It's a well-known fact that distributing articles through the various article directory sites can result in a considerable number of new visitors to your website as other webmasters lap up your content and add it to their sites, each one linking to yours.

However as word of the success of this method spreads, competition increases and so it is becoming ever harder to get your articles published on other sites.

Even more so popular, high-traffic sites that can really make your hit counter spin when they use your article.

To be successful at this technique you need to know the rules and when selecting articles myself for use on my sites I never cease to be amazed at the number of articles that "break the rules".

Here, therefore, are the 7 most common mistakes I see other writers making, that will *seriously* reduce the number of people who choose to use your articles on their sites.

Avoid these and you'll see your results soar.

1) Badly Chosen Title

There are two problems here. They are boring or unoriginal titles. If you're writing an article about viral marketing, don't just call it "Viral Marketing". Look to make the title original, unique and shouting about either a benefit to the reader or answering a question. Call it "17 Ways To Increase Your Sales In The Next 24 Hours Using Viral Marketing" or suchlike. Now *that* sounds interesting.

Also, try to avoid using any "strange" characters in your title. Hyphens are okay, but speech marks, quotation marks, colons and semicolons should be avoided. Why? Many webmasters use automated software to find articles and add them to their sites. This software often takes the title of the article and saves it as an HTML file with the article title as the filename.

Except of course filenames can't have the above characters in them, so the webmaster will either have to manually change the title, or more likely, simply ditch your article.

In the same way, calling your article something common like "Viral Marketing" will likely mean the software will have several files with the same name. And so yours might just get written over.

2) Poor Formatting

Experienced writers and webmasters on the net talk about "white space". That is - the amount of white space around text on a page which, if large enough, makes the text look approachable and interesting.

Sentences and paragraphs should be short, as in this article, with spaces between paragraphs. It simply makes the text look easy to read, so increases the number of people who bother.

Don't write your whole article in one huge paragraph as it looks aweful, and very few people will bother reading it.

Also, and I don't know why some people do this, but don't "indent" the beginning of each sentence. It just looks strange when it comes to adding it to a website.

Consider also line length. Some article directories want hard carriage returns after 70 or 80 characters. If that's what they want - give it to them!

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