27 Dec Understanding the Rules of Online Article Submission
By Paul Barrs.
Chances are if you’re reading this than you’re one of the thousands who seek to generate traffic and income through writing and online article submission.
Many years ago this was identified as one of the single best ways to boost traffic to your website; more recently however this marketplace has become corrupted and overtaken by the plethora of those who think that *everything* should be automated and run by a program… including the writing of the article itself!
Personally I think that while online article submission and automation thing is most certainly important, it should never overtake the final authority that is the human mind… after all, we do sell to people, not machines, don’t we?
Recently I was browsing a local net forum and one person posted the question asking “was it practical to publish the same article to more than one directory”. He wanted to know the virtue of using a program to re-write the article automatically and then have it ‘automatically’ submitted to some insane number of article directories.
My response to this was simple… yes.
Yes it is practical and I believe ‘preferable’ to write your article yourself and then publish it manually to a handful of online directories. How many? About half a dozen – the difference between putting your article on the top half dozen directories vs the bottom 1000 is HUGE. It’s not even worth a comparison. When it comes to online article submission, like with all things, the best results can often be found in the highest quality of performance, not quantity.
However, there was another response to his question that peaked my interest and probably gave the best advice on article writing that I’ve ever seen. For myself, not being someone to use others material without permission I contacted the author and asked permission to use their words – interesting enough, this came from someone who didn’t even have a website. They weren’t a web writer but rather a professional writer – who had in recent years earned as literally hundreds of thousands of dollars by writing articles for targeted business models.
When asked about the virtue of writing articles and online article submission… and “how” to make money doing so, they replied simply in the following manner….
Online Article Submission Foundation Principles
“Remember that all publications are online now.
You will want to avoid the ones that are ONLY online though for best results.
Your online campaign will probably get 90% of it’s results from the online version of the publication. But real publications that deliver real article marketing results have both an online and a paper version.
You will see thread after thread about people complaining that submission only to EzineArticles.com and the other “online only” publications just doesn’t yield any results.
And that makes sense. Those “publications”, if you can even call them publications, are mostly visited by your peers, not your prospects.
Go where your prospects are reading. If you are into “health” like one poster said, you have a lot better chance reaching them while they are busy reading “Fitness” magazine than EzineArticles.com.
Just ask your prospects if you don’t believe me. Put up a survey on your site and ask them what publications they read. Make it a simple checkbox survey and ask them to check all of the publications they read. Put EzineArticles.com in the list along with the real publications.
Once you see that 63% of your prospects read “Fitness” magazine and 0.12% read EzineArticles.com, you’ll want to focus on getting published in Fitness magazine rather than EzineArticles.com.
It’s Marketing 101. Go where your prospects are hanging out.
1. Select a market that has money and is willing to spend it for good information. In this case, I selected investing… specifically a form of investing where the participants spend a lot of money on information.
2. Select the #1 publication that most of my prospects read. In my case (and in most cases), the #1 publication is read by 90% of your prospects.
3. Write an authoritative article that covers the topic in a brand new way that has never been talked about before. Make it a bit controversial, but kill the controversy before it can start with cold hard facts.
4. Be willing to work with the editor. This is the hardest part of online article submission. They always want to gut your article. Just keep rewriting alternatives that aren’t gutted and resubmitting them pretending that you are doing exactly what the editor wants. Meanwhile, send them gifts. I sent a book I knew my editor would enjoy sent straight from Amazon and a baseball glove signed by a local major league player (I found out my editor had a son who played in little league and idolized this player… and the player was local and easy to access).
5. Make your bio a pitch. Your editor will gut this as well several times. Just keep resubmitting an even heavier pitch that is tied in with the article. Your editor will eventually accept it if your article is good enough to support it.
6. Get decent hosting. The online version of most publications is supported with an email list. You’ll get most of the traffic in a single three hour block. You need hosting that can deal with the traffic.”
Now that’s what I call an interesting and informative post, wouldn’t you say?
And here’s the point… no matter how good you think you are, there is always going to be someone ‘better’ out there that you can learn from. It’s vital that we become ideologically aware when it comes to business principles, because they never change over time. Sure the techniques that we use and the programs that we apply do – but never the underlying reasons.
When it comes to online article submission, hold fast to those reasons and your business is sure to grow and stand over the test of time.
