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.