A Publisher’s Rant – Why I Hate Your Articles

I’m a publisher for numerous sites. I HATE many of your articles. Here’s my rant and what you can do to change my mind.
Don’t Send Me Your Articles
First of all, don’t send me articles. I only take them from directories. The purpose of this article is to give you a better idea of what I’m looking for in articles. It is not to create an assault on my email account.
You’re Killing Me
Okay, "hate" is strong word and I probably shouldn’t use it. It is, however, the word that comes to mind when I blow an hour in an article directory trying to find usable articles!
As an Internet marketing firm, we beef up client sites by adding article content. This means I handle the article sections of more sites than I wish to admit. Because of this, I spend most of my time hunting for good articles. By "good articles," I am talking about articles that are formatted and arranged in a manner that makes them ready for publishing. I am NOT talking about what you write, just how you organize and format it.
Building article pages on sites is a tedious process. If dealing with your article is going to require me to make a lot of modifications, I will not publish it. More so, I will NEVER look at your articles again. Despite your captivating headline, I will simply bypass it as soon as I see your name. Whether you realize it or not, you have a reputation with webmasters, publishers and editors.
But I Need You
I hunt through article directories because I need your content. New content equals happy visitors for the sites I work on. With the exception of a few of you, however, I loath the very ground you walk on because you make my job miserable. Yes, miserable. The problem I have with your articles is you create them in a style and format that makes my teeth grind. Again, I am not talking about WHAT you write about, just HOW you put it together.
When I look for articles every two days, I am trying to find something I can slap onto the sites as quickly as possible. This means your article should be formatted to make meta tagging and hyperlinking as easy as humanly possible. Keep in mind that I am publishing hundreds of articles a day, not one or two. Time is at a premium. If you make the job easy for me, I will snap up articles as fast as you can post them.
Why Should You Care
You should care about my gripe because many of my peers feel the same way. When we get together, bitching about your articles is a popular subject. That hurts you from both a readership and link building perspective. You want to get publicity from your articles and we want to give it to you. Comply with our demands and we will paste you all over the net. Don’t and you can watch the proverbial tumbleweed continue to roll by your site.
Now, you’re probably thinking none of this applies to you. In truth, I suspect it applies to 90 percent of the authors publishing in directories. Yes, this is even true for the authors publishing hundreds of articles.
I am going to publish a series of articles on this subject all at once. These articles will cover in detail what I want to see in each section of your article. I pray that you will read them and ease the misery of all of us lowly publishers.

10 Ways To Generate New Articles Ideas And Topics

1. Brainstorm for new ideas.
Add your brainstormed ideas to an idea file that you can go back to when you are stuck for a topic.
Also add ideas you get from other sources into this file so that you'll always have a fresh source of inspiration.
2. Visit forums and message boards.
Look for an interesting topic or thread in the posts that you can turn into a new article.
3. Check out newspapers and news programs.
Depending on what you like to write about, you could find some new hot topics.
4. Subscribe to e-zines that reach your target audience.
You'll be able to get new, relevant information that could spark an idea for an article.
5. Review your own articles.
Keep your eyes open for things that you touch on in your articles that you could expand into a full article.
Also look for ways to further educate your readers on the topics that you've written about in the past.
6. Read other people's articles.
You could look over the submissions to article announcement lists and article directories, or you could visit a site that has articles you enjoy reading.
You might be able to come up with an original slant that the other author didn't cover in her article or a topic that you could research for your next article.
7. Use questions you get from your subscribers, visitors, or customers for ideas.
Questions that you get on a regular basis can be an excellent source of new ideas and topics that will appeal to your target audience.
8. Go to a seminar or marketing conference.
In addition, to finding more new article topics, you'll be able to learn new things and gain more contacts.
9. Conduct an interview.
You'll be able to get a new article from the interview itself.
The person you interview could also bring up things in their responses that you could do some research on for a new article.
10. Run a survey.
Ask your participants what topics they're interested in learning more about in your e-zine or on your site, and you'll be able to get more new ideas and topics.

Free Reprint Articles That Will Interest Publishers - 4 Tips

Have you been writing and submitting your free reprint articles for quite sometime now?
If so, how is your reprint rate doing? Is it doing well or is it a bit below 50%? Are webmasters approving your articles?
Here are some tips on how to write effective free reprint articles that would guarantee great interest from ezine publishers and webmasters.
1. Choose a good keyword
A good keyword is your "key" to getting high reprint rates for even just a single article. Try using the keywords found in this page http://random9.com/Googlest-site/index.htm
2. Keyword density
Keyword density is the number of "keywords" found in an article or content which is then divided by the total number of words. Try to keep your keyword density at 5% to 7% maximum especially if you choose common keywords for your article. Keyword density is important because this is one of the things search engines look into when they rank the search results.
Do not try to make your article an article for search engines, make them full of quality, informative but still search engine optimized.
3. Shorter word count
Publishers or webmasters often love articles that are less than 1000 words, but it totally depends on the topic and how informative is your article. Try not to go around the bush and result to making your article at 1800 words. In other words, do not make it like a short story. A good article may only have at least 250 words, but could still capture the reader's attention and have the attributes mentioned in numbers 1 and 2 above.
4. Good content
You wrote a 700-word article with good keywords and keyword density, but does it contain good content? Well, only you can answer that truthfully and if your answer is yes, then great! But for some few inviduals this isn't the fact, many are still writing articles that editors label as an "indirect" advert. If you really want a good reprint rate then make your article body 100% of quality information, tips, how-tos and tricks. Keep the 100% advert in your bylines and keep them short.
Good luck and enjoy writing!

Checklist for Writing Articles That Get Read

When writing articles for publication, it is important that you bear certain matters in mind. If you want to write a good article that stands a good chance of publication you need to take the following into consideration before, when you are in the process and after completion:
Have you formed a full idea on what you want to write about? Which subject? Which topic?
Do you know where or how to find facts or material for your article?
Have you collected sufficient raw facts/data for your article?
Have you considered the article’s audience / market? Will it interest or captivate your readers?
Does your article have a main idea and secondary ideas?
Have you written enough to give readers quality and credible information?
Does the article offer any new, refreshing and useful advice or ideas?
Are paragraphs short, well arranged and flow smoothly from each other? Are sentences short and well constructed? Is punctuation all right and there are no grammatical mistakes?
Is your article descriptive? Is it sensational, thought provoking, emotive or inspiring? Does it evoke happy memories, sadness or inspire readers to action?
Have you revised the article to flush out irrelevant ideas, strengthen your points and checked it for any errors?
Does your article content infringe any law? Copyright? Libel?
Has the article undergone rewriting through several drafts to polish it?
Does the article make sense?

The EASY Anyone-Can-Do-It Way To Write Free Reprint Articles

As you may already know, writing free reprint articles and then distributing them to publishers and web sites is one of the best ways to promote your web site - a single article can result in hundreds of new links to your web site and a rapid increase in traffic levels. But there's nothing worse than staring at a blank screen, and wondering how you're going to fill it with hundreds of words. That's why I'm going to give you an easy way that anyone can use to write an article - even if it's your very first one!
1. Get a main idea, or focus for your article.
This is what your whole article is going to be about.
The main idea for your article needs to have some relevance to the web site that you link to in the resource box, because this is how you are going to get the benefit when your article is published.
This is why articles are so effective at directing targeted traffic to your site - the reader will be searching for information on a topic, find your helpful and informative article, and follow the link to your site for even more relevant information. Writing free reprint articles fits right into how Internet users surf the web, and benefits you with targeted traffic.
2. Jot down five or more key points that provide information on your article topic.
For example, if your article's a how-to type of article, you can have say five steps towards accomplishing a specific goal. If your article explains different ways to do something, think of five or more different ways. Each of these points will form a paragraph in your article. Often as you write your article proper, you will find that you can expand each point into two or three paragraphs, which will give you an ideal length for your article.
3. Write an introduction.
Just introduce your topic. Give a little bit of background to the article's topic, and then summarize what you will cover in your article.
Again, you want to keep the reader interested, keep them reading, and push them along to the link in your resource box that you want them to click. So try to spike their curiosity a little, and they won't be able to help but read on to find out more.
4. Write a conclusion.
Your conclusion really just quickly summarizes the main points in your article, similar to how your introduction works, except now you are drawing your article to a natural close.
It's good practice to take a look at some articles in an article directory, and see how authors have concluded their article. Don't copy word for word, but you can base the format of your own conclusion on one that you like the look of.
5. Add a tantalizing title.
You may want to write this at the very beginning, but it's often helpful to write at the end once you are really clear what your article is about.
Your title is also one of the most important elements. It has to draw the reader in, encourage him to read further, make your article stand out from the crowd, and if at all possible contain an element that plays to the reader's curiosity (i.e. literally force them to read just to satisfy their curiosity).
6. Check the length
The ideal article length is 600-800 words, this is what most publishers are looking for, and will ensure that your article gets published in the maximum number of places. If you're short, see if you can expand on certain points, or add a couple of new points in.
7. Write your resource box
The last and arguably most important bit is to write your resource box. Again, it's a good idea to have a look around some article directories and note how other authors have structured theirs.
In my experience, the most effective way to structure a resource box is to first write a sentence about yourself that also gives you some authority on your topic. Then write a sentence about your web site, with a link to it. And that's all it needs. Keep it simple, keep clear of promotional language, and just include a single link.
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Once you've practised these techniques a couple of times, you'll find it as easy as pie and will be churning out quality articles in half the time. There are a few common mistakes that you will also need to avoid, but this is covered in a previous article I wrote at http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Steve-Shaw-1/submit-article-963.php , there isn't room to go over them again here.
All you need to do now is get your article out there and published as widely as possible.

Writing Articles For Profit

Article writing has suddenly become very popular among online marketers lately. A lot of people are taking advantage of this fact to make extra money.
So just how can writing articles make YOU extra money?
Firstly the obvious answer is to write keyword dense articles on specific subjects and offer them for sale. These will be quickly snapped up by people trying to create niche market sites to sell a product within that niche. They will also be in demand with people setting up content sites to make money from Googles Adsense (you could also do this yourself as you write the articles).
Research the most popular keywords at http://www.wordtracker.com to find a niche which will give you a good idea of what to target your articles at.
Secondly, a series of articles about one niche can be placed in one volume and turned into an ebook, or course which can be sold with very little overheads. Using one or two of the articles to submit to article directories like http://www.ArticleCity.com or http://www.DEBSArticleSite.com and adding your bio with a link to your ebook salespage will quickly add some traffic and lead to sales.
You can also use articles to promote affiliate products. Search at http://www.clickbank.com and find a product you can market from it's marketplace. Make your new link and use a service like TrackThtaAd ( http://www.trackthatad.com/?s=13753) to mask the link. Then write articles using keywords related to the product and submit those to article directories (see above).
There are a lot of ways to make money from writing articles, so get out there and start writing and submitting them today.

8 Tips to Get Publishers to Notice You

If your articles aren't getting published very often, or you just want to increase the chances of them being published, then you will benefit from the tips in this article.
1. Article Length
You should always keep you article 500 to 800 words long. If you can't fit what you want to say into that amount of space, then break your article up into more than one part.
2. Resource Box Length
When writing your resource box, keep it 5 to 6 lines long. In a resource box you are simply trying to get people to request more information, not sell them something. If you want a longer ad, purchase one!
3. Line Length
The lines in both your article and your resource box should be formatted to 60 to 65 characters per line. One of the consequences of not doing so is that, in some email programs, your article may appear with every line at a different length.
You can get your article formatted, as well as learning its character, line, and word count, at the following website for free. http://www.fwointl.com/FWOFormatter.html
4. Is Your Article Actually An Article?
Publishers want to provide their readers with actually useful information and you should want the same. If you write an article that is just a sales letter or press release it will be rejected 99 percent of the time.
5. Inactive Links
Before you even think about publishing or submitting your article check that all links within it are active and working. Nothing is more irritating than to click on a link for a site you're interested in only to find out that it no longer exists.
6. Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar
If you submit your article and it's full of errors it will be thrown into the trash folder so fast that your head will spin. Submitting articles with these types of errors not only makes you look extremely unprofessional, but it shows disrespect for both the publisher and their readers.
7. S*AM Triggers
As a courtesy, you should run your article through a program that will check it for triggers that could possibly get it rejected by filters. This isn't a necessary step but it will definitely impress publishers and increase the chances of your article being published.
You can check your article for free at http://www.lyris.com/contentchecker.
8. Publisher Guidelines
This should be understood without having to say it, but it is still important enough to mention. Always, always, always follow the publisher's guidelines when submitting an article to them. Not doing so will get your article rejected quicker than anything else.
Read this list, print it out, and keep it by you when you are writing an article. Read each tip and make sure that you are following it.
Making the above mistakes will insult the intelligence of both the publishers and their readers, as well as wasting your time and theirs.