Today, no one can deny the fact that article submission has become a big trend in internet marketing to improve website's popularity on the net. There are thousands of articles, books and forum entries showing that submitting your article to as many article and ezine directories (article hosting sites) is the best thing you can do to increase valuable targeted traffic to your web site, and quickly grow your site's backlinks. In this article, you can find some ways that can help you increase the effectiveness as well as facilitate the process of your article submission.

* Well preparation before your submission: Prepare a short abstract and a list of keywords for your article. Not all article directories will ask for them, but when they need, make this abstract and the list of keywords ready to copy and paste. Besides, you may also prepare several different versions of your articles to prevent duplicate content recognition from search engines. Just replace some words by synonyms then you will have an identical article with readers but different one with search engines. Next, gather all the information which is required by most submission sites including: title, author name, pen name, word count... for author account creation. And last but not least, make sure you have reread and corrected all misspelled words or grammar errors before submitting your article because you will lose credibility with a lot of mistakes in your work.

* Making your resource box effective: This is the first reason of writing the article because it's the resource box which is going to bring targeted traffic and backlinks to your own website. Keep it short, concise and include the most important information - your name, a few attractive sentences about what your site offers and the most prominent link (URL) to your website. If an article directory supports HTML code (or Rich Text Editor support), don't type your URL in its entirety. Use it with the anchor text (keyword) that you want to build backlinks for. With different directories, you should vary this anchor text which points to different pages in your website. Of course you must accept the policy of article directories, do not overuse or abuse with your resource box.

* Using clear format for your article when submitting: Write an article as simple as possible with a clear structure. It's better to avoid complex HTML tags, images, affiliate links and special characters. Make certain to well check the guidelines of different article directories and follow the minimum or maximum article length, general layout and style. If you are allowed to use HTML (or Rich Text Editor), you should use some basic tags such as [b] (bold), [i] (italic), (break line), (paragraph), (link) to make your article more attractive. Besides, pay attention to your headline since it is the most efficient thing you can do to get your article read. In the headline, you should highlight a problem or state a solution that your readers are looking for.

* More is better: There are thousands of article directory on the Internet. So the more directories you submit your article to, the more backlinks you can get. It's better if you have prepared a list of all article directories appropriate to your article. With the keywords "article submissions", "articles directory" or "free articles", you can find on search engines thousands of article directories welcoming you to submit your own articles. On the Internet, besides of big articles directories, there are a lot of small directories which you cannot find out with the above popular keywords. Most of them are based on the same software such as Article Dashboard, Article Beach,... so with the keyword "Powered by Article Dashboard" you can get a list of all article directories which use Dashboard System.

* Checking your article's exposure and maintaining your list of article directories for the next submission: Almost all article directories are based on human editors. They need time to read and approve (or reject) your submitted articles. So, the appropriate time to check your article's exposure is about 2-3 weeks after submissions. You can check by either using search tools (if exists) on article directory or using quick indexing and updating search engines such as MSN. This step is very important to make sure your article's format is correct and the resource box is included. In addition, this is also the step to evaluate the article directories: are they still managed or abandoned? Are your articles suitable for these sites? The collected information from these checks will help you maintain a reasonable and useful list of article directories for the next submission.

In this article, I've provided you with some basic but effective tips to come along your article marketing campaigns. Article writing and submission bring benefits to all authors so it should not be underrated. If your articles are not written, and submitted effectively, plenty of efforts can be wasted.

Happy writing and submitting articles!