Article marketing holds the ability to share information with readers whilst showing your knowledge of the niche. As a website owner this is a great way for you to gain the trust of a reader before they've even visited your site.

However, although the benefits of article marketing are numerous, there are also downsides if not done correctly. One of these is damaging an author's reputation which is most likely to occur with junk articles that are merely submitted to directories to benefit from link value.

Article directories do provide direct traffic so it clear that the quality of an article is highly important. Aiming to only benefit from article directory links is a big mistake that can damage the reputation of a website and its' owner. The website will have links from 100s of unique domains – the links will be embedded in content and relevant to the content of the commissioning website.

Despite this, article marketers can increase the results of the article marketing process through then going on to re-write the articles and then over-coming the google duplicate content penalties in part. Should the marketer decide to re-write the article by 25% 9 times then the marketer now has 10 unique articles, and the distribution of these articles is also paramount to the efficiency that will be attained.

The commissioning company should publish the unique articles to the top 10 article directories on their distribution list. It is imperative that, should the company wish to achieve optimum efficiency, they then continue to submit variations of this article to the remaining article directories on their list.

Let's take an example. An author decides to write a quick article that is rushed and inaccurate so that he/she receives backlinks to their site. By submitting this to article directories the author is not only losing potential visitors directly but also losing the viral affect of article marketing. This is the affect where an article is picked up and published by an unlimited number of other websites. These publishing websites are often related to the article, allowing the ability to send targeted traffic and produce relevant backlinks. Can you now see what is being lost by submitting poor articles?

A large percentage of traffic that views articles in directories and follow the resource box links are as a result of finding the article in the search engines. They are targeted visitors that are interested in the topic of your article and are looking for something in particular. Should they come across a sub-standard article and in an unlikely event follow the resource box links, the author is risking his/her websites reputation. The author has not made the most of this visitor by showing their knowledge and expertise on a subject. In fact they may be showing their lack of knowledge - most likely resulting in no end result (sale) from this visitor.

One of the most important marketing methods (word-of-mouth) is also being lost. Why would a reader want to recommend the article if it does not hold any value/benefit? In short, they wouldn't.

Remember that article marketing is an important method of promotion and one that needs to be considered carefully in order to benefit from it to the maximum.