Information-based marketing is usually your safest bet for sharing your business online. It is one of the oldest and most effective techniques to get targeted prospects to a website and convert them into buyers. Article writing, submissions, and publications are developing in popularity as people realize the effectiveness.

Several tools and sites already exist that people can use to hasten the process of distributing their articles. These tools are priceless in getting the contents more exposure, but there's more to consider than blasting away pre-written or self written articles.
Here are three important rules to consider before submitting your contents to article directories and publishers:

1. Do not confuse the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them.

With your article, there are useful benefits to sharing them with others. Branding, lead generation, and promotion are some added results and should be essential to the creation or revision process.

However, there is only one primary reason why you write an article. Your primary goal is to inform your audience. If the article is not focused on this crucial, most important goal, it will fail to achieve the added benefits of marketing the article. If your article is one big advertisement, no one will be interested in reading the article.

You need to be able to capture your reader with what is in your article, and then make them click on your resource box. The solution, to make that happen, is to ensure quality information and content that is personalized by you, the writer, specifically for the reader.

2. Do not ignore the hidden benefits associated with article marketing.

You may know already that your articles can help you generate additional back-links to your site. Nevertheless, do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from those same articles?

How do you do that?

The easiest method is to mention keywords at strategic places. Like any keyword optimizing though, pay attention not to overdo the placement. You don't want to break rule number one. In addition to keyword optimizing your article, some publishers even allow anchor texts, which is also an effective method to improve results. However, realize that the majority of the publishers and directories are not able to support this.

Also keep in mind; it is not solely about the links back to your site and search rankings. Part of doing well in your article marketing requires publishers with a large number of audiences to accept your work. An accepted article has the ability to leverage other brands.  Reaching a wider audience also brings more traffic without even needing better search rankings.  Although often, the more exposure, then the more back-links, and the better ranking.  If you take your time and do it right, it's just a win-win all around.

Still, these things do not bring in the money by themselves. Other factors can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity to improve or increase your earnings if that is your goal.

Take the time to do some careful planning and ensure that your article will serve the function that you intended your marketing to have.

3. Do not publish content that is useless to the the publishers or out of your market.

Perhaps in the process of writing, revising, and publishing articles, you are thinking that all you really need are back links to your site. You might be thinking that you can just submit and forget, and any visitors that are generated as a result are just fine with you.

Do you know what?

Not all article banks and directories are going to accept your content automatically.

Frequently, they have established guidelines and specifications regarding acceptable articles for publishing.

You can easily double the number of sites you can submit to by writing articles that the directories are looking to receive and share with their readers. All it takes is stumbling on that one publisher, with a hundred thousand readers, to increase your potential audience overnight.

In other words, write the articles that publishers want in their publications if you want your article marketing to work effectively. Obey the standard guidelines! Run spell checks, do your research on a good topic. If you feel your writing skills are not up to speed, you can also hire freelance writers or start with pre-written private label content and modify it to ensure good personalized content on your behalf.

Regardless of the source of your content, what it comes down to is this; you make the choice on your level of involvement and subsequently the results.

You can start getting a little exposure from increased back-links with limited revision and article submission, or enjoy massive exposure from taking a little extra time making a quality piece of information to submit

I'll leave that choice up to you.

Just remember, less quality equals less effectiveness. Do you really want that for your business?  Maintain the quality of your work!  Don't to ruin the power of article marketing for your online business with poor content.