Article Marketing is one of the best free effective methods you can use to promote your website and all your marketing campaigns.

If you’ve gone through my blog archives, you would have noticed that I don’t have many posts on article marketing. That’s not to say I don’t believe in it or know how essential it is for getting backlinks and free traffic to your website or blog.

I stopped writing to article directories temporarily for at least a year because I wasn’t getting any traffic then, despite getting lots of backlinks. I used that break to focus on other aspects of the business, blogging being one of them. Well now I’ve resumed doing article marketing. Want to know the reason why?  Well I am now doing freelance writing articles and every week I write at least 5 articles and publish them at selected article directories. But most importantly I found the mistakes I made that caused me not to get much traffic for the articles I posted one year ago.

Article Writing Mistake #1 - Lack of Article Marketing Research

When I first started article writing I did so without doing any research on how successful authors write and the techniques they used. My mistake was to just focus on the relevant keywords and start cracking. As a result, my posts were generally too long. The correct technique is to write short articles about 270 - 300 words.

Article Writing Mistake #2 - Article Contents not Scannable

Whenever I visit an ezine site looking for ideas, I usually don’t like to read long articles. I’ll just read the first paragraph and moved on. However if it’s long and has good sub headers, I’ll just read these headers only. If they are long, without eye catching presentation, I skip them. I realized now I was guilty of many of these same article writing mistakes then.

Article Writing Mistake #3 - Article Headlines didn’t grab my readers’ attention

I learned that in an article, there are just 2 places where you can grab the attention of a reader. The first is the title or headlines and the other is the bio text. Looking back, I have to admit most of my articles’ headlines or bio text could have been better written in these 2 areas.

How you can use these article marketing tips to help improve your web traffic?

1. Reaching out to more people

If you think you have written a good article, don’t you want to share it with others. When you choose this method of submitting your articles to ezine directories, nothing really stops you getting the traffic. If you are are new marketer, it gives you better results than writing on your new blog which may not be indexed, have no traffic or no search engine ranking. But when you submit to article directories, all it needs is good content and good article writing technique to bring in traffic.

2. Get High Search Engine Ranking

Even with a short article, you could make it search-engine friendly by optimizing your article using good keyword phrases that can give your articles a high search engine ranking.However avoid using too many keywords. In fact for a 300 word article, I usually use about 3 keywords.

3. The Use of Readers’ Comments and Testimonials

When you received good reviews and testimonial, put them to good use on your website or blog. Find a relevant post in which you can use them to promote your products or substantiate an opinion on your topic of discussion. It does give you that extra weight besides looking nice on your blog or website as it helps to build your reputation, or the authority that you site projects or at least tries to.

IMHO testimonials are very powerful statements as they come from people who shared similar experiences or who have just used and loved your product or services. Sometimes they serve as your customers’ deciding vote before buying your product.

Final Thoughts

Even after one year of neglecting article marketing, I’ve finally realized how much I could have gained had I known some of the things I learned only recently. But on the other hand I prefer to look to the future and not what could have been. I’m pretty fired up on article writing especially after having learned some of the best kept Article Marketing Secrets from the gurus.

I’ve been very encouraged by the good article stats I’m seeing in my Ezinearticles submission. In fact it was this one post which got 100+ views the day after it was published that got me curious as to how that came about, something unheard of when I last wrote articles for them.

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Did you miss any of these?:

• Lessons Learned From My Article Writing
• Writing Good Articles Will Bring More Traffic To Your Website
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