As a small business owner or entrepreneur, you probably have a wealth of knowledge to share with your prospective clients. Writing articles is a great way to introduce your services and expertise to the masses. It also has to be done in the right way in order to be effective (or even to gain approval for publication on the majority of article directories).
As a virtual assistant who has submitted hundreds of articles on behalf of clients, I have learned that self-promotion should be kept to a minimum and helpful information should be maximized.
Here are several more tips:
1) Keep self-promotion to a minimum
When reading your article, if someone is truly wowed by your content, they will want to learn more. They’re not reading your article to find out more about you. They’re reading to find out more about themselves and perhaps how you might be able to help them.
2) Be aware of the length of your article
Between 500 and 750 words is optimal for the length of your article because most folks don’t have much more time to divert their attention toward what you have to say.
3) Keep the “affiliate” thing out of it
Reputable article submission sites hate when contributors try to use them as cheap and easy ways to make money just for the sake of making money. You can’t drag EzineArticles.com down to that level. It just ain’t happening. Many other article sites have followed suit. Keep affiliate links entirely out of your articles. In fact, many won’t even allow you to include direct links to your own website in the body of the article.
4) Maximize your author resource box and/or profile
Here is where you are encouraged to promote yourself, your business, your services and your latest book, product or website. If a person likes what they’ve read in your article, naturally they will want to find out more about you. You can alternate between different resource boxes depending on the content of your article and where you want to direct your reader.
If you can put a photo of yourself on your profile, do so! This immediately adds a human touch and gives readers the sense that you are a real person who is interested in helping THEM.
5) Ensure your article is properly formatted
If you’ve written an article in Microsoft Word, for example, there are many quirky things that can happen during the copy and paste process into an article directory. Sometimes you’ll submit an article that you’ve composed in Word and then see that it has been published with all sorts of weird characters and symbols. That doesn’t look very cool or professional.
I usually take the Word document, save it as a plain text and then copy it into Note Pad. This usually removes the “smart quotes” and other nasty things that can warp your article’s formatting after the fact. (Always look at the preview if you can.)
6) Keep track of your articles and where you have submitted them
It’s easy to lose track of where you have already submitted an article and when. New article sites crop up every day and you may have written an article a year ago, but now want to submit it to some new sites. But, “Gee, have I already submitted that to XYZ? I can’t remember.”
I use shared Google spreadsheets to track my clients’ article submissions. Each page is devoted to one article and includes the article title, date submitted and published, the link to the URL of the published article and the login information for each site. It’s a permanent record of the history of the article. It avoids duplication and tracks those numerous email addresses and passwords that you might have used while submitting your articles in the past.
7) Consider utilizing the services of a virtual assistant
Consider having a virtual assistant submit and keep track of your article submissions for you. (They can also do some quick proofreading.)
Your virtual assistant will set up your accounts, resource boxes, summaries, keywords and just about anything else required to ensure that your article is published the first time. Because they have become so familiar with standard submission guidelines, this will probably save you a lot of time.
