If you’re starting out in Internet marketing after March 2011, you may have heard about how search engine and advertising emperors Google put a cyber-smackdown on article submission website emperors Ezine Articles and Squidoo.

Google cited a lack of “quality” in the thousands of articles the article submission sites accepted, which contributed to a less than satisfactory “reader experience” as well as a less than wholesome environment for the ads they placed there (which can total as many as forty at Ezines).

All the article submission websites hastily but enthusiastically hastened to comply: increasing minimum word limits, exiling all links to the final paragraph or resource box, banning copy that even hinted at selling anything, and above all, demanding more “quality.” But as a beginning article marketer, what can you do to ensure that you’re always submitting "quality" -- what is it, exactly?

Is a quality article possible when you’re promoting something? Of course. Selling a product or idea online is no different from doing it anywhere else. It’s HOW you do it that makes the sale: nobody enjoys trying to be bulldozed by an oversized, overcooked, high-volume pitch. And Google has made it clear that they don’t enjoy it when their ads have to compete with it.

Does the quality of an article have anything to do with its word count? Of course not. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address had two hundred and sixty-three words; the preamble to the United States Constitution has only fifty-three. Definitely quality writing, but they’d both get rejected by today's article submission websites.

But when you stop and really think about it, anything you write is a sales pitch. You’re trying to “sell” your reader on whatever it is you’re trying to express, whether it’s your political viewpoints or the information that you’ll be home by 4PM. And the end result should be the same -- after your readers have read what you’ve written, they should feel a little more empowered and better educated than they felt before. And that's where the "quality" in writing comes from.

What article marketers sell is the link to a product or service they’re advocating. While it's unfortunate that Google now defines educating people in search of something that can fulfill their needs or solve a problem as the opposite of “quality,” it does not have to be an obstacle to article marketers.

If you want to get started in Internet marketing, don’t be discouraged by what you may have heard about this so-called “crackdown.” Just learn some legitimate online marketing methods, and you’ll have no problems writing for the article submission websites -- which can result in lots of sales for you.