Submitting articles to directories can greatly enhance your Internet business and drive traffic to your websites. However, you can do yourself more harm than good if you make critical mistakes in your article submissions. Following, are the top 5 things to avoid when submitting articles to directories.

Avoid obvious self-promotion. Your readers have found your article because they are looking for information. Provide them the information they are seeking without overly promoting yourself or you will lose them before they get through the first paragraph. Some article marketing sites will reject articles they deem as too self-promotional so if you want your article to be read, the best advice is to provide relevant, useful information. Save the promotional content for the resource box.

Never plagiarize content to use for article marketing. Either write your own articles or outsource them to a competent writer. For one thing, it’s wrong, and for another thing, Google may penalize you for using duplicate content. In addition, using plagiarized content could get you banned from the article directory and this could have a negative impact on your business. Even if you buy content from someone else, run it through a plagiarism checker to ensure you are only uploading 100% original content.

Avoid the use of poor spelling and grammar, which will mark you as an amateur. If you do not have a good command of the English language, hire someone to write articles for you. The same rule applies, of course, regardless of who writes your articles. Post articles that are full of spelling and grammatical errors and your readers, who are potential customers, won’t take you seriously.

Don’t rely on your computer’s spell checker to catch all of the mistakes. The Internet is full of articles that have passed the best available spell checkers, yet those same articles are full of mistakes. Potential customers may feel that you can’t provide a quality product or service if you can’t provide quality articles.

Avoid using keywords to stuff your articles without providing any useful information. Even when your articles are filled with interesting information, use keywords naturally. Readers who spot articles that are obviously keyword stuffed will likely be turned off and exit the site without following your link. It isn’t always easy to use keywords in a natural manner, but stuffing articles with keyword phrases that make little sense will mark you as an amateur and you’ll lose the sale long before potential customers even see your website.

Avoid submitting the same article to multiple directories. You can use the same information but use it in such a way that the article is unique. For example, if you are promoting acne remedies, use your research to create multiple articles so that each one of them is different from the others. Here again, you have to be aware that Google will penalize you for duplicate content and visitors who see the same article in multiple places will dismiss the information without really paying close attention to what the article says.

While article marketing is a great way to increase your online presence, it is important to treat it as the important vehicle it is. In order to drive traffic to your websites, your articles need to compel readers to take action. They must want to know more and they must feel that they are dealing with an expert if you want them to take you seriously.

Author Bio: Dinu Vlad is an editor at http://e-articles.info, a free directory of articles that offers free reprint articles for publishers and webmasters. Articles are submitted freely.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: advertising, business, internet, marketing, writing