Article marketing has become the primary marketing vehicle for many online businessmen. Its simple, its effective and its free.

But article submission these days is prone to some costly mistakes, that, when committed, would mean failure for your article marketing campaign. These mistakes are born from simple things that people take for granted, and they can, in fact, be easily remedied.

What are these mistakes? Here are the 6 most commonly committed ones:

1. Submitting articles which you have used as content for your website. This can be fatal. The search engines can consider your content as a duplicate, and such a page where they can be found may be de-indexed. Additionally, youd want nothing but unique content for your own website, since content generates traffic and you will need to provide something that people are looking for which they cannot find anywhere else.

2. Submitting the same article to the same directory more than once. Most article directories frown on this practice. Though this tactic escapes non-automated systems of most article directories, the repercussions, when caught, could be disastrous. Your account may be banned by the article directories you have submitted to.

3. Submitting the same article to many directories at once. This is the practice of many people, but its wrong. The search engines will notice the sudden spike in your number of back links, and its spiders will categorize the same as dubious. Your page rank may not even benefit from the said back links, if ever such is the case. You need to submit your articles nice and slow. 5 article directories per 2 days will be a safe and convenient approach. Remember, most of your back links will not come from the article directories themselves. Rather, they will come from the webmasters who will pick up your article for online publication. Taking things slow will serve this end.

4. Trusting automated article distribution software programs. There are a lot of software programs promising a solution to the rather tedious requirement of having to submit your articles to many directories. Sadly, most of these programs do not serve their purpose well, the reason being is that article directories often change their systems to dissuade the usage of such programs. For the many article directories in the World Wide Web, article submission programs pose a lot of potentials for abuse which will be detrimental to their own businesses. Hence, there is no standard article distribution software that is built to last. Manual submission of your articles is still the best. If you feel that this is too laborious a task for you, you can always subscribe to manual submission services that are widely available in the market today. Or you can get a freelancer to do the task for you.

5. Submitting unmodified PLR articles. With the sheer amount of membership sites and offers of PLR packages these days, its tempting to submit them as they are. This will be a costly mistake. Article directories consider this a big no-no as it compromises the integrity of their own services and promotes the submission of duplicate articles which will just spam their inventories.

6. Submitting articles that are filled with affiliate links. Most article directories explicitly state that affiliate links should not be included anywhere within the article. The worst thing that can happen to their directories is that theyll become one glorified classified ads site. Once an affiliate link is detected, the article will almost, always be rejected. If you have to include an affiliate link, make sure to host it in your own website, then include the URL of your website in your articles.