Seasoned writers and beginners, now is the time to call on your creative juices and start writing.

Information based marketing is what works online now. It's been around for ages, but it's always been under utilized and ignored by serious marketers. Writing articles is one of the best ways to find targeted prospects, get them to your site, then convert them to buyers. Now that the mainstream Internet marketers have realized this, article submissions and article publications are popular.

You can find a load of tools to make the process of distributing articles a much easier process and it's essential in getting exposure.

There are three major mistakes you can make that will damage the efforts of submitting your articles.

1. Not Understanding The Reason You Submit The Articles

When you write an article, there are three benefits in then promoting them. They are to brand yourself and your site, to create lead generation and to promote yourself as an expert. All of these things are part of your SEO efforts.

The reason you write an article however, is purely to inform your audience on your chosen purpose. You must always remember this when writing or you'll lose the opportunity to gain from the three promotional benefits listed above, because your articles will be ignored.

Your very first step is to get people to read your articles, the second step is to entice them enough to click on the link in your resource box. The way to do this is to provide good article content, then make sure the resource box link is directly related to the article.

2. Not Using The All The Opportunities To Market Your Articles.

There is the benefit of backlinking, that the search engines currently favour.
Did you know you can get better search engine results from well placed keywords in articles?
Whe you use keywords, use them judiciously. More than once or twice per hundred words will make your article look like it is keyword stuffed, and the search engines penalize for that. Failure to use keywords, keyphrases and long tail keyphrases can cost you with the search engines. They are hungry for keyword rich content.

One of the best opportunities for promotion is when a well written article is picked up by other publishers, with large, targeted audiences. You gain the benefit of leverage then, because your article is likely reaching people who may not know about you or your site. These backlinks also are very beneficial in search engine rankings.

Unfortunately neither of these things on their own pay well. They are part of a marketing strategy that helps to boost public awareness which in turn will help boost your earnings.

When writing your articles, keep to your plan, remembering your article must be informative for your audience, but serve your purpose to promote yourself and your site.

3. Not Publishing Content That Your Readers Want.

You can easily forget about readership when you're writing articles to get backlinks. It's easy to write a load of 'fluffy' uninformative, short articles, purely to get published and get a backlink. The problem with this approach is you may find your article is rejected by some highest ranking article directories. Most directories have strict guidelines about the articles they accept and inferior articles don't make the grade.

You can greatly improve the number of sites you can find your article placed upon, if you write a good quality article. If your superior article is picked up by a site with 50,000 or more readers, your potential audience has dramatically increased overnight. If you've spent time and created a well-crafted resource box, you may find your targeted site traffic increase dramatically.

This also means you should be considering writing articles that will appeal to other publishers, if you really want your article marketing to work most effectively. You have to follow the guidelines, check your spelling and grammar (there's no excuse with spell checks on almost every decent writing program) and research your topic. If you can't write well, then consider using a ghostwriter to write quality content on your behalf.

It's your choice. You can write dozens of poor quality articles and get backlink exposure, or you can get massive exposure from less articles by writing high quality content. It's up to you. Decide which method you want to use, then start writing and submitting the kind of articles that achieve your goals.