Beware The Pitfalls With An Article Submission Service

If you are planning on making use of an article submission service, then there are some potential difficulties you should be aware of. If you know about them in advance you can plan your campaigns carefully, and this will save you time and frustration in the future.

Pitfall #1 - Whose Credentials?

When you join an article submission service, you may be asked for your login credentials at some of the leading article directories - typically half a dozen directories. You will need to register these yourself. That's fine.

When the service starts submitting articles on your behalf, they will use those half dozen credentials you have supplied. Now, a good submission service will be submitting to many hundreds of directories on your behalf. In order to do that, they have their own accounts at those other directories - I will use the term 'other' as a referenece to those directories for which you did not set up the credentials yourself. Your author name will be set up with the first article submitted.

When you search that article directory, then you will find your article, resource box and your links. It will look completely normal to you and the world.

At sometime in the future, if you wish to change your resource box or perhaps edit the article in some way on one of those 'other' directories, then you may not be able to do so. I recently discovered some corrupted anchor text and wanted to correct this. I could not obtain the login credentials (set up by the submission service) from the site whilst still active with the submission service, as the article was under their (submission service) account (transparent to the reader). If however I stopped my engagement with the article submission service, then the account could revert to me.

So, there are two things to remember:

1. Do not expect to be able to edit any of your articles in the future on those 'other' sites.

2. Check your article very carefully before you submit (this should be the norm anyway).

Pitfall #2 - Alternative Author Name or Not?

If you want to use more than one author name when publishing articles, then take care over the use of pen names, segregate the copy strictly by name (and ideally, subject), and do not expect to be able to change it. Why would you want to change the author name? Perhaps because you have built up a good reputation under a different name and wish to make use of the track record - e.g. you may be an 'expert author' under a different name.

This is an easy mistake to make when you are new to article submission, but it will mean that your copy is indelibly stamped with the original author name. For example if you published an article under an alternative name, and then decided to use the copy on one of your web sites under a different name, then your site will be penalised by the search engines for having duplicate content.

OK you say, I will delete the original article from the leading article directories, and republish under the changed author name. Not possible! Your article has been published to the ether by the article submission service and is on many of sites. Besides that, your article has probably been picked up by other publishers from one or more of those leading directories, and has already been re-published elsewhere (after all, this is how article marketing provides leverage for you).

So, think carefully before you use a pen name - I learned the hard way!

Article submission services provide huge exposure, with the ability to offer variations of your article (as the best ones do). They can vastly increase your market exposure.

(c) 2010 Phil Marks