5 Simple Ways to Fail at Article Marketing

Content is king. There's no question that good content delivers qualified traffic. Traffic is the first step to getting new customers. New customers are the first step to more income.

It's true, article marketing is very difficult to get wrong or to screw up - but there are some folks who really need failure in their lives. So, for those poor souls who simply can't abide success, I have put together this list of five simple rules to ruin your article marketing campaigns.

1) Write an ad and call it an article This is the biggest one, so it's first in the list. Write a 500 word benefit statement about your product, service, or website. Don't put any of that pesky "interesting content" that readers want to read - and editors want to publish. Just talk about the wonderful things that happen when a reader becomes your customer.

Make sure you include several self-serving links within the body of your article, because how else will someone be able to find your site? Don't limit yourself to simply putting your links in the resource box (where they belong) instead, make sure to litter your article with self-serving links. Oh, and be sure to do it in the most distracting manner possible.

By submitting advertising and calling it an "article", you can be certain that editors and publishers will reject your submissions. That will keep readers from getting to your article, and it will prevent you from getting links back to your sites. It's a terrific way to destroy your campaign.

2) Use your keyword *AS* the title This one is related to the above, so it comes next. Don't bother writing an eye-catching headline that will engage a reader - instead use your preferred keyword as your headline. For instance, use "Fish Tanks" as the headline, instead of "How to Keep your Fish Tanks Clean Without Harsh Chemicals"

You see, that second title might actually get someone to publish your article, resulting in links to your site. Who needs that? The second title might also get a reader to click into your article, resulting in a qualified visitor to your site. Oh the HORROR!

To ensure that your campaign is as ineffective as possible, use a single keyword term as your title.

3) Write for a spiderbot and not for a person Moving right along, as long as we're talking about keywords, make sure that your article repeats your keyword phrase at least once in each paragraph. Better yet - to really make your campaign fail, put it in every sentence.

Keyword stuffing is one of several "Black Hat SEO" techniques that have been known to get sites banned from Google and the other search engines.

No publisher of a content site wants their site to get banned by the search engines, so by stuffing your keyword into the article in as many ways as possible, you can rest assured that the publisher will skip your article. That way, you'll get neither links nor visitors to your website. It's the very picture of failure. Nice work!

Also, since the article is written for spiderbots and not for humans, even the article sites that publish everything without review won't be able to save the campaign. This is great news for those who need failure.

An article that isn't interesting won't convert readers (who have very short attention spans) into visitors to your site. Click click, they're away from the article and onto a more interesting page.

So that your campaign will fail as impressively as possible, write a boring, monotonous article and incorporate as many black hat SEO techniques into your articles as possible. You won't get any traffic at all. And customers? Of course not! Exactly the ticket for those who need to fail.

4) Use pre-written, canned, re-brandable content That's right, we mustn't forget the lazy marketer's method. Imagine this - pay someone to give you a bunch of bland articles that they've already sold to hundreds, if not thousands of other Internet marketers. Then, put your name on it, and try to submit it to article sites as an original article.

Do you remember when you'd open your email and all of your friends had sent you the same Internet joke? Each of your friends thought they had discovered it and that it was new. You knew better.

That's how content publishers feel when they get the latest canned article pretending to be original content. By the time they've seen that article for the zillionth time, they won't even look at it again.

If you want to go broke online, use public domain or rebrandable articles that have already made the rounds of the article sites and submit it as your own. That way you keep from getting the free links and visitors to your website that might cause you to become successful in spite of yourself.

5) Tease instead of teach Now this one is only for the truly savvy failures out there. Teasing readers instead of providing good content is one of the most advanced article marketing techniques for those who want to destroy their businesses.

With this one, you can completely avoid all four of the other techniques and still manage to ruin your article marketing campaigns.

A tease is one of those articles that says "I can tell you how to..." but then never gets around to telling the reader how. The only way to find out how is to visit the author's website, buy the author's product, download the author's ebook, join the author's affiliate program, etc. There isn't any actionable information in the article itself.

Since articles are meant to inform readers, skipping the teaching part and simply teasing them is a great way to decrease your readership, quash your publishing ratio, and fail on a grand scale.

Conclusion So there you have it, five simple ways to ruin an otherwise foolproof article marketing campaign. If you absolutely need your business to fail, make sure you write ads, use a keyword instead of an interesting title, repeat your keywords monotonously in your article, don't bother creating interesting original content, and tease your readers instead of teaching them.

That will guarantee that your articles aren't picked up by the directories, can't be found by Google, don't provide links to their sites and don't convert readers to visitors.