By David Callan – www.akamarketing.com
Building your reputation online is one of the most important
thing you can do to aid the success of your Internet business.
One of the most popular ways among the “Internet gurus” to do
this is to provide highly useful, interesting and profitable
information to people interested in your industry.
When people see you as a provider of good information that they
can use and profit from, then your reputation and your companies
reputation become more credible. When this happens people will be
more likely to buy your products and services or indeed the
products or services you recommend them.
One of the best and fastest ways to get your companies name and
your own name spread on the web is to begin writing articles for
other ezines and websites, or indeed just submit previously
written articles to them.
If your articles are good quality and informative then ezine and
website publishers will be interested and your work could end up
being published in endless ezine editions and hundreds of
websites. Not only will this increase your credibility, it could
result in 1000’s more visitors, this is because at the end of all
your articles which you allow others to publish will be a link
back to your site. Don’t forget also if lots or your articles are
published on websites then your link popularity will improve
drastically. This will result in higher search engine rankings in
Google and the other engines which use link popularity as a
ranking factor, which or course means lots more visitors and
profit for you.
Take AKA Marketing.com, we are only a new site, might be news to
some of you but we are. We launched in late April (02) if I
remember correctly. We have already had articles published in two
of the most popular ezines available for webmasters on the
Internet. These are Webpronews and Sitepronews, our “Yahoo
submitting tips” article was published in Webpronews and our
“Banner design tips” article was published in Sitepronews a week
or so later.
These publications have a lot of subscribers, easily well over a
million between them. For our troubles akamarketing.com received
a couple of thousand free visitors over the day of publication
and for a couple of days after the original publication. All we
did was send in two articles which were already published for all
our regular visitors to view and read on AKA Marketing.com.
Hopefully with the above example in mind you can begin to realize
the power of writing and distributing articles for others to use
over the web. This article is your guide to getting published on
the web.
First of, you have got to make sure your article is properly
formatted. By this is mean readable, if it’s not readable then it
doesn’t matter how good your article is, because no busy ezine
publisher will bother to format it for you, that’s your job.
Before we continue I have to admit that I have fallen down on
this point, recently I submitted to article_annouce a Yahoo group
for you guessed it announcing your article to ezine publishers
and other people looking for content. Article_annouce is the
biggest group of it’s kind on the web with nearly 2000 members.
However Shelley Lowery the group moderator emailed my a while
later saying my “Yahoo submitting tips” article was rejected. It
turns out the copy I sent to her was unformatted and all over the
place. This is the same article that Webpronews editors felt was
good enough to send out to over 800,000 subscribers, so it was a
good article. However it wasn’t formatted so it wasn’t accepted
and nobody in that group got to see it, that time anyway (it was
accepted a few days later).
The correct way to format your articles is to hit the carriage
return button or enter button on your keyboard every 65
characters including spaces. It’s recommended that you do this
using Notepad as MS WORD and other word processors aren’t good at
this sort of thing. I found this a pain in the butt, I knew it
was essential to getting my articles published, but I thought
that there must be a quicker way, and guess what there is.
However only users of MS Outlook and MS Outlook express might be
able to do this. I’m guessing other programs have this capability
too, but I only have the two MS programs mentioned above
installed on my machine so I can’t say. Anyway if you want to
properly format your articles to the 65 characters a line
standard without manually counting and pressing enter after every
65 characters you can. Simply startup which ever of the above
programs you use for email, go to tools then options. The two
program differ from here. In Outlook Express next go to the Send
tab, select Plain text as the mail sending format and then click
on “Plain text settings”. You should now set the number to 65 in
the “Automatically wrap text…” section.
In Outlook go the Mail format tab and select “Plain text” as the
format and then go to settings, again select 65 here. You now
have your email program configured to hit enter every 65
characters for you whenever you send email.
You can leave it at that and just send your articles via your
email program, but lots of free content sites only offer forms to
people who want to submit articles. They will still want all
articles formatted, what do you do then? Well I usually send my
articles to myself, yes I simply copy them from my site, and
email them to myself, a couple of seconds later they arrive at
the same account I sent them. Except this time they are nice,
formatted and put straight into a special folder, all ready for
me to copy and paste into any Internet form as I require.
The next thing we’ll discuss is your article itself. It has to be
informative and useful to the ezine publishers audience. Your
article should be original and unique and not just the same as
the last article you read on your chosen article topic.
What bothers me a lot about some article writers is the fact they
think that writing articles is just about plugging their
products. They don’t seem to realize that the ezine publisher is
looking for real quality content that will make him or her look
better in the eyes of his or hers subscribers and not just a
sales letter.
What I’m trying to say here is that articles sent to ezine
publishers which were written to sell won’t increase your chances
of being published infact very few editors will accept any
articles like this. The ones that do have probably used your
product in the past and liked it. Articles designed to inform and
educate people will increase your chances of being published and
also of making sales from people who have read your article. So
stay away from sales letter based articles.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but make sure your articles are
grammatically correct and watch out for those spellings mistakes.
Lots of online content groups and directories stipulate that you
must include your publishing guidelines at the top of your
article. A good one I like to use is this:
“You have permission to publish this article electronically or in
print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included. A
courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated.”
Lets continue onto bylines (aka resource boxes). These are the
couple of lines included at the end of your article, this is what
you get in return for allowing people to use your work. Pretty
much the same as an email signature, the idea is to attract
people to visit your site or email you to find out more about
your product. I usually use something like:
“Article by David Callan – admin@…
David is the webmaster of www.akamarketing.com.
Visit his site for free Internet marketing articles, advice,
ebooks, news and lots more.”
My resource box is quite small, you can get away with another
line or two in most cases. Try however to stick to 4 or 5 lines
if you can.
After your articles are written and before you go searching for
places to submit them to, you can do certain things on your
website to help them spread. Basically you just tell people they
can use your article if the like, do this by including a little
note at the end of the article, like the one at the bottom of
this page. You could even tell your visitors that your articles
can be reproduced on your home page like we do. If your site is
busy and in an industry with lots of ezine publishers around like
“Internet Marketing” then this could help spread your article
very quickly indeed.
Finding places to submit your articles on the web is not hard. It
does however take time. The best places to start are likely to be
the free content directories and articles.
I however like to start by simply searching for sites which are
looking for your articles. This is a much slower process and the
visitors you get will be few compared to being published in a
popular ezine. I prefer submitting to sites over directories
first because this helps my search engine rankings. I know this
because most of the ezine directories use CGI generated pages
when fetching articles from their databases, Google and the other
engines can’t read this, so I might aswell submit to individual
websites first to give Google the chance to spider my article and
register another few inbound links for me.
When searching for sites that are looking for articles on your
industry use the following urls:
www.google.com/search?q=%22add+your+article%22+Internet+ma
rketing
www.google.com/search?q=%22submit+your+article%22+fishing
www.google.com/search?q=%22write+for+us%22+promotion
The text in red is your keyword(S), change this to match the type
of articles you write. You should also try any other keywords you
think people looking for articles would use. You’ll find however
that the above URL’s will turn up loads of places that are
interested in your articles either for websites, ezines or both.
Go to these sites, and confirm that they are looking for articles
on your industry. Send your articles in two or three at a time at
most. Do not send more than this, your emails might be considered
as spam which nobody likes.
Make sure you have both your publishing guidelines and resource
box included with all your article submissions.
The sites you submit to should go into a mailing list. The
mailing listing should contain the article submit email address,
the address of the site, and the name of the webmaster if known.
The next time you have articles to submit you can use a mailing
program. You can use this along with your mailing list to send
emails with your articles in them to multiple webmasters, this
will save hours of time.
You’ll find that most webmasters will email you informing you
that they are using your article but some won’t, so it is a good
idea to check back with the more popular sites you have submitted
to now and again.
After a couple of months you should find your link popularity
filled with sites from your mailing list.
Next well talk about actual free content directories, free
content groups and other content resources available on the web.
There are plenty of these on the web, many are a complete waste
of time, however others can really help to get your articles out
there.
Free content directories are sites which categorize hundreds,
even thousands of articles which writers have submitted and given
permission for people to publish. When ezine and website
publishers visit these, they search for articles related to their
industry and publish one’s they like. This is why you want ALL
your articles in ALL the content directories, the directories
that are worthwhile anyhow.
Here’s a few of the most popular places writers like to submit
their work.
www.ezinearticles.com -
This is one of the biggest directories on the web, your articles
however have to be available via autoresponder otherwise they
won’t publish them.
www.ideamarketers.com -
www.goarticles.com -
Content groups serve the same principal as content directories -
a place to connect writers and people looking for articles. These
groups are hosted by Yahoo and Topica mostly. Writers can submit
articles via the Internet or send them to the group email
address. Most groups are moderated to prevent blatant
advertisements and maintain a high standard of articles, so your
article may not be published for a couple of days.
The moderator of the group usually selects his / her favorite
articles from recent submissions, these articles are then emailed
to members of the group. Some members however choose not to
receive articles via email but to read them online instead.
Here are some of the content groups I submit articles to along
with the latest member numbers.
Yahoo Groups – article_annouce – 1821
Yahoo Groups – Free-Content – 848
Yahoo Groups – aabusiness – 839
Yahoo Groups – articles_archives – 594
Yahoo Groups – Free-Reprint-Articles – 237
Yahoo Groups – publisher_network – 209
Yahoo Groups – ArticlePublisher – 129
Yahoo Groups – FreeWrites – 118
Before you can submit to any of these you have to have a Yahoo id
and then join each group individually. Also
www.topica.com/lists/FreeEzineContent
Now I’ll talk about the websites which publish ezines, but don’t
say if they accept articles. Just because they don’t mention it
on their websites doesn’t mean they don’t accept articles. For
sites like these I use a couple of directories devoted to listing
ezines only and not free content. These include
www.homeincome.com/search-it/ezine/ and
ezine-universe.com/ . These directories will usually tell
you the following information and more about each ezine they
list:
Ezine name
Name and email of the Editor/Publisher
Content Type
Subscription address
If they accept articles or not, what type of articles they accept
and how to submit them.
And of course the all important circulation number.
Simply enter your search criteria and visit the bio page for each
ezine. Be patient as for some searches there are 2500+ ezines
listed. When on an ezines bio page, check to see if their
circulation is above 500, (otherwise it will just be a waste of
time) if it is check to see if the ezine accepts articles. If
they do add the editors/ publishers first name (if you can),
ezine name and the article submission email address to your ezine
publishers mailing list. It will take time to visit all the ezine
bio pages, but after doing so your mailing list should start to
take shape. Be careful not to have duplicates in your mailing
list, this is sure to annoy the unlucky publisher who receives
your same article 3 or 4 times.
The resources mentioned higher up the article are only a fraction
of the resources available, doing a simple search for related
keywords should return many more places for you to promote your
article.
One more final point before I conclude, recently I came across a
service on a website. The service offered to promote your article
for $50 by sending it to 2,800 ezine publishers. I considered
giving the service a try myself but then thought “What about the
next article I want to submit”. I’ll have to pay $50 over and
over again, am I’m not going to do that, so I decided against
using this service. I would have to promote my articles myself.
The point I’m trying to make is to gradually build your own list
of people who are interested in your article, then this list will
be your for keeps. Don’t borrow someone else’s list. The process
is slower but much more profitable in the long run.
That’s the end of the article, in it you have learned the power
behind writing articles for others, what’s needed in order for
your article to be published and what resources there are to help
you. Hopefully you can benefit from the information you have read
here. Happy Writing!
Article by David Callan – mailto:admin@…
David is the webmaster of www.akamarketing.com.
Visit his site for articles and tutorials focusing on
internet marketing and website promotion. AKA Marketing.com
Also includes free ebooks, webdesign and HTML tutorials.
Note: Why not start by submiting your article to CataUniversity?
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