I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago about signing up for Article Marketer. Since then I've been using it for two of my clients (there will be three of them any second, now) and I've learned a few things that might help you compose your articles before submitting them that will keep you from being as frustrated as I was at first.
- If you have Word 2007, don't compose there!!!! Any specially formatted text (like those pretty quotation marks, or when 1/2 turns into the cute, little thing you see in real, printed books) won't change to ASCII text no matter what you do to them. (I'll probably do a quick blog post on how I sort of got around that but not today.) Compose in Notepad. Then you can copy and paste it into Word to see if it finds any misspelled words or possible grammar problems and
use that information to fix them in Notepad.
You can only have 300 characters in your Bio (Resource Box). This isn't much so make it count! If you can have them link to a page that packs a punch, that's far better than just linking to your home page (unless your home pages packs a real punch).
You get a few more characters in the box where you can put html text for an alternate Bio. They use that for sites that accept html. Copy and save this Bio because, unlike the text one, it doesn't get saved from one article submission to the next.
I haven't actually counted the number of characters allowed for keywords but it isn't as many as some sites allow. Be sure to keep it short and to the point. Make your most important keywords the first part of the list and if it cuts off a word you can just clean up the end of it and go on rather than having to re-write the whole list.
Go back and check out your account shortly after posting an article there. If there are any problems, they will actually tell you what they are so you can go in and fix them rather than just deleting the article as some sites do. I'm very good at formatting articles for submission since I've been doing it for so long but when I first started it was very frustrating to see three or four things I needed to change before they would distribute it.
Here’s the hardest part for most people. Not only can you not self-promote, you can’t link to anyone’s web site because the Article Marketer folks are concerned they might be promoting you. On the same general subject, do not suggest people go buy a book (a "call to action"). It's annoying not to be able to recommend someone else's stuff even though I understand why they instituted that rule--many people were top-loading their articles with self-promotion. This prevents that. You can utilize your Resource Box (Bio) to direct readers to one of your specific blog posts where you discuss the subject of the article, complete with links for how to purchase or what to read or whatever else you want. Of course you would definitely want that blog post (well, all of your blog posts for that matter) to have a very prominent link for how to get to your main sales or home page.
This one is pretty petty but here it is: You can't use Title Case in the body of your article. I actually sent in a trouble ticket over this one because one of my clients used section headings that truly looked ridiculous when they looked like just another paragraph. I had to revise the article to have that information as part of the main text.
OH! This one probably should have been the very first one! When you get ready to sign up for Article Marketer and you want to pay them for it, be sure to have at least one article ready to submit because that's the easiest way to do it. Just click on the "Submit an Article" link and put everything in. Then, at the very end, it will ask if you want to sign up for lifetime, one year, or quarterly (I recommend one year unless you know for sure you're going to be doing this for a very long time). There is a free option but you get minimal exposure with that option.
Even with all the little rules we have to deal with, I still believe Article Marketer is the very best way to go! I can submit one article to thousands of sites in the time it would take me to submit to just one or two free sites. That saves my clients a ton of money and it saves me a ton of time. Even if you're doing your own article submissions, your time is worth so much more than the amount you pay to get this kind of coverage. Go get 'em!
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