To all article authors out there: do not submit your articles, until you know how to avoid some of the common mistakes that many authors out there make.

Article writing, submissions and publications are getting more and more popular due to the Internet. This technique is actually one of the oldest and most effective in getting targeted prospects to visit your site, and then converting them into customers.

With the need for information-based marketing growing exponentially by the day, there are now lots of services and software available in the market that authors can use to simplify the process of distributing their articles. As a result, many Internet marketers are now going for article marketing as one of their Internet marketing strategies.

Though this is invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, this is only half of the story. I will share with you the painful truth about the common mistakes that many people make before submitting their articles to the directories.

Not focusing on the most important purpose

There are three key promotional benefits why Internet marketers go for article marketing: branding, lead generation and promotion of their website. But there is really only one important reason why you are writing an article, and that is to inform your audience.

If your article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits simply because no one will be interested to read it in the first place. You need to figure out how to get people to read what is in your article first, and then entice them to click on your resource box.

Try to focus on the headline of your article to get the readers attention, and then put something compelling in the resource box so that the reader will click through to your website.

Insufficient content to get the attention of the readers

It is a known fact that not all article banks and directories are going to accept your articles automatically. They do have some guidelines and specifications on the articles that they are accepting, so it is very important that you format your articles properly after writing them.

If you want your article marketing to work in the most effective way for you, then you must write the articles that publishers want in their publications. This also means you have to obey the standard guidelines, spell checks, researching on a good topic and even hiring a writer to produce a good content on your behalf.

At the end of the day, it is all really a matter of choice. You can start getting a little exposure from increased links back but on a very basic level, or enjoy massive exposure by investing a little extra time and effort writing content-rich articles.

You must be aware of the fact that an article submitted to directories does not necessarily have the same level of exposure as highly-targeted content ones geared towards a narrow group of interested audience.

Remember, all it takes is just one publisher with a hundred thousand readers to increase your potential audience overnight, and boost your credibility to new heights.

Failure to maximize the full potential of article marketing

You may already know for a fact that article marketing can help you generate many back links to your site. But do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from just one article?

One of the tricks is to put your keywords at strategic places in your article. Put the keywords once in your headline, and then sporadically throughout the article for better optimization. You can also use an anchor text in the resource box, but it is important to note that some directories do not support this.

Article marketing is not all about generating back links to your site, although you can achieve better search engine results as you submit more articles. You should also focus your efforts on getting your articles picked up by publishers with a large subscriber base and gain more exposure for your brand name because of the quality of your work.

Now that you have finished reading this article, you can now have a peace of mind submitting your articles to the directories, because you have just learned how to avoid the common pitfalls that are bugging many article writers out there.