Preparing Articles For Article Directory Distribution
Article distribution is a very effective method of promoting
your business. There are a number of direct benefits from doing
regular article distributions. When done properly you can
recieve loads of extra traffic to your website. You can increase
your search engine rankings, and of course you position yourself
as a knowlegable person on your topic - an expert.
However you need to do article distribution properly in order to
get the most benefit out of your time and money. What follows is
a list of important things to do in order to make sure your
articles perform at peak capacity.
1) Take the time to write your articles for a very specific
audience. You need to understand who it is that is consuming
your information and then write articles that they need and
want. Find out what are important issues for people in your
market and then produce articles that provide relevant and
useful information and solutions for these people. The better
you do this, the more likely ezine publishers and webmasters
will pick up the article and use it in their publications.
2) Extending the first point a bit here, be sure that you
provide useful information for readers. If you want maximum
exposure for your ideas, you need to give people a reason to use
your articles. The best way to do that is to write valuable
content that provides real information and real solutions for
the readers.
3) Have a plain text and basic HTML version of the article and
resource box prepared. Many (most) article directories do not
allow html in their articles, so all your articles should start
their life as plain text. However you should also have a simple
HTML version of each article and each resource box. In the HTML
versions, simply add hyperlinks with anchor text to make any
URLs in your article "live".
4) Don't forget search engine spiders when you write up
articles. Before you start writing spend a few minutes
researching relevant keywords and then be sure to work them into
your articles. Not only does this help your articles rank a bit
better in search engines, but more importantly it gives extra
relevance to the links pointing back to your site.
5) Spend time on the by-line and/or resource box of your
article. Be sure to make it a call to action. In many cases your
resource box is the only place you are allowed to put links to
your site. Make sure that your's gets people's attention and
get's them to do what you most want them to do. An effective
practice is to change the resource box slightly to match each
article and each audience.
6) Use very a clear reprint permission statement that is as
unrestricted as possible. Putting rules on the use of your
articles, results in fewer people actually using them. Since you
want maximum distribution, make it very clear and very simple to
use your articles. A simple statement like the following is
enough: "You have permission to use this article freely in any
publication as long as the resource box and byline are included
as-is and any weblinks are made 'live' when published on
websites".
7) Don't fill your articles with tons of links. While there is
clearly no set rule about how many links are too many links,
human editors will treat heavily linked articles as spam and
will be much less likely to use your them. One or two links
within the body of an article and one link in the resource box
is reasonable, much more than that will start to have a negative
impact.
8) Don't be shy to target specific publications with your
articles. If you know of a big player in your industry, follow
them a bit (get on their ezines and watch their websites) and
then write articles specifically for their needs. Often you can
simply write an email and ask them if there is anything specific
that you could write for them, in exchange for a link or two
back to your site from within the article.
Remember that you want to get the most bang for your buck when
you distribute articles. Ezine editors and website publishers
are our friends, but they are also a filter between your ideas
and possible readers. Anyone can just throw together an article
that will sit in an article directory. What you want is an
article that gets picked up and republished in ezines and on
websites as well as being in the article directory. If you want
to get past the human article filters, you need to give them
quality content that is easy to use.