Top 5 Common Article Marketing Mistakes and Blunders to Avoid

Whether you are a novice revenue sharing site user or a career SEO expert and Internet marketer, mistakes can and do get made from time to time. But in this virtual world controlled by massive search engines, social networks, and advertising campaigns & programs, even a small mistake can be costly. If you're not careful, a mistake could even lead to the end of your career on the Internet. Without further ado, here are the top 5 mistakes made by article marketers.

This really goes without saying! If you want to be a successful writer on the Internet, you must proofread your content! Not only will your articles look horrible if you don't proofread them, the search engines won't really be able to tell what is going on. You may have just written the best article in the world, but if the search engines can't find it, your readers won't either. Correct spelling and grammar also go a long way in showing your readers your credibility and authority. How many times have you started to read some poorly written articles only to leave because it was too hard to read? Proofreading is of the utmost importance because spelling and grammar errors can be severely detrimental to your overall experience and career as an article marketer.

To avoid this deadly error, you really should do more than just run spell check on your article. I recommend reading it aloud to see if it sounds good and makes sense. After this, you should consider letting your article "rest" for at least a few hours. When you come back to it, I bet that you will notice some mistakes that you previously missed.

Article marketing is about making money writing and promoting well written content. If your goal is to make money in this field, keyword research is necessary to succeed. Doing the research only takes a few moments of your time and is guaranteed to improve the traffic to your content by increasing its visibility in the search engines. Articles that are un-researched generally don't get as much traffic because they A) may be filled with irrelevant keywords, B) may have keywords that are too broad, and C) may contain keywords that are under-searched and/or have too much competition.

To perform keyword research you need to utilize several available tools on the Internet. I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search the most when doing keyword research. The basic goal with keyword research is to find combinations of words that you can write about that have a high search volume and low competition. This is the key to finding keywords that will lead to your success in the article marketing business.

The flow of your content is very important if you want people to read it. Make sure that each section or paragraph logically leads to the next things that you want to say. Avoid jumping around or switching topics in the middle of an article. This will throw off your readers and could do the same for a search engine. Be sure to make good use of the space bar and enter key on your keyboard. No one likes coming to a webpage and seeing a giant wall of text. It's intimidating and people click out of it really fast.

I strongly recommend using sub-headings to organize your articles. This will help break up the words into more manageable pieces. in addition to this, adding a cool graph and a couple of pictures will also help increase the readability of your content. When writing on Hubpages, be sure to make use of the various capsules and tools available to you to enhance your articles.

If you have written at least one article for the Internet, then you have already realized the importance of backlinks. Backlinks serve two main purposes, and if used improperly, your content may become "sandboxed" or marked as spam. The first reason backlinks are important is because it provides another avenue (other than a search engine) for people to come and read what you've written. The second reason backlinks are important is that they improve your search engine results page (SERP). This basically means that your content becomes easier to find through a search engine.

The big three, Google, Yahoo, & Bing, all use complicated algorithms to determine where a specific page will rank in the search results. It's no secret that the number, quality, and timing of backlinks play a key role in determining that rank. This is why a backlinking strategy is so vital to your success online. And by strategy I mean doing something more than just posting random links on random bookmarking sites.

Everyone will have to develop their own custom backlinking strategy tailored to their specific needs. Essentially you will need to determine what site you post on, when you post on them, and how you post on them. I recommend that you get organized and keep a log or spreadsheet of all your articles and where you have backlinked them. In addition to this, you should set up a schedule that allows to you backlink an article slowly over a long period of time. I also recommend that you modify the description and tags of each item you post to help improve its visibility.

How many people reading this have joined a website or online community without reading the member agreement or terms of service? I am sure all of you are nodding your head right now. This is seriously one of the BIGGEST mistakes an article marketer can make. Reading these agreements will help ensure that you understand the rules and regulations of the websites and services that you are using. Don't want to get banned from AdSense? You can greatly improve your odds of keeping your account by reading the Terms of Service. Don't like getting your articles deleted or unpublished? You probably violated the member agreement - you should go read it.

I can't stress this point enough. You really need to read the agreements on every site that you join. They are not always the same. Did you know that some social bookmarking sites allow self promotion (posting your own content) and others do not? Reading these important pages only takes a few moments of your time, so it would be a huge mistake to just skip them.