LBJ's Writing

You heard writing articles is a great way to drive traffic to your site. So you have written several articles and posted them to dozens of article sites. Then you sit back and wait for the avalanche of traffic. And wait. Nothing is happening. What’s the deal?

The deal is depending on where your article gets republished your links may not be “live”. Writing articles and posting them is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Search engines love it and if done correctly it will help drive new visitors to your site and get you listed higher in the search engines. The problem comes when article writers and authors and publishers don’t all follow the same rules. The main problems are:

1. Original article not formatted correctly
2. Article copied and pasted into new webpage without links
3. New publisher doesn’t make links live

Lets start with #1 “Original article not formatted correctly”. Not all article sites are the same. On some sites you can simply put in plain text and it will format it correctly, paragraphs will be correct and it will recognize http://www.yoursite.com as a live link. Some sites you may need to format it all in html. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is type your article in a web design program such as “Dreamweaver” and then view the source and copy and paste the code. If you don’t have access to such a program then you should learn a few basic html tags:

View the source of this page to see the html tags.

This is a “break” tag, The break tag is used when you want to end a line, but don’t want to start a new paragraph. The break tag forces a line break wherever you place it, a very common tag and one that is recognized by most all article sites.

Bold anything you want in bold should go between these tags

italic anything you want in italic should go between these tags

http://www.yoursite.com–some sites will recognize this as a live link. Many will not! This is where you are going to lose your links! If your article is copied and pasted into another web page or ezine your link will not be clickable. Someone who really wants to go to your webpage can copy and paste it into their browser but it is alot easier if someone can just click on it! If it is not a clickable live link search engines will not follow it not matter how many times it is republished. Imangine your article being reprinted 1000 times, a potential of 1000 back links to your site but without it being a clickable link you won’t reap the benefits of those 1000 links. Your links to your sites should always be formatted this way:

YourWebSite

If you follow the correct html formating for links your website links will always be clickable. To learn more about html tags search google for “html tags”

2. Article copied and pasted into new webpage without links. Your article may be correctly formatted on the article site you posted to but when it is copied and pasted into a new webpage or ezine it may lose some of it’s formatting. Some of the better sites have a choice of “ezine ready”, this will display your article in the correct html formatting which makes it easier to copy and paste.

3. New publisher doesn’t make links live. All article sites have a policy that clearly states “you are free to republish the article as long as the links and author bio stays with the article” Some don’t realize your links are no longer live or don’t know to make them live. Others leave them off all together or don’t make them live on purpose. Not much you can do except write to the website owner and request they make them live. Some will comply, some won’t. Chalk it up to the cost of doing business. For everysite that doesn’t make your links live, 10 will.

Keep publishing! Writing articles and posting them across the internet is still a great way to drive traffic to your site. Content is king and website owners, and ezine publishers are hungry for fresh new original content.

This article is free for republishing TJ Smith is the creative force behind several websites including
Article Boy article submission site and content archive and
The Blogger Nation Blog Directory

Assuming you’ve read my rants on articles, you may want a checklist of items to consider for future articles. I am at your service.

Checklist

This checklist is going to be short and to the point. Remember, I’m lazy. Go back and read the original article if you need more information.

1. Headlines – Keyword phrases should ALWAYS be the first words. No exceptions.

2. First Paragraph – No more than 38 words. Two to three short sentences with the keywords from your headline included near the beginning.

3. No one sentence paragraphs.

4. Cut up long sentences into shorter ones. If a sentence is over two lines, it can be cut down.

5. Linking In Article – Don’t. Just do it in the byline.

6. Body Headlines – Break up the article with headlines in the body. Just keep them short and capitalize the first letter of each word.

7. Last Paragraph – Sum up the point of your article. Don’t include links or a plea to go to your site. Use the byline for your begging. I do.

8. Bylines – Keep them under four lines. Try to include the keyword phrases you are using on your site. If you are linking to an internal page of the site, use the keywords on that page, not your home page.

Eight stinking guidelines. Is that too much to ask? I think not! Besides, I’ve already had laser surgery and can’t afford a second session of smelling my eyeballs smoke. Please follow them. If you do, I will publish your articles and so will others.

Despite the tone of these articles, I am trying to help you get more bang for your buck with your articles. Okay, I am also trying to make my life easier, but there isn’t any reason why we can’t both benefit. If you want to get published more often, follow these guidelines. Publishers, webmasters and editors will love you.

The again, I could be wrong.

Okay. Occasionally you can use one-sentence paragraphs.

Just not very often.

Wannabe writers, are full of excuses as to why they aren’t writing yet. Many of these excuses can be changed to proactive statements with a mere switch in attitude and perspective.

How many times have you read an article, and said to yourself, “I could have written this.” Well, why don’t you?

It took me a long time to discover that my passion in life was writing. Even though, as a teenager, I filled a whole blank book with poetry, which I wrote while trying to recover from the “first love’s” broken heart type of feelings.

It wasn’t until I made it a habit to start writing in my journal every morning, that I found out just how easy it was to get the writing juices flowing. Below is a list of some common excuses writer wannabe’s make for not writing. You will find suggestions along with each excuse on how to counteract those excuses and move forward to success.

1. EXCUSE #1 I don’t know where to start, or what to write about.

—Just get up each morning a few minutes earlier than the rest of the household, and start writing in a journal. Write about anything and everything that pops into your mind. Try to write at least 3 or 4 pages. Devote at least 10 minutes each morning to this ritual.

Do it with a pen and notebook, rather than the computer. There is a physical connection between the brain and your fingers on the paper.

Keep your statements positive. Try to eliminate words like, “I need to” or “I should” or “I have to” replacing them with more affirming phrases. Using “I am” and “I can” changes your whole focus. I find just replacing the three phrases above makes the writing process much more positve and results oriented.

You will be amazed at the material that you can pull from this journal that can be used in your daily projects.

2. EXCUSE #2 I don’t have any experience or formal schooling in writing.

—-With the internet, and all the writing books available today, it is easy to teach yourself what it takes to write successfully. Just jump in and get your feet wet, give it a try.

Have someone you trust read over your writing, and then give you their opinion. But don’t stop with one person’s point of view.

Some of the best feedback I have received, has come from people wanting to use my “free to reprint” articles. I remember one lady email me saying, “I really enjoyed reading the passionate article you wrote on this subject.” Up to that point, I had never looked at my writing as passionate.

3. EXCUSE #3 I don’t have enough confidence in my writing abilities, I can’t measure up to what is already out there.

—-Following the same advice as above, as you jump in and do it, your confidence will grow. Publish some free content articles, to promote a website, and discover just what people like and don’t like. With feedback comes confidence. It is hard not be be confident in your writing abilities when you get showered with requests to use your articles in others ezine’s and on their websites. )

4. EXCUSE #4 Writing will take too much time away from my family and other responsibilities.

—-On the contrary. Writing can actually benefit and help you with your other responsibilities. By establishing a morning routine of writing in your journal, you will get to know yourself better, and grow both in professional and personal development. These positive changes to you will affect everyone you come into contact during the rest of your day. This includes members of your family.

5. EXCUSE #5 I am not very creative.

—-Everyone has creativity in them. Some people have a harder time tapping into it than others. By creating a time and space for writing in your life, you are giving yourself permission to tap into your own creative subconscious resources and intelligence. You may be surprised and amazed at your own creative results.

6. EXCUSE #6 What I know has already been written.

—-Did you know, you could give 5 writers an assignment on the same subject and each one of them will come back with an article with a very unique and different focus. It is because we all look at things from different perspectives. Our perspectives are developed by our own individual life experiences and the lessons we have learned. You can take what is out there and put your own unique slant on it.

7. EXCUSE #7 I am scared, not sure I can handle criticism and rejection.

—-As mentioned already, by just doing it, jumping in and giving it a try, you will gain confidence and grow. Rejection is just someone’s opinion. Get another opinion, and then another.

Some of the best books published in history were rejected dozen’s of times before some one took a chance on them and would eventually hit the New York Times bestseller’s list.

So there you have it. Stop making excuses and jump in the water and get wet. It will be more fun, rewarding and maybe even profitable for you once you actually take some daily action steps. Who knows, you might even make a big splash upon entrance to the pool of what’s floating around. . )

As you begin getting your work out there, ideas will come to you so quickly it may be overwhelming at times. Just remember to write down your ideas, keeping notes on topic ideas, titles, and themes to research. The list will be endless.

Use these intuitive thoughts to spark your thought process when you actually sit down with pen to paper. You will find many stories, experiences, and lessons learned that can easily be incororated into a promotional article. “So start writing now, may the force of your creativity be with you!”

When writing articles for publication, it is important that you bear certain matters in mind. If you want to write a good article that stands a good chance of publication you need to take the following into consideration before, when you are in the process and after completion:

Have you formed a full idea on what you want to write about? Which subject? Which topic?

Do you know where or how to find facts or material for your article?

Have you collected sufficient raw facts/data for your article?

Have you considered the article’s audience / market? Will it interest or captivate your readers?

Does your article have a main idea and secondary ideas?

Have you written enough to give readers quality and credible information?

Does the article offer any new, refreshing and useful advice or ideas?

Are paragraphs short, well arranged and flow smoothly from each other? Are sentences short and well constructed? Is punctuation all right and there are no grammatical mistakes?

Is your article descriptive? Is it sensational, thought provoking, emotive or inspiring? Does it evoke happy memories, sadness or inspire readers to action?

Have you revised the article to flush out irrelevant ideas, strengthen your points and checked it for any errors?

Does your article content infringe any law? Copyright? Libel?

Has the article undergone rewriting through several drafts to polish it?

Does the article make sense?

The main task of a newsletter publisher is to select and package quality content of direct, practical relevance to its specific readership audience.

This might sound quick and easy, but it is not.

Publishing a quality newsletter is more than just cutting and pasting quality content into your newsletter. A quality newsletter is more than just the sum of its parts. The more the different sections in a newsletter support each other, the more benefits subscribers can get from it.

A quality newsletter makes sense out of the Internet chaos. A good newsletter editor understands the Internet big picture and is able to pick out relevant information which is packaged into one newsletter issue in a way that makes sense for its readers.

A poor quality newsletter is easily produced in less than 15 minutes of cutting and pasting quality content text. One issue of a good quality newsletter takes one day to produce – it might also select from the same content pool as the poor quality newsletter – but it takes more time in selecting the right combination of available free content for each issue.

Extremely high quality content, randomly aggregated into a newsletter makes a poor quality newsletter. Somewhat lower quality content, expertly packaged and organized make a high quality newsletter. Your editorial note (that introduces each newsletter issue), shows how much understanding and effort you put into this critically important step.

Publishing a quality newsletter is a creative process. It does not involve following three easy steps. Good editors will find this article packed with value, others will consider this article as utterly useless.

Quality newsletters gets edited by the most senior, experienced people in an organization, not on a rotational basis by anyone with some free time on their hands.

The following are some concepts that help a good newsletter editor in his or her task:

Integration: combine the value content of several experts in their fields into one newsletter issue. Each of these experts can only contribute expertise on their topics. However, when these standalone expert contributions are combined into one newsletter issue, all their contributions grow in value because it is part of a larger solution. Your newsletter subscribers can possibly get all your newsletter content easily elsewhere, but come to you because of the way you package and present it to them.

Position: by publishing a newsletter, you position yourself as the central point where they go to get quality Internet content, nicely packaged to address their exact needs.

Team: your newsletter will be more valuable if its content is produced by a team of people. This team of people consists of: guest article authors, contributors of tips, subscribers that provide questions and software products authors that ask you to review their software.

Benefits: your newsletter is only about providing benefits to its subscribers. The more value content you have the more benefits your subscribers get from you. Value content like: feature articles, guest articles, questions and answers, link to value resources, product reviews, your editorial comments, tips.

To summarize: you, as newsletter editor and publisher, use your newsletter to combine the content of your team of contributors into a logically-arranged, benefit-rich newsletter for your subscribers.

Your newsletter is benefit-rich when it is packed with useful, practical content that is directly relevant to the needs of your readers.

A newsletter is not benefit-rich only if it contains detailed, step-by-step articles.

A newsletter that helps its readers understand the bigger-picture meanings and implications of the Internet on a more philosophical level also has benefits. Such a newsletter should focus on educating its readership on how to apply their insight practically and on a daily basis to their business.

A newsletter that focus exclusively on step-by-step articles makes its readers work harder.

A newsletter that focus exclusively on philosophical, Internet bigger-picture visions make its readers think harder.

In my opinion, a combination of these approaches is best. Such a combination will make your readers work hard – smarter.

There are two main (opposite) approaches to packaging a quality content newsletter:

Your write all the content yourself … very time-consuming.

You select and package content created by others … the more practical and realistic approach.

Most editors choose a middle road where they contribute some original content and get the remainder of their content from other contributors.

If a good newsletter editor’s main task is packaging value content, a good newsletter subscriber’s task is to read, understand and ACT based on the insight the gain from this content. A good newsletter is your personalized to-do list for the week.

If you’re not a born writer, a simple way to begin writing articles to promote your business is to write list articles.

Your list articles could be a top ten list or top seven list that deals with a specific subject.

You could also write up a list of tips that deals with a broad subject such as marketing or promotion, and then add a catchy headline or title to your list.

Your list article could be without an introduction or you could write up a few short sentences or paragraphs to lead into your new list article.

With your introduction, write just enough to get your readers interested in your article before going into your list.

Some tips that will help you to maximize the success of your list articles are:

1. Make each tip informative.

You could tell your reader the benefit of using your tip, go into detail about how to use your tip, or define how your tip works if you’re writing about something that is new to your reader.

One tip could simply state the benefit of using your tip, or you could tell your reader the benefit of using your tip and also how to use your tip.

The key is to provide genuinely useful information to your reader. If you’re able to do this, you’ll be able to get your articles published and achieve long term promotion of your business.

2. Write for your target audience.

For example, if you wrote a manual on e-zine publishing you could write up a list of ten e-zine promotion tips.

3. Use lots of white space.

Your articles will look cleaner and more professional, and you’ll be able to keep your readers, including your skim readers, interested in your article.

4. Vary the length of your sentences.

Use short and long sentences to get your points across.

For example, if you have two or three short sentences in a row, you could transform these short sentences into one compound sentence.

You could also make these short sentences into one compound sentence and one short sentence.

5. Write your articles as if you are writing to one person or even talking to that person.

Writing your articles in this way will help you to add your personality to your writing, and make it feel like you’re speaking directly to your reader.

6. Use the active voice.

Using the active voice will make your writing more straightforward.

It will also help you to keep your list article from becoming uninteresting or confusing to your reader.

7. Go over your article for mistakes.

Many article writers, even though they write very informative articles, have a problem with spelling and grammar mistakes.

Because they’re easily avoidable, making mistakes like this can make your writing seem amateurish and decrease your chances of getting your article published.

8. Leave your list article for a couple of days and then go over it again adding detail where it’s needed and eliminating parts of your article that are unneeded.

Afterwards recheck your article for mistakes.

9. Read your article out loud.

By doing this, you’ll be able to make your article read just like you speak.

You’ll also be able to make changes to parts of your article that don’t flow very well or that are unclear to your reader.

10. Have someone else read over your article after you’re done.

You’ll be able to get honest feedback for your article that will either tell you that you’re article is really good or that your article needs some work.

If you’re article needs some work, getting this feedback will help you to avoid making the mistake of promoting your article before it’s ready to be published.

11. Promote your e-zine in your resource box.

Promoting your e-zine in your resource box will help you to successfully keep in contact with your readers and keep your marketing message on their minds.

In your resource box, have your readers visit your site to subscribe to your e-zine or have an email address (i.e., subscribe@yourdomain.com) that forwards emails to your subscription email.

Doing this will enable you to continue to get more subscribers from your list articles even if you decide to change list hosts or autoresponder services.

12. Promote your finished article.

Submit your article to article directories, article announcement lists, and also to e-zine publishers.

Also post your article on your site, and keep your site updated with your new articles.

The key to selling reprints to parenting publications is the creation of dynamite ideas followed through with professional writing. Here, I’m focusing only on finding those lucrative topics.

Most topics in regional parenting publications are straightforward: finance, parenting tips, health, sports, and education. The trick is to twist them in an unusual way.

1. If you’re a parent, what do you wish you knew about a topic? Write down questions that you have as you go through the day. When I was driving the other day, I complained to myself about bad teenage drivers. Then I wondered, “What can parents do to encourage good driving?” If you already know the answer to the question, it won’t make a good article unless you’re an expert on the subject.
2. Take a generic topic and make it seasonal. Choose a season about four months away, because the lead-time for parenting publications is 2 to 6 months. Four months from now is April. What happens in April (or would be published in April) that I can combine with a topic like health? In April, parenting publications start printing their summer guides to camps. What can parents do to make sure their children stay healthy at camp? What are the traits of a safe camp? Change to camping plus another topic like education or finance to create unique articles.
3. Who do you know who has an unusual or remarkable story – something that affected children? What did the parents learn? Write an article using the anecdote as an introduction to the information you want to give. A great anecdote can sell a story.
4. Visit online parenting forums and read the questions people ask. Use some of these as a basis for your article ideas.
5. When you research a piece and talk to experts, look for what you don’t know. “Joe says insurance is important for families,” won’t make an article interesting. Too many people know that insurance is important. But a quote like, “Joe says disability insurance is the most neglected area of insurance, but it protects young families from the biggest threat to their security,” will make parents keep reading.

If you give editors timely articles that readers will want to read, you’ll sell your work over and over again.

Websites, Bloggers, Ezine Publishers all need content. All business need exposure and advertising. Writing artilcles to share your expertise with others can benefit in a number of ways even if you offer your articles freely.

1. Brand Yourself. You will brand your website, business and yourself . Make sure you include your name, business name, credentials, web site address and e-mail address in your resource box.

2. Gain credibility. You will become know as an expert on the topics you write about. Get an edge on your competion with a boost in credibilty.

3. Free advertising. This will broaden your advertising efforts in addition to yur normal advertising budget.

4. Get Published All Over The Web. Multiple visiting publishers to need free content for their websites, ezines, blogs and more.

5. Get Published in Offline Content. Some publishers may put your content in ebooks and so your advertising can multiply further.

6. Gain Trust. If when people read your article they like it, they will be more likely to buy your product or service increasing your profits.

7. Highlighted Exposure. A publisher may choose to place your article on their homepage or high traffic blog. Placement can increase credibility as well as exposure.

8. Long Term Advertising. Your article may end up in archives to ezine publications. Some subcribers like to read back issues before subscribing.

9. Multiply Income. You may get extra income from people who want to hire you to write other articles, books or even speak at seminars. This can be a great way to multiply your income.

10. Link Popularity! When publishers begin placing your article along with resource box on their websites you will start to raise your search engine rankings. The more links back to you site the more popular you are with the search engines. Start gaining all sorts of popularity today!

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If you earn income as a writer, or use writing as a marketing tool, you know how difficult it can be at times to write. I started writing for my website and newsletter a few years ago. Sometimes it would be two or three weeks between articles. Sometimes writing would be torture. Then one day I caught the writing bug.

Now I write two or three articles each day. I don’t have to struggle for topic ideas. I have thousands of good ideas to choose from. Instead, now I struggle to limit the scope of areas that I will write about. What happened to cause this change? I caught the writing bug.

The writing bug is contagious, and by reading this article, you too will catch the writing bug!

How to Choose a Topic

The most difficult part of the writing process is choosing a good topic. A good topic is one that other people want to read about and one that is interesting enough for you to write about. Here’s how to create a notebook full of great topic ideas.

- Use a three-ring notebook as an idea file.

Your idea notebook should have two parts. The first part is sheets where you jot down ideas whenever they pop into your head. The second part is tabbed dividers where you keep reference material and partially written articles.

Where do ideas come from? Everywhere! Ideas can come from TV news or any TV show. They can come from a book, newspaper, or magazine. They can come from the web. Ideas can come from a conversation with a friend. All of these sources are sending information and ideas to you.

After you learn how to catch ideas, your idea notebook will be bulging with great ideas and research information for article and book topics. You don’t need to plagerize or copy other peoples’ work. Your article should be nothing like the material that you get an idea from because you have the “writer’s attitude”. Below are some thoughts from a person with the writer’s attitude.

• I can explain the topic better.
• I know more about the topic.
• I disagree with this source.
• I can approach that topic from another angle.
• I can elaborate more on that topic.
• I can write a more concise article.
• I can break the information up into more readable short articles.
• I can write a more comprehensive article.
• I can write a more up-to-date article.
• I can rewrite that topic and include examples.

When an idea hits you, write it down in the first part of your idea notebook. If the idea comes from an article, tear the article out, punch holes in it, and save it behind a tab in the second part of your idea notebook.

Now when you need an idea, just flip through your idea notebook. Eventually your idea notebook will contain thousands of great ideas to choose from.

- One surprising source of topic ideas is material that you wrote previously. You can apply the writer’s attitude to your own articles.

How to Write the Article

The second most difficult part of the writing process is actually writing the article.

First, make an outline. If you’re going to write the entire article in one sitting, the outline doesn’t have to be in writing, you can keep it in your head. If you’re writing a large article or a book, create a written outline.

- Sometimes when an idea pops into my head, I can visualize the final article. I want to get it on paper before the vision goes away, so I drop what I’m doing and write the article immediately. This is when writing comes extremely easy. I call this “flow”.

Divide large projects into parts and write one part at a time. Don’t publish the first part of the article until you have completed all the parts, or at least several of the parts. When working on later parts of a multi-part article, you may find it necessary to make some changes to earlier parts.

Your first draft doesn’t have to be comprehensive. Just get the main ideas down. You can go back and flesh it out later.

Your first draft doesn’t have to have have correct spelling and grammar. Just get words on paper (or on disk). You can go back and correct the spelling and grammar later. The first draft may not be perfect, but having an imperfect first draft is a whole lot better than having a perfect nothing.

Go back later and revise your first draft. Make sure it contains all the information and ideas you wanted to put in the article. But keep in mind that almost any topic is infinite. You have to limit the scope of your article based upon the purpose of the article and the practicality of doing the research required for a more comprehensive article.

I feel it’s very important to let someone else read your article. You may have written something in a confusing way or a way that requires the reader to have some knowledge or experience they can’t be expected to have.

- If your article is for an audience that is expected to already have some understanding of the subject, limit explanations of the basics. You have to limit explanations at some point or the article will be too long and too boring to your target audience.

Go back and correct the spelling and grammar but don’t try for perfection. I see spelling and grammar errors in magazines, newspapers, and on TV all the time. If all writers waited until the spelling and grammar was perfect before releasing their work, we wouldn’t have anything to read.

I feel it’s important to set your article aside until the next day and then read it again. But don’t take editing to an extreme. No matter how many times you re-read your article, you can always find something to change. Don’t try for perfection. Your goal is to create an article that communicates the information and ideas that you intended. Recognize when the article is good enough and meets the requirements.

If you are not an expert writer, keep learning by studying a page or two each day of a grammar book such as Painless Grammar by Rebecca Elliot

With your idea notebook, the writer’s attitude and the ability to recognize when an article is good enough, you have the tools to be a productive writer. Have You caught the writing bug?

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Permission is granted for the below article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the resource box below is included.