An article submission strategy should form an essential part of promoting your web site, but if you are missing one vital ingredient, most of your efforts will be in vain. This article will show you what you could be missing, and how adding this to your strategy can have a hugely positive effect on the results you get from your article submissions.

Many people seem to believe they can spend just five minutes writing an article, submit it to lots of article directories, and then enjoy an avalanche of traffic to their web site the following morning.

If only it was so simple. Once again, there is no such easy route to success.

Which of the following articles do you think would achieve the best results after it has been distributed?

- One that has a great title, is focused, provides valuable information, reads well and is error-free;

- Or, one that contains grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, reads poorly, is badly structured, and fails to provide any insight of value.

Or to phrase the question slightly differently, which article do you think is more likely to be selected by a publisher looking for some quality content to put in his ezine with a readership in the thousands if not tens of thousands?

It's obvious of course - he will be looking for a quality article that will reflect positively on him and his ezine.

There is another important factor you need to remember. Once you have distributed an article online, it will exist online FOR A VERY LONG TIME - with YOUR NAME attached to it. And if you have distributed it correctly, it will sit on hundreds of different web sites. Clawing an article back at some point in the future will be a very difficult if not impossible task.

This means you need it to reflect positively on your name, and on your business, not just now, but for a long time into the future. And an article you have put together in just five minutes with little care or attention is unlikely to do you or your business any justice.

If you want article submissions to work for you as an online marketing strategy, it is absolutely essential that you give the highest priority to ensuring the quality of the article.

Imagine yourself in five years time, with your business, your own level of success, and your reputation, growing healthily over that time. Do you really want a poor quality article with your name attached still in publication?

I would think not.

There are, however, some easy tips to follow that will help guarantee the quality of your article and ensure that article submissions are of benefit to you both now and in the future:

1. Ensure you have a clear focus for your article - the title should also reflect this.

2. Run it through a spell-checker - you may be surprised what you may have missed.

3. Leave it for at least a couple of days, then come back to it and re-read it. This will mean you spot elements of your article that read poorly and need to be revised or rewritten. This is absolutely essential for improving the overall quality of your article.

4. Leave it again for a day or two, then come back and re-read it. Hopefully this time it will read a lot better, although you may still notice the odd element that requires a final improving touch. When I write an article myself, I often return to it several times before finally distributing it.

5. Ask a third party to review it - this could be a partner, friend, associate, or even a professional editor. This again can reveal problems with your article that you hadn't spotted yourself.

6. Once you are completely happy with your article, run it through a spell-checker one last time.

These few steps add very little time on to the process of creating your article, but they can improve the quality of your article immensely. By ensuring the quality of your article, you will maximize the results you can achieve from your article submission strategy and boost your own credibility and reputation over the longer term.

Copyright (c) 2007 Steve Shaw