appears in is another place to get a link or a chance to have your article grabbed and published.

3. Don't worrty about youior speling- None cares anyways, right? Well, some of us do. I grab plenty of articles to repost on my sites and I don't grab articles with lousy spelling. A typo here and there is cool, but a typo in every other word isn't.

4. Don't worry about grammar, k? See #3. If you're writing for certain crowds of teens on MySpace you're going to write differently than if your article is for HubPages. Grammar doesn't have to be perfect (my wife disagrees,) but it has to be good enough that you're understood.

5. Skip the resource box, no one reads it anyway. Maybe, but you want links back to your site(s) and the resource box is where you put those links, at least on sites like EzineArticles.com.
6. Skip the resource box since anyone who uses your article will clip your links out anyway. My experience is that while some do, many people don't clip the links. I don't clip them unless the URL has expired or now goes to a site that has zero connection to the article (this is rare.) Besides, even if evryone does you still get those resource box links from the article directory itself.
7. Link only to your home page- A few of your links can go to the home page, but the rest should go to the internal pages. For example, if you have a killer Hub are you going to link to the HubPages.comhome pages or are you going to link directly to your own Hub? Same with your other articles and sites.

8. Link to your page using only top level keywords (eg: Dogs, instead of rottweiler leash training.) The more targeted your keywords (targeted to your article) the better the quality of google juice you'll get and the more likely you are to get live targeted clicks on your links.

9. Never use keywords on your links, instead link to your pages with words like click here- Of course, the truth is that you should always use your keywords in your links. Mix them up, use different, but related, keywords in all links to your own sites & hubs. Leave the click here for the times when you link to a merchant.
10. Never ever use tracking links- If you're directly linking to your affiliate merchants then you always want to use a tracking link, for a couple of reasons:

    1) If the merchant changes his links or link structure, which does happen, then you only have to log into your tracking system and change the lnks in one place and all your articles are instanlty updated.

    2) If the merchant disappears, eliminates its affiliate program, or changes its terms such that youi no longer want to promote it, then you log back into your tracking system, change the link your tracker points to, and you're good.

    3) If you're using a tracker you'll know how many clicks, from which articles, you're getting.

11. Skip the resource box since you can't think of anything clever to say- Your resource box should tell people what's in it for them if they click through to your site. Do they get a free pdf? A free e-course? Answers to their questions or concerns? Even if it's a boring resource box with a link it's still a link.

12. Never use your keywords in the title or the body of the article- Always have your keyword in your title, preferably at the beginning of the title, and sprinkle those keywords, and related keywords, throughout your article.
13. Always make your article readable and useful if you want people to pick it up. The EzineArticles.com site has lots of author tips and they send a lot of them in their newsletter.

Hmmm.... got a baker's dozen there. Should I working on my counting ability?

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So here's my resource box which, based on the above, I have to include, right? I'm Greg and I have a series of sites covering a variety of topics. Of the articles I've written relating to marketing and websites one is this hub: How to Design and Host a Website. I'm also working on a related series on another site: How to Build Your Website. No freebies or e-courses yet, but they'll come.