To all online marketers, newbies or not, now is the time to start writing. Get those creative thoughts together and put them to work for you. You may have a website or you may be promoting someone else's product or service. Either way, article marketing will send more traffic your way.

One of the oldest and most effictive techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers comes from the popularity of information-based marketing efforts. Everyone wants to know more. This is why article marketing is becoming more and more popular. No matter the subject, you can write, submit and publish your article with ease through the many tools available on the net. But getting your invaluable information exposure is only half the story.

But before you start writing to your hearts content, lets take a look at the most common pitfalls people tend to fall into when writing:

Don't confuse the reason your audience is reading the article with the reason you are writing it. Yes, we know there are several reasons we write articles, such as branding, lead generation and/or poduct promotion but the simple truth is, your reader doesn't care. They want the truth in an interesting manner. Therefore you must simply write to inform and make sure you do your research. If the article is not focused with your readers interest at the forefront, you will fail to achieve your goal because no one will want to read your article. Better content will keep the readers interest so they will make it to the end and want to click on your resource box for more information.

Still more people fail to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing. Most people know that they can many additional links from writing articles but did you know that article marketing also gets you better search engine rankings if you strategically mention keywords without overdoing them? Anchor texts also gets good search engine results even though many directories are not able to support this quite yet. Don't forget, article marketing is not just about your resource box. It is first and foremost about the content. Good content will get the article picked up by publishers with a large number of audiences thereby gaining you the ability of leveraging other brands because of the quality of your work. Keep these things in mind and you will increase traffic to your site but lets take it a step further. Finally, people fail to provide content that actually helps or benefits their reader. I understand your main purpose is to get traffic back to your site through your link but if the article banks don't see unique information that their readers can use they will not accept your article and all your work will be for nothing. The content has to be what they are looking for. You won't get published if you don't submit articles that the directories are looking for. They are looking for what they know their audience wants. You can double the number of sites that accept your article if you take the time to find out what people need information about. One publisher with a substantial number of readers will increase your potential audience and your traffic overnight. Write the articles that the publishers want and obey their standard guidelines, research your topic and spell check your work. You can always hire a writer. They will create excellent content on your behalf and it will be yours to keep.

Tip: Remember that a general article is not meant to have the same exposure level that a highly targeted article will get. Discover the difference between these and you will know what to write.

After-all, the choice is yours. Choose to succeed in all that you do and make victory the only acceptable result of your efforts.