How You Submit Articles is More Important Than Where

The following article is from my good friend Bret Ridgway, I wanted to share this with you for a couple of reasons.  One is that Bret has a lot of great information to share, he and I are co authors on our book “50 Biggest Website Mistakes“.

But more importantly I’ve just recently revamped my article site (ArticleCabi.net) and wanted to provide you with an awesome article about “How to Submit an Article”.

I’m sure you’ll find this very useful.

What a lot of people do is after they have spent so much time, so much blood, sweat, and tears getting that article ready, that when they go to submit their article they just want to get through it as quickly as they can so they can get it online.

That is a big mistake, because when you submit an article you submit through five different fields in the article directories.

1. Keywords
2. Title
3. Article description
4. Article itself
5. Resource box

Let’s look at some tips that you can use to get your article picked up more than someone else’s article. For instance, when you are listing your keywords when you submit your article, use your name as a keyword, even if your name is not a keyword yet and you think it never will be.

Use your name as a keyword when you submit your article, because later on when you are building your business, people may not remember your website, but they remember your name. They will Google your name and those articles will come up.

One tip for your title, and we will use a newsletter example. Let’s say you came up with a title, it was the top seven strategies for great newsletters online. That sounds like a pretty decent title, doesn’t it?

On the Internet, that title stinks because when somebody types in newsletter publishing, online newsletters or whatever the keywords might be into Google, Google sends out little spiders looking at every single page on the Internet in seconds, to return the result to the searcher.

When the little spiders get to your article title and they read the top seven secrets to…or the top seven strategies to… if your keywords are not in those first four words, they are gone. Google does not return your article as one of the results.

For your title, you would change the title ‘the top seven strategies for great newsletters online’ into ‘online newsletter tips – the top seven strategies for great online newsletters’. You put those keywords at the front, it is called front loading the title with keywords.

Don’t overdo it. Don’t say newsletters, newsletters, newsletters, newsletters; that will get you kicked out. Make it user friendly and also search engine friendly. Most people will try to write really exciting things as their titles.

For the Article Description the formula is: Ask a question and provide the answer. What you could say for this article is; ‘Do you know the top ways to create really great online newsletters? You will when you read and use this article’. What you are doing is you are asking a question and promising the answer.

Now let’s look at the article body, the actual article itself. You want the body of your article to be in manageable chunks. Most people will just throw this great big glob of text into the article body submission field. That gives the psychological impression to the reader that this is going to be hard to read and take a long time.

People are in a hurry. They are impatient and the Internet has only made them more so. You want to give the impression that this article is going to be quick. You want to break your paragraphs into small chunks. That is why a tips article is so good, because it is naturally built that way.

If you don’t have an article like that you can put in subheadings that break the article up and help the reader to flow through the article, which is the whole point.

You want them to flow through that article and come down to the last part of your submission which is the resource box. This is kind of like the old Batman shows – riddle me this; when is a box not a box?

When you submit to Ezine Articles, you submit your resource information into a box but here comes the kicker; when it shows up online, the resource box is the next paragraph in the article.

What most people will do, because it’s also called a bio box, is they immediately start telling all about themselves. Sally Smith graduated from 12 hard universities, has written 100 great books, and her parents love her. Who cares? When you start the resource box with talking about yourself, it is like you have announced to the reader; the article is now over and you can leave, which is not what you want to do.

You need to just flow right into the resource box and then extend an invitation. Invite them back to your website or blog to get more information from you in exchange for their email address. Only at the bottom of the resource box should you ever mention your name and only then, is one required.

If you have multiple niches that you are submitting articles in, you have the ability to select an appropriate resource box for whatever the niche is. You are not obligated to use a standard resource box.

You can craft your own for each niche. The way EzineArticles has it set up is, you can have a default one that always shows up at the end of your article, so you don’t have to rewrite this every time, it’s already there for you, or you can include other ones.

At the basic level account you can include two other resource boxes, and you can just click on the number and boom, they are in there. You want to automate every thing you can, so you don’t have to write a resource box every time. You may tweak it a little, but it is there waiting for you once you have crafted it in your author’s area.

Bret Ridgway is co-founder of the Newsletter Formula. For your copy of the free report “7 Ways to Make Money with Newsletters and Continuity Programs” visitÂ
http://www.NewsletterFormula.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bret_Ridgway

About Frank Deardurff

My Passion is my Faith, Family, Love for Music, Art and Photography. I myself have delivered many of my own training courses as well as webinars and teleseminars for many other coaching groups. I’ve also published a book titled “50 Biggest Website Mistakes”. Having many decades of experience in various forms of graphics and IT experience and aspects of online business, my vision is to help others overcome their fears and frustration with taking their businesses online and reach the next level of success.

4 Comments

  1. Carla McNeil, Social Media Marketing Mentor on January 29, 2011 at 10:33 pm

    Hi Frank, I have submitted a few articles over the last year, about 100 or so and I have never been real sure about what to put in the Article Description. Now I do, and it’s so easy.

    thanks

    ~ Carla

  2. Cathy Goodwin on January 30, 2011 at 11:55 am

    Great simple tips for ezines – easy to apply immediately and I’ve never seen them before. Thanks, Frank!

  3. Narek Gabrielian on February 4, 2011 at 12:33 am

    hi Frank,

    You make it sound so easy, in fact, it is very easy, or should I say simple…

    I meant, Bret makes it sound easy 🙂

    In order to find out this information, I bought several courses. Thank you for sharing Bret’s article. I guess, it takes time and trial and air to find out what works… and whatever works might be a very simple thing.

    Better and better,

    Narek

  4. how to work from home on May 21, 2013 at 7:01 pm

    First of all I want to say fantastic blog! I had a quick
    question that I’d like to ask if you do not mind. I was interested to know how you center yourself and clear your thoughts before writing. I have had trouble clearing my mind in getting my thoughts out there. I truly do enjoy writing but it just seems like the first 10 to 15 minutes tend to be wasted simply just trying to figure out how to begin. Any recommendations or tips? Appreciate it!

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