Writing and publishing articles can be a very effective means of marketing for most businesses. It builds credibility, creates branding, drives traffic, and increases link popularity to your website. Like any other marketing method however, there are effective and ineffective ways to do article marketing.

A key component to making article marketing effective, is making sure the resource box is used effectively. Article directory managers, see a number of mistakes made in resource boxes that have greatly reduced the marketing effectiveness of the article. The good news is that most of these mistakes are very easy to fix.

1. The Links in the Resource Box Are Broken

Many articles that have been submitted to article directories don't have links that work correctly. A huge opportunity for traffic is lost because the link in the resource box sends them to the wrong website. If the reader wants more information after reading the article, they will have no where to go, especially if the artcle is very well written and draws in the reader to want more information.

The most common problem with broken links, is that the linking code isn't formatted correctly. This creates a broken link that usually points to a page that doesn't exist. Many authors leave the 'http://' off of the beginning of the URL, causing the link point to a page like 'http:// theirarticledirectorysite.com/www.yourwebsite.com'.

To avoid this problem, it is crucial to add the 'http://' to the beginning of your link (make www.yourwebsite.com into http:// www.yourwebsite.com) so the link will send visitors to your website when they click on it, and not some non-existant page. If you use article submission software, or a service, carefully review the instructions on how to add links to your resource box so you can avoid creating broken links. If you need to add the links yourself, make sure you understand enough HTML so you can correctly create a link.

2. No Active Links in the Resource Box

Another common problem with articles submitted to directories is that there are no links at all in the resource box. In this case, the author just writes the link to their website without making it an active link. It is just a text listing of their link, such as 'http:// mywebsite.com' that isn't clickable.

The most common cause of this problem is that the author doesn't realize that many article submission software services do not work the same as email. In most email programs, a link that includes 'http:' will automatically make the link clickable in their email reader.

Most article submission software and services don't follow these same rules. In most cases, the links aren't automatically created, and the author has to create the link themselves. Read the article submission guidelines very carefully to determine what is required to add links to the resource box. If you have to do them yourself, then make sure you know enough HTML to create a clickable (active) link

3. Resource Box Not Related To Article

The resource box of the article serves many purposes. Some of the biggest reasons are to give credibility to the author and to guide the reader to where they can find more information about the subject material of the article they just read.

There are many articles out there today with resource boxes that focus on topics that have absolutely nothing to do with the written article. Some people will write articles that talk about how to improve your time management skills, and then take you to a credit-repair site in the resource box of the article.

If readers want more information, they want to read more about time management and not credit repair. This mistake will make the reader question the authenticity of the article and the credibility of the author in regards to the subject matter. After all, if they were experts and had a lot of information about the subject matter, wouldn't they have more information on their website that they would want their readers to know?

While article marketing can be a very effective means of marketing, not making the best use of your resource box can bring you poor results in getting quality traffic to your website. Poor linking strategies and poor followup are some of the biggest reasons for reducing the effectiveness of the resource box. Knowing the ins and outs of any article submission services will go a long way towards eliminating much of these problems.

Understanding how to write effective resource boxes and effective articles will go a long way towards making your article marketing efforts worthwhile. Fortunately, there are many resources online that you can use to help you improve the results of your article marketing efforts.