Get back to basics before you submit your private label rights (PLR) articles to online article directories. Think back to your earlier school years and dust off those skills you thought you might never use again. If you’ve got a product or service to sell, you probably have a web site. If you don’t, you need to either get one or use affiliate or PLR sites, and then take some time to determine what kind of content you need to both attract and keep your reader’s attention in order to sell your items. Next take a look at the PLR articles you have. Of course, the first thing to do is to make sure that the content you provide is well written and informative. Grammatical or other kinds of mistakes that come from poor writing skills are going to drive readers (and thus your traffic) away faster than anything else you might do. So go through your PLR articles, revise them to fit your marketing needs and edit them as needed. Then before you rush off and add your byline or resource box and submit them to article submission services or directories, check the content in your articles to make sure that you haven’t made the following mistakes: 1. Don’t forget to provide useful and accurate information in your articles. If you’re submitting your articles to generate leads and promote your products as well as your web site, you’ll want to provide articles with content that has truly interesting and accurate information that’s useful to the reader. Even though you’ll want this information to be “teaser” information that will cause him or her to come to your web site and purchase the products, and it still has to be both targeted and informative. So avoid any hype or other useless information whose only purpose is to drive traffic to your site, word about this will get around very quickly and this will actually hurt your traffic and therefore your sales. Make sure that the information you provide is absolutely targeted for your reading audience and useful to the reader by itself, not just as a means to sell your product or products. 2. Don’t forget to take every opportunity available to market your articles — and then look for some more opportunities. After you’ve made sure that you provide valuable information to your reader in your articles, look for ways to promote, promote, promote with the articles to increase traffic to your web site. Among the first of these are keywords. Although search engines are becoming increasingly “smart” and you can no longer pad your articles with keywords the way you used to in order to get noticed, you can carefully include keywords sparingly in your article content that truly is relevant to what you’re talking about. This will increase links to your site and therefore, more search engine results will bring your site up in the results. Also look for other marketing means like using snippets of you articles on blogs and in forum posts, and tagging them in social networking sites as helpful resources for others. And there’s always pay-per-click, pointing readers to your articles. 3. Don’t break the rules. Before you submit to directories, make sure that you meet their guidelines. Internet writing is a special kind of writing, in that what you say it needs to be in relatively short and to the point, with eye-catching headlines that will make the reader want to check out the content. Then make sure that the articles you write are both free of character errors (i.e. run your content through a text editor first like Notepad) and easy to read, and that you have the allotted number of hyper links in the body of the article(s) as well as the resource box. By taking these few steps, you’ll ensure that your web site gets the publicity you need and you’ll be able to increase your traffic and return on investment in turn. It pays to take a time out to check these few things first when using PLR articles.