Copyright 2006 Mike Adams
Article marketing is one of the best ways to promote a website. Article Marketing is relatively simple, extremely effective, and generally free (or at least very low cost).
There is one catch. For Article Marketing to work, your articles have to be accepted by the article directories you submit them to, and they have to be published by webmasters and eZine publishers.
As the owner of a popular article directory, ElectricText, I can tell you that there are 5 simple ways to avoid getting your articles rejected. Avoid these 5 things, and your Article Marketing will likely be highly successful.
1. Poor Writing
You don’t have to be a great writer to get your articles accepted in most article directories. But you do have to be at least okay. Not everyone has natural writing talent. Don’t be afraid to ask someone you know to review your articles and help you improve them.
2. Bad Grammar
Many people are not very good at grammar or are writing and submitting articles in a language (usually English) other than their own.
Article directories and publishers expect articles to be ready to publish, with no editing required. Minor issues may be overlooked, but when hundreds (or thousands) of article submissions are coming in per day, it’s easiest to just reject articles with bad grammar.
This does not mean that you have to give up on Article Marketing if your grammar is not perfect or English is not your native language. Just find someone who can help edit your articles. Most articles that I have to reject for bad grammar could have been fixed with just 5 or 10 minutes of editing.
3. Badly Edited (Or Badly Spun) Articles
I am continually surprised to receive articles where the author obviously did not check the spelling or read through the copy before submitting it. Many articles that are otherwise quite well-written have a number of minor typos – misspelled words, missing words, etc. These are the sorts of errors that could have been caught by any word processor or even just reading the article before hitting send.
The advent of private label rights content and “article spinning” software has definitely increased this problem! What’s article spinning? Many people buy the rights to articles written by others. Then they run them through special software that is supposed to randomly replace words and phrases, much like you might do manually with a thesaurus. Their idea is to improve their Article Marketing by submitting unique articles.
Unless you overdo this (see #4), there is really just one problem. Article spinning software often produces some rather clumsy wording. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether an article was written by a non-English speaker or by article spinning software.
In both cases, the fix is simple. Edit your articles manually before sending them, or have someone else edit them. Check your spelling and grammar. Read the article out loud to see if it flows. I see a lot of articles that probably would have been edited if anyone had tried to read them aloud before hitting send.
4. Duplicate (Or Almost-Duplicate) Articles
This one ties in with #3, as it seems to be largely a result of private label rights content and “article spinning” software. There are a few authors who constantly submit multiple copies of the same article with very slight differences.
I have literally had to ban authors from submitting articles after spending an hour or two per day for several days trying to weed out 5 or 6 unique articles from 50 or 100 duplicates. I quickly realized it just isn’t worth it, as there are many other authors and articles to publish.
I guarantee that irritating editors and publishers and getting banned is just about the dumbest way to try to do article marketing!
5. Plagiarized Articles
I’m not sure which irritates me more: #4 or #5. I can’t count the number of people who copy and paste articles right out of Wikipedia (an online collaborative encyclopedia), then submit them as their original work. Often they don’t change anything! Yes, I realize that Wikipedia is “copyleft” not “copyright,” but there are still rules.
There is nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as one of your sources – it’s an excellent source. But use a few more sources too, then add your own original thoughts and put it all in your own words. Please.
There you have it, 5 ways to avoid rejection and succeed at article marketing. If you write and submit many articles and manage to avoid these 5 things, I think most of your articles will be accepted and you will be extremely successful in your article marketing.