To all authors out there, there's no time like the present to polish up your creative writing skills.

Because of the internet and other high-tech advances the attractiveness of information-based selling or marketing is on the increase. This is one of the most long standing and telling methods of acquiring targeted visitors to websites and turning them into customers and is the reason why writing articles and submitting them to ezines and article directories is becoming so popular.

There exist numerous ways in which disseminating articles can be achieved easily but possibly the easiest is to submit them to article directories. However, there are a few basic errors that writers make while creating their articles and these are as follows:

1. Writing articles purely with website promotion in mind

When writing an article, authors are generally doing so in order to get traffic to their websites, to brand themselves or their product and to acquire members of their opt-in lists. However, there is one fatal flaw in this approach because readers are not necessarily looking for a website to visit or a product to buy, they are seeking information. Thus, if an article is not informative or indeed, is not on a subject of general interest then no-one will read it and the promotional aspects just won't happen. The lesson here is to research keywords and phrases and find out what information readers want then write articles accordingly and bingo the author's link in the resource box will be clicked and a potential customer found.

2. Writing articles purely with reader information as a basis

In contrast to the above, mistake number two that authors make is writing purely for their human audience. In other words, a human reads and understands what has been written but the search engine spiders won't "read" the article and categorise it correctly, if it doesn't contain keywords and phrases. A word of warning here though, authors shouldn't overdo the keywords or their human audience will be bored and their spider audience will accuse them of spamming. The object is to get the website url to appear in lots of different places all over the internet because a wider audience means more visitors. The wider the audience, the more the writer's reputation will spread and so on.

3. Writing articles which the publishers won't accept

Many directories and publications only accept articles on certain subjects, so authors should research the most popular of these to check which topics are open to submissions. In addition, they should check the terms of publication to ensure that guidelines with regard to links, spelling, grammar, number of words, etc. are complied with.

If a writer wants to publish in an ezine aimed at internet marketers, an article on knitting or car maintenance is unlikely to be acceptable but many directories have a wide range of topics for which they seek articles so authors must make sure that their topic is covered.

If authors avoid the above three pitfalls and write authoritatively on a topic which is of wide interest and publish in appropriate places, then visitors and ultimately customer will come flooding to their websites.