Article marketing works if you follow a few basic guidelines, so for those who are not finding success with articles, or for those considering starting out, here are a few ground rules that will save you a lot of work in the long run.

As an article directory owner and editor I am exposed to a huge number of articles every single day of the week.

I sometimes receive complaints from authors who are angered by the fact that their article has not been published, which leads me to believe that there are still a lot of people out there who do not understand article marketing, nor the role that directories play.

For those who are not finding success with articles, or for those considering starting out, here are a few ground rules that will save you a lot of work in the long run and will likely get your article marketing career off to a much more auspicious start.

Read the article directory's specific terms of service and guidelines. This may seem like a boring, tedious and long winded waste of your valuable time but in the long term it will save you hours of frustration and wasted effort. All directories set their own rules and some are stricter than others. Most directories labor under a huge number of submissions and the work of sifting through them is often the job of one individual. This means that if your opening paragraph or introductory statement is poorly written or contains mistakes, that is as far as the editor will go before hitting the delete key. The luxury of time to edit an author's mistakes or to decline an article as opposed to deleting it, is one that most editors do not have.

Mass submissions are usually viewed as spam. Let's face it, none of us are capable of writing over 200 articles in a day - I would say that even producing more than ten would be a pretty amazing feat of productivity. It should come as no surprise to those submitting large numbers of articles in a 24 hour period to find that they are all deleted. Article directory software usually allows for quick erasure of such submissions, so if you don't want your work to fall victim to mass deletion, don't mass submit. All that is needed is a little common sense. If you are using a submission service, set the option to stagger your submissions over a longer period of time.

Proof read your articles. If you don't know what this means, look it up! If your writing is riddled with spelling errors, poor structure, punctuation horrors and grammatical butchery, don't be surprised if none of them get published. I could write thousands of words on the most common mistakes seen in people's writing. These usually involve spelling and grammar. Spell check your articles, even if you think you're perfect, you will often be surprised at the mistakes you make. If you tend to misspell a word regularly, you will never correct it unless you make yourself aware of it.

If you are of the opinion that these things don't matter (after all, people will know what you mean!) then think again. If you want to write and, more importantly, see your work published and picked up by other website owners and bloggers, you need to demonstrate an ability to write well.

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