Hey all, Articles are an important part of any website, whether you're promoting your own products or working the affiliate marketing angle. I've gotten some great advice here at DP and have seen big success with article marketing, so below are some tips for those who aren't seeing good results. Possible Reasons Your Articles Aren't Producing For You: * Your articles are off target, and don't pertain to your niche. Make sure you're writing about something that will help sell your product or drive traffic to your site, and not just talking (and talking). * You're not going after the right keywords. Know your market, and know what keywords/phrases are essential to driving traffic. Make good use of google's keyword tool to chase the more lucrative phrases and sub-phrases that will help get targeted traffic to your website. * You have poor keyword saturation. Spend some time learning the basics of keyword saturation. Some people don't do enough of it, while others completely overdo things to the point where their articles get dinged to death. * You're not thinking like a user. Open google's main page. Now close your eyes and imagine you're a person about to search for your product or website's niche. Exactly what would you type in? Precisely how would you word your search engine request? When you think like a user, you can sometimes stumble across some search terms you never really thought of before in relation to your product. And if you're not chasing the most commonly-searched phrases, you're missing out. * Your articles are too short. Maybe this is my personal opinion, but I've found that my longer articles (600+ words) do better in the search engine rankings than my shorter ones. Way too often you'll see people banging out dozens of 250 word articles, and I'm not sure that's a good philosophy. * Quality, not quantity. I'd rather write one really good, catchy article than write three mediocre ones. If you're going for link-power, the shorter, easier, and more mindless articles will help you. But in driving traffic? Making sure your paragraphs are cohesive and your article compelling can go a long way toward getting those click-throughs. * You're just not funny enough. Don't write dry articles. I'm not saying you have to be a comedian, but anything that's way too informational (and keyword-driven) will lose the reader's interest rather quickly. Try to talk to your reader like a person by relating to them in a friendly way. Cracking a joke here and there never hurt either, and will help your reader get through the article to where your links are located. * Your articles are not unique. When I first started submitting articles, I thought "The more directories, the better". Over time though, I've found that duplicate content can really kill you. If you write a really great article? Submit it to one really good article site and leave it at that. Don't dilute the quality of your article by republishing it 100x over. * You didn't leave the reader wanting more. By the time your article ends, your reader should be hungry. It should seem almost as if you've got the answer to their burning question... and that answer is right on the other side of the link you gave them. You want to give your reader an incentive to click through to your website - not hand them all the answers within the scope of your article. That being said, you have to give them answers to some of their questions, in order to establish yourself as an authority. * You're not analyzing (and duplicating) your own success. As you build up a bunch of quality articles through Ezine or whatever, are you going back to see which articles were the most popular? Which ones had the best click-through rate? Which of them got the most pageviews, or generated the most comments? If not, you're doing yourself a big disservice. When you stumble across a very successful article that you've written, it's time to re-write it and submit it again, with a slightly different title. Chances are good that you'll have similar success with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th re-writes of that one excellent submission. Obviously there are a lot more tips than just these, but the ones listed above have always been successful for me. If you can keep grinding away with quality articles, you're always going to have sales. Good luck to everyone, and thanks to those here who've helped me in the past.