1. Confusing the reason for writing articles with the reason for promoting your business with articles.

Even though there are many reasons to use articles to promote your business, writing the articles have only one reason.

First lets talk about reasons for promoting your business with articles. Articles drive traffic to your website. They also position you as an expert in whatever field you are writing about. Now those are great and all but it should not be your focus for writing an article. Then why write articles?

Giving value to your readers is why you should be writing articles. Any other motives will stand out like a sore thumb. False motives will turn people away. If you write in this manner, it is best not to bother.

Your readers will only trust you if you give them good value. You can advise them that you have more information on your site in the resource box.

2. Using less than an article's full potential.

After you write an article, then what do you do? Your next step is to make certain your resource box is enticing. It will do you no good if you produce marvelous articles but no one clicks the links in you resource box. Provide a reason for readers to want to click the link to your site.

Using your keywords as hyperlinks in your resource box is a good technique that will increase your articles effectiveness. This will not only have the effect of getting visitors to your site from direct clicks on the links but will help the rank of your site in the search engines indirectly.

Then you submit your article to article to article directories. And then you're done, right? WRONG.

Many people go wrong at this point. Now you also submit the article to web publishers individually. People who want to submit articles of there own are the most frequent visitors to article directories. Web publishers will use your article on their own websites or send it to their email lists so your article is read by real people.

3. Writing useless articles that help no one.

Your articles have to be of help to people or two things can happen. Your business can be negatively impacted by either of them.

The first is that readers will not trust you if they find your article of no help to them after reading it. Of course, they may not even finish reading it. They will very likely just click away and find something that is of more value.

Second, anyone putting your article on their site is not even going to be considered. If they put your article on their site, they would be risking their own reputation. They will lose trust if they put an article up that is garbage. This means you won't get much in the way of links either. So it would be a waste of time.

Article marketing isn't dead. Far from it. Doing it right takes more time but there are great benefits to be realized from it.