How To Submit Articles
NOTE: Below - Submitting to RealArticle.Com/Articles/
How to Submit Articles The Right Way
If you treat the search engines well they can send your way a steady flood of natural traffic who want what you’re offering. Search engines are all about real people searching to find answers to their problems. If you want the search engines to put you forward as the solution to the user’s problem then you need to play by the search engine rules. One of the things the search engines like is a lot of links (or back links) to your site from other websites.
Why Submit Articles?
Submitting articles to article directories, announcement lists and direct to websites looking for fresh content is a great way to build back links to your website and to gain a ‘presence’ in your chosen market. If you look at any guru site about how to build traffic to your site you can bet that article submissions will be up there at the top of the list or close to the top.
Why is that? There are a few reasons.
• One way links Article submissions have become a key tool in building traffic to a website because they are an effective way of adding one way links pointing to your site. Exchanging links with other sites is still a worthwhile thing to do but search engines place more weight on one way links rather than those that are reciprocal. And the more links you have, the more likely you will be seen as an authority site by the search engines and the more natural search engine traffic they are likely to send your way.
• Introduce Yourself You get a chance to explain yourself to your potential customers. Unlike a 50 word classified ad which is clearly trying to sell something, with an article you have an opportunity to talk to your customers in a way that isn’t confrontational. You’re not directly trying to sell them something but instead are giving them some free and useful information about an area they are interested in.
• Build credibility An article is your opportunity to build credibility with people who are interested enough in what you’re offering to read your article. If you do your job right in terms of the article itself (more about this later) then clicking on your resource box at the end of your article will be a no-brainer.
• You control the process While you can’t control exactly which websites your articles appear on, there is a lot you can control. You decide how often you want to submit articles and therefore build links, you decide on the keywords you want associated with your site, and you decide how wide and how fast your article is distributed.
Article Basics
Before you start on your article first comes keyword research to work out exactly what you are going to write about. You can get help with a keyword research tool or use your server logs to work out the best keyword to focus your article on. Each article doesn’t need to revolve around a completely different central keyword – for example, you could do an article about ‘dating advice’, another about ‘love advice’, a third about ‘dating love advice’ and yet another focusing on ‘dating tips’.
There are three parts to any article that you want to submit for publication – the title, body of the article and resource box. The resource box is where you get to say a bit about yourself and directly link to your website, it is the ‘payment’ you receive for others freely publishing your article.
The body of the article is usually between 400-600 words and needs to have an introduction, middle and a conclusion. The middle part of the article may continue on in paragraph form or could be a series of numbered tips, depending on the title and focus of your article.
Another thing that you will want to have is a brief article summary – usually a sentence or two that sums up your article. Some people choose to use the first few sentences of their article as their summary – whether you do this is up to you. Not all article directories require a summary but many do.
Some directories also ask you to supply a list of keywords that users would enter to search for your article. Have a list of 20 or words ready to use.
You may be asked for author bio information instead of a resource box. This is essentially the same thing as a resource box but will usually begin with a sentence that establishes the author’s credibility in writing the article.
Where Can You Submit Your Article?
When it comes to submitting articles for publication you have three groups to submit to: article directories, announcement lists and direct to website or ezine owners.
Article Directories
What are Article Directories?
Article Directories are basically sites where anyone can submit an article for inclusion in the directory and where webmasters can go to find free content for their websites. As the directories are free for anyone to access and some of the larger ones like ezinearticles.com often have high page rank they also show up in search engine results pages which means they get end users to their site as well as webmasters and website owners.
Some article directories require submitting authors to create an account and others can be submitted to directly using their online submission form. Some directories accept submissions by email and others require you to have an autoresponder or web page set up where they or their users can get the article themselves if they are interested in your topic.
Creating an account with an article directory is relatively simple. Some, especially those that use article dashboard type operating script, allow one author account to have multiple pennames or pseudonyms, while others have a strict one author name policy. It costs nothing to set up an account with an article directory but depending on how many you decide to submit to it can get confusing having different login names and passwords all over the place.
There are hundreds of article directories around and more are popping up every day. Article Directories typically make money from running third party advertisements on their sites – often Adsense but sometimes advertisements for other products – and they may also promote affiliate products. So basically they generate revenue in the same way as any information portal.
How many directories you decide to submit to will depend on how much time and money you have available to spend getting your articles out into the world.
NOTE: Submitting to RealArticle.Com is simple. Follow the link, sign up, submit! If your article is good and written properly, then it will be published. Easy Enough?
