Top 10 Reasons Why Online Marketers Fail With Article Marketing

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Copyright © 2010 Bill Platt


If you've been marketing products online for any length of time, you've likely heard people talk about the power and promise of article marketing for the promotion of your online business.

Unfortunately, many online marketers have tried to utilize article marketing to benefit their online business and failed. After numerous failures, many online marketers decide that success with article marketing is an illusion. They decide that article marketing is a complete and utter waste of their time and resources.

As one of those people, who has found great success with article marketing, I have taken it upon myself to try to help people understand what enables some people to be truly successful with article marketing, while others will never see any success at all with it.

Some people believe that the only way to learn to be successful, in any task, is to study those who have been successful. I happen to be one of those people, who believe that studying failure can be just as useful, as studying success.

I see the concept of studying successful techniques and techniques that fail, as the yen and the yang of success.

It is one thing to study the people, who have been most successful with article marketing. If you are attentive, you can learn a lot from them. It is quite another thing to study the people, who have failed with article marketing. If you are attentive, you can learn a lot from them as well.

In my recent e-book titled, "How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts", I talk about what it takes to be successful with article marketing. But in this article, I am talking about the reasons why many people fail with article marketing.

Top 10 Reasons Article Marketers Fail

The top 10 reasons why online marketers fail to find success with article marketing:

1. Failing to create an article that carries an interesting title - a title that will attract the attention and interest of publishers first and readers second.

2. Failing to acknowledge that publishers have a vested interest in keeping their readers happy - submitting crap articles that publishers know their readers will not want to read.

3. Failing to understand that people want articles that help them solve problems and answer questions - as opposed to glorified sales copy.

4. Failing to keep the information interesting for the reader - when people abandon your articles, they will never see the link to your website.

5. Failing to present a strong call-to-action in the authors' resource box - if the resource box does not attract a click, the article is simply page filler.

6. Failing to focus on the needs of readers in the authors' resource box - readers, who enjoyed reading your article, want to know why they should visit your website. Don't bore them to tears with a lengthy personal story and a lengthy brag fest about what makes you more special than everyone else.

7. Failing to expend a few more minutes during the editing process, to present your article with nice formatting - articles that break to a new line in mid-sentence are annoying and hard-to-follow. Long paragraphs that run for miles are hard-to-read and lead to eyestrain and article abandonment.

8. Failing to spell check your articles can annoy a lot of people - you may not catch all of the mistakes, especially when your Spellchecker software does not identify the misspelling to you. Often, you can get by with a few misspellings and instances of poor grammar in an article, so long as the misspelling or poor grammar does not distract the publisher, when he or she is reading the article.

9. Failing to make sure that you put the article into the correct category - when publishers ask you to select a category for your article. Do not cut corners here. If you expect the publisher to fix your category for you, they won't... If a publisher sees your article in the wrong category, they will more often hit delete, rather than fix your article placement.

10. Failing to follow simple instructions - the easiest thing to fix is the one thing that 85% of article marketers ignore, and that is making sure your articles' word counts match the publishers' requirements for word counts. Article marketers, who are willing to waste a publishers' time, by submitting articles that do not meet minimum or maximum word counts will find that the publisher would prefer to reject all of the marketers' articles, rather than to take the time to check if the marketer finally started following instructions.

Final Thoughts

In the end, as an article marketer, you must always strive to satisfy two audiences - the publisher, who might want to publish your articles, and the reader, who might want to read your articles.

If your article fails to satisfy one or both of the people in your target audience, then you should not be surprised that your article marketing failed to achieve its intended goals.

The most common reason for failure in article marketing is actually the tendency of marketers to view article marketing, in the same way that they view ordinary advertising.

With ordinary advertising, people write sales copy to generate an immediate action.

With article marketing, the process is a little bit different. With article marketing, those who are most successful answer the needs of the reader first, before presenting the sales copy that is designed to get people to take an action. This is why successful article marketers solve problems and answer questions in the body of the article, reserving the sales copy for the authors' resource box.

By putting the focus on solving problems and answering questions for readers, we are able to get the attention of the publishers, whom we absolutely want and need to publish our articles. By restricting our sales copy to our authors' resource box, publishers are more inclined to give us what we want (access to their audiences for our sales message), because we have successfully given publishers what they wanted - information that their readers will find useful and interesting.


About the Author:
My name is Bill Platt. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, then you will love my newest ebook titled, "How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts". It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html Or, you can get warmed up with my free "Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics" ebook at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html