Writing articles as a means of website promotion is definitely on the rise. Writing articles gives you the opportunity to showcase your knowledge on an area of interest to you. At the same time, you are providing your readers with useful and/or entertaining information. You can greatly increase traffic to your website absolutely free of charge.

It is easier than ever to distribute your quality article to an eager audience. There are many article directories that accept articles on a variety of topics. Submission is usually free, and your article will often be reviewed within a few days. There are also manual and automated article submission services that will take care of all of the distribution legwork for you.

You can also pay to have articles written for you. Of course, you can take the totally-free approach, and write and distribute articles yourself. Before submitting your articles to an article directory, ensure that you avoid some of these common mistakes.

Don't confuse your promotional goals and your reason for writing the article. These are two separate things. You are hoping to achieve branding and lead generation as promotional goals. But your only goals for writing an article should be to educate, inform, or entertain your audience. This is where you focus all of your creativity and expertise when writing your articles. If your article is clearly self-serving with extensive self-promotion and little substance, your readers will quickly be turned off.

Another common mistake to avoid is to waste the maximum promotional capability of article marketing. You know that you can add links to your websites within the article resource box. These links allow readers to enter your site in search of more information. They also increase your ranking in search results because they increase the number of links pointing to your site.

You can make the most out of article marketing by strategically placing your keywords within the article. Don't overdue it or it will be viewed as spam by the search engines. Some article directories allow you to include one link in the article of the body. If this is permitted, make the most of it and use quality anchor text with your link. When optimizing your copy for search engines, never sacrifice the quality of your content or the integrity of your "brand".

Another common pitfall in writing articles is to write content that doesn't help the readers. The first thing I look for when approving article submissions for my own directory is for article spam. These are articles that are thinly-disguised sales pitches. They are loaded with affiliate and deep links and don't provide any useful information or answer any questions. They are simply there to increase the quantity of traffic to the spammer's website.

Writing one quality article can get you thousands more visitors than one hundred junk articles. Most human-edited article directories will not approve spammy articles with little original content. But they will happily approve a well thought-out, insightful article. Quality articles not only get approved more often, they also get read more often. Keep this in mind when writing - quality not quantity.

Write articles that people want to read. If you have a website about health and fitness, you could write articles about some of the most popular techniques in yoga or pilates. Not only should your articles be interesting and current, they should be checked carefully for spelling and grammar mistakes. Remember that your name and the integrity of your website are at stake, so represent yourself professionally and you'll see your vigilance rewarded.