Top 10 biggest mistakes made when article marketing

1. Not marketing is a big mistake. Some businesses start off with wonderful ideas and fantasies, but do not follow through and do anything about it. Marketing that is never done equals sales that never happen.

2. Starting off with lousy sales copy. One way to ruin articles is to have boring, generalized and useless content. You may have the world’s most wonderful widget, but people don’t buy just because you made the widget. The sales copy is often your letter of recommendation. A lousy recommendation is the same thing as a lousy recommendation.

3. Sell, sell, sell. Writing good sales copy involves engaging the audience. One sure way to turn them off is to try to sell them, sell them again and then upsell them to the bigger, more expensive model.

4. Forgetting the ‘buy’ button. I have seen sales copy that has everything but the ‘buy’ button. Another faux pas is cluttering your sales page with so much information and offers that the consumer is overwhelmed. Some people do not buy because they are too confused and do not know what to do.

5. Taking your time in responding to customers. Slow response time is a sure way to alienate if not loose customers. This situation is made worse by a poor command of English and nonchalant or resentful attitude toward customers.

6. Lousy customer service is also a good way to ruin a marketing campaign. When you don’t deliver the product and then don’t back up your product, your relationship with the client is ruined.

7. Submitting your articles individually by yourself. When you submit articles to sites, doing it site by site is time consuming. When your time translates into money, this is an ineffective use of time. Although the expression, “If you want something done, do it yourself” applies in some areas, this is one where it can become non-productive. When submitting the articles, making mistakes like sending them to untargeted markets, or irrelevant markets is another way to insure failure. Using extensive slang, offensive and crude language in your articles are some other ways to insure failure.

8. Wording your articles in such a way that they are passive and boring is another way to make sure that people do not even finish reading them. Making frequent use of past tense verbs and overuse of adjectives are sure to turn customers off. Other constructive elements that spell disaster include poor grammar, lousy spelling, and run-on sentences. If you really want to torpedo your articles, write on topics that you know nothing about and do not bother to check facts or numbers included in the article. The evil twin of this strategy is to make promises that you do not to fulfill in any manner.

9. Another way to help your article die is not including contact information or your picture. By making it look bland and impersonal, you make it look like it was cranked out by a computer rather than a person.

10. Relying solely on articles for your whole marketing campaign can be disastrous. This is akin to having all your eggs in one basket, and you are going down a very bumpy road.

By following the items above, you will be sure to wreak havoc on any marketing campaign and ruin your reputation. Since reputation is important in marketing, one must be careful to protect it by delivering what you promise, having good customer service and good products.