May
6

The 7 Bad Habits of Highly Defective Article Marketers

Filed Under article marketing 

Table of contents for Article Marketing Success

  1. Article Marketing Success
  2. Top Article Marketing Resources
  3. Article Marketing SEO | What is Thy Purpose?
  4. The 7 Bad Habits of Highly Defective Article Marketers
  5. Article Marketing To Increase Website Traffic
  6. The Article Resource Box | The 3 Biggest Mistakes

I see a lot of mistakes out there. Are you making any of these yourself? The good news is, most of these are easily fixed.

1.  Bad Habit #1 - Failure to Launch

You know, this is the guy who says he’s an article marketer, but really isn’t. He’s going to write articles but never quite gets around to it. He comes up fragments of ideas with little snippets of one or two sentences, but never gets enough together to publish a full article. Is this you?


Solution:

Gather together those snippets on related topics until you have between 3 and 10 snippets. Then, build out some content for each snippet. Publish an article using those snippets, such as…

"Top 10 Ways to…."
"Top 5 Ways Not to…"
"My 10 Best Ideas on …"
"Top 10 Things I was Going to Write About…"

and so on. If you can put together 5 50 word snippets, plus an introduction and a conclusion, you can come up with a 300+ word article suitable for submission to almost any article site.

2. Bad Habit #2 - Mumbo Jumbo

This is the guy who writes so poorly he doesn’t make sense half the time and everything comes out sounding like mumbo jumbo. Considering that an article is often a chance to get exposure to an audience you might not otherwise encounter, this is a fatal mistake. I’m not sure why some of these articles get published. Is this you?

Solution:

There’s no easy way to say this. It just needs to be fixed by writing better. Maybe it’s a matter of rushing it. Take your time and make sure your articles are of good quality. If you’re just not good at writing, then outsource the writing.

3. Bad Habit #3 - Failure to Use Anchor Text

This is the guy who writes a great article, but at the end, totally wastes the resource box by failing to use anchor text in the link. Is this you?

Solution:

This one is so easy to fix, it’s just that it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Always put your anchor text in there!

4. Bad Habit #4 - Poor Keyword Selection

This poor, highly defective article marketer doesn’t do his keyword research. He decides to write an article around the keyword "clowns who like green sweaters." After his article campaign, he can’t seem to understand how he can be number one at Google for that keyword, but not get any traffic. That keyword has exactly zero searches at WordTracker. Oops! Is this you?

Solution:

Again, this is an easy one to fix. Pick the tool of your choice and do your keyword research. You can choose either high demand (regardless of competition), or a low competition keyword with relatively good demand. If you choose something no one is searching on, what’s the point?

5. Bad Habit #5 - Poor Keyword Density

Those with this bad habit will write an informative and engaging article, but totally forget about optimizing for keywords! Is this you?

Solution:

Write articles just like you would write your pages… so that they rank high in the search engines for your selected keyword.

6. Bad Habit #6 - Linking to an Affiliate Site

This one is a shame and I see it a lot. Some article directories don’t allow this, but many do. Here’s an article marketer who writes a beautiful article. He gives his audience great information, uses the right keywords and the proper keyword density, and then totally misses both an SEO and a branding opportunity by linking to somebody else’s affiliate website! Doh!

First of all, the author loses credibility in such a big way because it makes it look like the article was written strictly as a sales pitch. Second, there’s no SEO benefit. Third, why would you want to send potential customers to someone else’s website, before they come to yours? I don’t get why people do that at all. Have you made this mistake?

Solution:

Luckily, this one is easily fixed. Simply get rid of that ugly and useless affiliate link and replace it with a keyword rich text link to your site.

7. Bad Habit #7 - Failure to Deep Link

This usually goes hand in hand with not using anchor text for the link. If your targeted keyword is a deep link on your site, then link to that page. In fact, link to two pages with two different keywords. Do you deep link?

Solution:

Again, this one is easily fixed. At the simplest level, link to the home page with the site concept keyword, and one other page with the specific keyword you want to boost. Article marketing is such a great opportunity for deep linking so don’t miss that.

It really isn’t that hard to get all the elements correct when you’re doing your article marketing campaigns. I hope that if you saw yourself in any of these, that you take corrective action.

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