Article Surfing Archive

Writing and submitting articles is an effective strategy to advertise your website and increase traffic to your website. For ezine publishers and webmasters to re-print your articles, they must be of high quality.
Many internet marketers have their articles rejected and not published because of several mistakes. If you want your articles to be picked up and massively distributed, here are the common mistakes to avoid:

1. Lack of proofreading articles. Articles that are full of grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors are not acceptable. You must proofread your article two or three times before you submit it. Make sure that your writing style is simple and your language is effective. There is no need to use complicated vocabulary. Say what you have to say in the most simple and effective terms. If you*re not good at proofreading, find someone to do that for you. An otherwise good and informative article can be rejected by publishers simply because it's full of errors.

2. Unformatted articles. In addition to making sure that your articles are free of grammatical errors, you may also want to be sure that you have clearly defined paragraphs. Nothing is worse than a big blob of text with 30 run-on sentences. Use a writing format that makes it easy for the reader to read. Write in short paragraphs, use bullets points or numbers. While browsing for content, readers are more likely to read an article which their eyes can quickly and easily skim from top to bottom.

3. Lack of useful content. Your articles must educate and inform readers. It is therefore important that your articles deliver useful information to the readers. Research what your reader wants to know by doing surveys with your own audience or do keyword search engine research to find what people are looking for. Avoid having fluff in your articles, and aim to deliver useful information.

4. Lack of focus. Your article must address a single issue or problem. Your article must not be too long, and the reader must be able to read it all in about 5 to 10 minutes. So you do not have enough space to waffle. You must avoid making your article too broad or superficial in content. It's better to go in-depth on a narrow topic. Once you have identified the topic you want to write about; define it, explain it and explore it in as much as you can within a 600 word article, plus or minus. Be original in covering your topic as much as possible in a way that has not been done by others.

5. Lack of a headline that catches the readers* attention. The headline is often the initial reason why someone might read your article or pass it over for another article. It is important that you entice readers to read more of your article by an interesting headline and introduction. Keep your headline simple and brief.

6. Duplicate content or articles. These days there are a lot of PLR (Private Label Rights) article membership sites where hundreds of people get the same article. If you have these PLR articles, you must re-write them before you submit them to article directories. Article directories do not accept similar or duplicate content. If you can't write your own articles and have to outsource them, get a ghostwriter to write them exclusively for you.

7. Too much hype, bragging and self-promotion. Don't fill the body of the article with hype, excessive links to your site or blatant self-promotion. Your opportunity to promote yourself and your services is in the *Resource Box* or author's biography where you can place a link to your website. A*Resource Box* is your pay-off for giving your article up for free reprints, but don't abuse that by including a dozen website addresses. Stick with one website URL or two at the most and you'll find your article may find a higher distribution rate.

8. Too long and boring articles. There are other articles which readers can read besides yours. You must therefore make sure that your articles aren't too long and boring. The length must be just right; a reader must be able to read it in about 5 to 10 minutes. Your writing style must be engaging in order to keep the reader interested.

9. Articles with similar information to many other articles. The internet is full of other articles on the niche you are writing about. It is therefore important that you make your article stand out from the rest. Your article must provice some unique opinion, experience or solution. You must bring a fresh perspective to the topic you are writing about.

10. Uneconomical use of words. There is no need to use some complicated style in your writing. Keep it simple, and deliver the message you want to deliver in the most economical number of words.

If you avoid these ten common mistakes in article writing, your articles will get published by many e-zines and webmasters, resulting in a lot of traffic to your website.