by: Martin Lemieux

Write an article, get the traffic. Well sort of! Since the birth of
writing articles, our industry has caught on to the phenomena of
increasing your website’s traffic by becoming the professional in
your field. The only problem with this is that for every serious
professional in one field, there are a thousand other writers who
are jumping on the "band wagon".

This article phenomenon is hurting every industry!
From bloggers, column writers, and e-books, the writing industry is
yearning for more great writers. The internet marketing community is
especially hurting for better content.

With the birth of SEO (search engine optimization), people all over
the world are searching, browsing, and reading everything they can
on how to promote their business on the internet. Because of this
demand for different content, the supply of writers are increasing
everyday but the quality of articles is decreasing exponentially.
Everyone is writing about the exact same thing! My company receives
on average 10-20 articles per hour submitted to us. I would have to
say that only 1 in about 100 articles submitted are ever published
within our website. Those numbers are extremely low and for good
reason.

It's all about "substance" - or lack of it!
Many articles we review are nothing more than simple "babble" and
most of them are pointless. You can seriously tell right away
whether the article is just a promotional piece or something with
actual substance within the content.

Great content is very important. There is a misconception out there
that most people won't read your content and you can pretty much
post anything you want within your website as long as your website
is clean, professional looking, and can be found online.
YOU ARE SOOOOO WRONG!
If there is one constant online, it's the fact that the general
public is getting smarter and more knowledgeable on how to research
for honest, reputable companies on the internet.
Unfortunately, authors these days are simply stealing from other
great authors!

I am not talking about posting someone else's article on your
website! Copying content from other leaders in your industry will
only hurt your company. This is why the writing industry is getting
worse; many writers out there simply select a topic they want to
write about, then they go online and find 5 articles on that topic.
Once they have some other great articles, they simply proceed to
combine each article for themselves, by personalizing the content a
little.

Do you ever wonder why for specific topics within your industry, you
can find hundreds of authors that wrote almost the exact same thing?
I call these people "Content Copiers".
Even worse are people who buy articles to post online ! ! !
This gets me every time. Did you know that you can now hire a
company to write something for you and insert your company
information as the source and author of the article? This strategy
is seriously sad considering I can almost guarantee you that the
article you just bought was also sold to a handful of other
companies. All they do is tweak the article a little bit and insert
a different title.

No one knows your business more than you do. If you are seriously
good at what you do, 9 times out of 10, you probably have enough
knowledge to write an article that makes sense, that is unique in
content, and that has your personal touch.
We've all come across different situations while operating our
businesses. These small but important situations are what gives us
confidence in what we do. When you learn from your mistakes, you
should also consider educating people on what you've learned in
order to help your potential clients or even help better educate
your industry.

Think beyond yourself and write down something helpful.
I hope you've enjoyed this article!


About The Author

Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising
Network. Smartads is here to help grow your business online
and offline through effective marketing strategies. Visit our
network today!
International: http://www.smartads.info
Canada: http://www.smartads.ca
For more of Martin's articles, go here:
http://www.smartads.info/newsletter/archive
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