The rise of article marketing has seen an absolute torrent of people trying to drive traffic and build links to their blogs, websites and online business ventures. There is no lack of advice on the subject, much of it, it has to be said, not particularly good.

Hopefully, this article will go some way to redressing the balance and helping article marketers everywhere to avoid some of the more serious and damaging mistakes that will often kill off an article marketing strategy before it's even got off the ground.

The whole system of promoting with articles rests on what has to be considered a fairly tenuous base. Article authors benefit from their writing by giving away their work - in return they earn back links to their websites, both from article directories, and, from any other site on the web that decides to republish their submissions. Additionally, they will increase their chances of ranking well in the SERPS for their targeted subject.

The article directory owners are effectively the "middle man" acting as the meeting place for authors and publishers, bringing the two interested parties together and enabling them to feed off of one another's services. The directory owners offset their costs in various ways, usually via advertising, and also benefit from building links and raising their own profile on the web.

So, a win-win for all three parties, or so it should be.

As with any Utopian idea however, there are plenty of people who are far too short sighted to see the benefits and accept them as they are. This excellent marketing tool is never enough for those who I think of as "greedy" - those who think they are smarter than the system, that they can "beat" everyone else, that they have discovered a way to effectively "game the system".

Sadly, it is this kind of attitude that is slowly strangling article marketing.

It is my optimistic, some might say naive, hope that by reading this article, some people will reassess their methods and that anyone just starting out will choose not to follow the greedy philosophy of the herd.

As an article directory owner and an article author, this comes from experience on both sides of the coin, and it's good advice.

Your articles must be quality. They must be well written, properly punctuated, well structured and proof read for mistakes. Anything less does you a disservice and will be difficult to get accepted into any decent directory and even harder to successfully syndicate to publishers. Failure to ensure these basic tenets of writing will harm your efforts.

2) Advertisements are not articles. Writing ad copy and trying to pass it off as an article will invariably fail.

3) The Resource Box - use it wisely. Your article's ultimate aim is to encourage people to find out more about you and your business. Writing an article about one subject and linking to something completely unrelated is a waste of time. Any decent directory will check for relevance in relation to resources. Give a reader a good reason to want to visit your site for more information on what you have introduced them to in your well written article. Do not link directly to affiliate programs - most directories will delete such links, or even your whole article. It's dumb to do all that work and shoot yourself in the foot this way.

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