Article Marketing: What Not to Do

Article marketing can be a balancing act. You have two audiences: human and search engine. To please both, you have to craft your article in a natural, informative way for your humans, with correct placement of well researched keywords for your robot visitors.

What Not To Do:

1. Do Not place your main keyword at the end of your title, or worse, leave it out altogether.

Instead of "What Not to Do When Article Marketing" the title should read "Article Marketing: What Not To Do." This moves the main keywords to the front for the robots to find. It's best if your main keyword or phrase appears in the first three words of your title.

2. Do Not forget to place the main keyword within the first 90 characters of your article.

This is important because it will increase your page ranking by helping the search engines identify exactly how to list your article. The spiders are just machines, so you have to be a bit more obvious about your main topic.

3. Do Not start your article off with a sales pitch.

Always lead with value. If you are selling or promoting something, there is no point in presenting it until you have established for your reader why they should consider doing business with you. Offer solid information, fulfill a need for your reader and then you can invite them to learn more about you and your services.

4. Do Not be overly concerned with "academic" writing.

Yes, you want to spell check and try to use good grammar, but you also want the writing to reflect who you are. The more your personality or "voice" comes through, the deeper your connection with your reader. Gems4friends, who also responded to the request for this topic does a great job of writing humorously and informatively.

5. Do Not forget that two of the most important words in copywriting are "you" and "because."

You want to connect with your readers and make them feel you are writing directly to them. As a former English teacher, I constantly have to rewrite sentences where I put "One should always..." That's way too formal for article marketing. "Because" is a powerful word and gives weight to important points. You want to avoid the items listed in this article BECAUSE it will make your article marketing more effective.

6. Do Not submit the same article with minor changes over and over again to the same sites.

In fact, I don't recommend submitting the same article to more than one site. Instead, write on the same topic, but from a different angle. You can say the same thing, but search engines don't like duplicate content. There are services such as Article Marketer which help rewrite and/or submit articles to various directories.

7. Do Not bookmark your article at all the bookmarking sites at the same time like you can with socialmarker.

Robots don't like this. Instead, change up your article description and submit to a couple of bookmarking sites a day in the same way you would bookmark other articles you come across. Otherwise the spiders will look on your article as spam.

8. Do Not overdo your article promotions on social networking sites.

Places like hubpages and Digg are wonderful to let others know when you have something new out, but be sure it is your best stuff because if you fill someone's inbox with too many submissions, they will delete you from their friends list.

9. Do Not try to put too much information into one article.

The ideal length for an article is between 400 to 1000 words, depending on the publisher. Stay tightly focused on your main keyword. If you have more to say, write a followup article!

10. Do Not forget to proofread.

We all make the occasional typo but if you don't carefully proofread you can lose credibility with your readers. The brain tends to correct what it sees - so if you have written 'its' instead of 'it's', your brain will insert the missing apostrophe. One way to help with this, as well as pick up on awkward sentence structure, or repeating the same word too often is to read your article aloud. You can catch a lot of extra errors this way.

11. Never use ten words when eight will do.

When you are writing prose, you can use long descriptive passages to create a mood, a scene, an ambience. Article marketing is informational. That doesn't mean it has to be boring. But you want to use short, taut sentences and make every word count.

12. Do Not Publish All Your Articles on the Same Site

Spread your articles all around the internet and interlink them. Ten blog articles will not reach as wide a market as one or two articles posted on several different sites like Ezinearticles, Squidoo, and Hubpages.

By pleasing your human and robot visitors, your articles will reach more people and your marketing campaign will be more successful. I guess the most important DO in article marketing is to have fun!

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