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Article Marketing 101
by: Chuck Crawford
By now you certainly have had someone tell you that article
marketing is a great way to promote your new website. But
what are article directories looking for to approve the
publication of your articles?
As the owner of two article directories ( Links are in the footer ) I
can tell you what I’m looking for when I review the articles
submitted to my article directories.
First of all, please be sure you are submitting original content
that you OWN. It’s perfectly fine to employ a ghost writer , but
make sure that when you pay someone to write your articles
that they are unique and that you own complete copyright to the
article. If they are selling the same article to hundreds of
people I do not want it submitted to my article directories.
ORIGINAL is the keyword that you should place in the front of
your mind. There are tons of sites and pieces of software out
there today that are scraping content and then using word
replacement on someone else’s article. Let me be clear about
this. It is plagiarism. It is STEALING. Any good copyright lawyer
is going to sue you and win if you use these methods to
generate articles.
You must actually produce original content to be successful in
article marketing. Period.
Another big no-no in my book is ’cut and paste’ articles. Do not
submit articles that are simply cut and pasted from some other
source. I get submissions all the time that are obviously taken
from wiki sites, dictionaries, and professional glossaries, and
these articles are denied immediately. Every single day
someone submits an article to me that contains a ’glossary of
terms’ for a certain subject. Give me a break. Please submit an
actual article.
Once again, produce and submit original content. Period.
Don’t try to be sneaky with your articles. This includes writing
articles titled ‘My article, Part 7’ , in the hopes that the surfer will
come to your site looking for the rest of the story. I now delete
all ‘series’ titled articles unless the entire series has been
submitted to me all at once. I even CREATED a special
category for series articles.
Your title is important. Just like a newspaper headline, you are
trying to quickly grab the reader’s attention. Be short and
concise. Be sensational! Be creative! If you have a mile long
boring paragraph for a title like “The Technical Wording Of
Router Design As Designated By Cisco In Their Corporate
Interoffice Memorandum Circa September 2004’ or some other
long gibberish, I’m going to delete it. Title your article with
something that is going to actually get them to read it. They
actually have to read the article for your link back to drive traffic
to your site. Plus, other webmasters are not going to reprint
your article if you don’t keep it short and sweet.
There’s much, much more that you can consider when
marketing your articles, but these are the basics. If you would
like to learn more about ethical article marketing I have setup a
forum where webmasters are discussing article marketing and
more. You are more than welcome to join up and jump right in:
http://www.affiliatewebdesign.com
In closing, if you get anything at all from this article, please let it
be ethics. Anything you do in business should be moral and
ethical. It’s you that has to face yourself in the mirror each
morning. It’s you that has to look your children in the eye.
Unethical marketing of any type may pay off in the short term,
but will eventually kill your online business in the long run. Stay
ethical and create original promotional content. It will take you
to the top.
Till next time,
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