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- Improve your article marketing technique
- Enhance your credibility and business promotions.
I like article marketing and find it an enjoyable and profitable way of promoting my websites. To get the best results you should plan an article marketing campaign offering information connected to the links in your author details. I don't always plan articles, the ideas just come out of the blue from something I have seen or heard. Once I start writing the words just flow, but before I write an article there are two things that I consider.
1. Why am I writing the article?
2. Would it be of any use to webmasters for their sites or for newsletter publishers?
It does not take rocket science to figure that I, and every other article marketer, use articles to benefit my own promotions. They will be of little benefit to us if we do not produce quality articles that others will actually want to read and use.
Owning my own article directory I have read thousands of articles, many of which I would never use on my other sites or in newsletters and many I have declined for various reasons. Let us consider the rights and wrongs of articles starting at the beginning.
Attention Grabbing
Your title is your headline, there to grab attention and many people never look past the first 2 or 3 words. I could have called this Sheep Do Not Mix With Article Marketing Success but I want people who are interested in article marketing and not sheep to read it. I am also using keywords at the beginning of the title. Another type of title that will not grab me is The Top 20 Tips For Passionate Sex. It would be more likely to create interest if it was Passionate Sex My Top 20 Tips.
Writing Standards
Spelling and grammar are important. You are promoting yourself and your business and you need to present yourself as professional to be taken seriously. I write my articles in Word first and use the spell checker. I sometimes fall out with it because I am English and prefer not to use Americanised spelling.
Using Word can cause problems with punctuation converting to webdings when pasted on to article directory pages. I get round that by copying and pasting a complete article into notepad first, or turning off the smart quote option in Word. You can find that via format – autoformat and options.
If you have problems with writing but good information the answer is to use a ghostwriter or copywriter. There are plenty of good writers advertising on the Internet and personally I think that one good quality article will do more for your business than 10 poor articles.
Articles translated from another language using software are not usually grammatically correct and often difficult to understand.
Know Your Subject
Good advice for writers is that they should always know and understand what they are writing about or their articles have no credibility. I was gobsmacked last week to read an article about my own country that I knew to be very ill informed and by somebody I suspected had never set foot on our shores. The guy could not even spell Britain right and as his misspelling was in the title he sunk without trace before he even started!
Original Copy
The best and most memorable articles are purely original, thought provoking and offer different viewpoints to a subject. Some writers submit zillions of slightly changed articles about the same subject over and over; yawn. They are boring and eminently unreadable after the first one or two. There are exceptions where writers are providing updates and news about their chosen subjects. I would use those articles for my sites.
Lists of quotes from the bible for instance are not original articles. At least 90% should be your own work and quotes only used as a point of interest not as the whole article. Submitting articles on behalf of others using your own name is suspect, how do readers know whether you have filched them or not? Plagiarism, not worth going there, eagle eyes and google will find you out!
Advertorial Blues
An advertorial is an advert written in article form. They carry no unbiased information or advice that would be of any help to anybody interested in that subject. There are plenty of places to advertise for free on the Internet, so trying to fob adverts off as articles is unfair on directory site owners or visitors who want to read articles not adverts.
Link Usage
The reason most of us use Article Marketing for promoting our businesses is to place links to our websites in the author resource boxes usually placed at the foot of articles.
I like to maximise the potential and use the maximum links allowed. As it varies from one directory to another you should check the submission guidelines of each article directory before submitting. Many article directories scripts automatically activate links with the http:// prefix but some do not. A problem can arise when articles are automatically submitted if the script the site uses strips the html so if you use html it is better to include the URL also.
I use a company to submit my articles mainly to ezines and blogs but prefer to submit to directories manually mostly and then I can activate the links myself and check out the competition! I can also make sure that I am following each particular sites guidelines.
Your own links within the article body, titles and summaries are unacceptable on most directory sites, but as you get to place your links in the resource boxes there is no point in pushing your luck. Embedded links work better for the search engines but no more than one link for each website.
Website links that are likely to be blacklisted by the search engines such as for porn or gambling are also not usable on many directories.
All Keyed Up
You will be asked to provide some keywords for your articles so choose wisely. Study your content and consider what somebody who might be interested in your article is most likely to enter into the search engines. Use one of the many keyword search tools available on the Internet. A poor example is if you are writing about search engine optimisation and your title is SEO, Internet Business Bread And Jam, you would not use jam and bread as keywords unless you wanted to attract hungry people. Apart from that your articles credibility takes a nosedive if you do not know what a good keyword is.
The keywords should reflect your content not your resource box and overall the article shouldn't contain more than 4-6% keywords.
Readability
Finally, your article should not be repetitive and should be interesting. Short paragraphs make it easier to read, text talk makes it more difficult. All capitals in the article body or title are a no no, they only stand out in the sense that the reader feels shouted at and nobody wants to feel like that.
500 words should be the minimum that you are aiming for and PLR articles whether altered or unaltered shouldn't be used unless just for the initial idea.
I hope that you have found this interesting and useful and that we get lots more quality articles to read.
Category: Article MarketingArticle Marketing Success And Sheep Do Not Mix was written by:Author:Patricia JonesAdded: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:29:22 -0400 This Article Has Been Read 193 times View all Patricia Jones's articlesAbout the Author: Patricia is the co owner of Mega Music Videos where bands can upload their videos and audios free and music lovers can freely listen to or download the videos or audios. |
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