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Writing Articles for Online Publication

riting articles for online publication can be a fun part of your job as a marketer. Whether marketing is just one of your jobs as CEO of a small online business, or you are a marketer for others, creating informative, useful articles with links to your website or the sites of your clients is a great way to get some links out there. Many websites where you can publish your articles are open to the public, and you can publish each of your articles on as many of them as you have time for. By creating just one article with three links to your website and submitting it to 50 different article sites, you can create 150 external links to your website. These article websites often have high PR ratings with Google and other search engines, and links to your site from a website with a high PR rating are the most valuable in the eyes of many search engines. Which is a good way of leading up to mentioning that my own website can be found at www.webvector.net.

Now that the shameless plug is out of the way, we can discuss some tips for writing effective articles for online publication. As the programmer behind the IncredibleArticles.com family of article sites, I can speak with some authority about what works best on many of these sites. If valuable linkbacks to your website is the purpose of your articles, then worry less about what the article looks like and more about providing useful information that will encourage people to read your articles and click on your links.

First, when publishing on an article website, read the Terms of Service and the Author Guidelines and follow them. They are intended to keep the site clean and readable, to prevent objectionable content, and to make the job of reviewing and approving your articles easier and less time-consuming. Your articles will be accepted and published quickly if they are easy to read and follow the rules. If you publish on more than one site, just make your content adhere to the rules of the lowest common denominator and the article will be ready to submit to all of them.

Do not use HTML tags in your content that are not permitted by the site's rules. Trying to make your text look extra fancy by using tags that are not permitted will just result in delays in getting your articles published, rejections, and time wasted editing the article to remove the extraneous tags. It also wastes the time of the site's editors, who are generally too busy to edit your articles for you and have no choice but to simply reject such articles. To have your articles accepted and published quickly, HTML should be used sparingly and only where really needed to create lists or provide emphasis with bold or italic text.

You may want to use a word processor like MicroSoft Word for Windows to create your articles so that you can use its spell checker. This is fine, but you should always remember to save your article file as plain text once you are satisfied with the grammar and spelling. It's important to remember that you are writing for an HTML environment, not a print publication. MS Word and other word processors use unconventional codes for special characters like Smart Quotes that are only valid within the word processor. In other environments these codes are meaningless, and they do not translate into HTML. On some PCs these Smart Quotes may look okay in a browser, but on other PCs and on most Apple computers, they won't appear as quote marks at all, but as a string of gibberish characters. It makes you look bad, and it makes the site look bad. Most sites try to keep these characters out of their content, and leaving them in your text may result in rejection of your article. The smart thing for an author to do is eliminate these problems at the source. When you finish your article in your word processor, save the file as plain text (.txt), not as a Word document (.doc) or a Rich Text file (.rtf). You can then open the text file with Notepad or another plain text editor and copy the content out from there to paste into the form field. This ensures that Smart Quotes and other unconventional characters are left behind in the word processor where they belong, and not in your article where they may cause problems. For quick publication, your content should be plain ASCII text.

Most article sites have a number of different categories and subcategories to which you can submit your articles. You should always try to submit each article to the category where it is best suited. The editors may move your article to an appropriate category if necessary, but this is one more way you can save time for everyone.

If the site you are submitting to has a preview function, you should preview your article as many times as necessary to get the best possible visual presentation before submitting it for publication. An article that looks good and is informative and easy to read will be a pleasure for the editors to review and approve. An article that looks sloppy, or that has problems with sentence structure, spelling and grammar may require editing before it will be accepted.

Don't write inflammatory articles or use questionable verbiage like profanity in your content. Swearing is never necessary to get your point across and is often perceived as the last resort of those who lack language and logic skills. It's what some people do just before losing an argument. Profanity doesn't help your image, and articles with inflammatory intent will just be rejected. Multiple violations in this area may well result in deactivation of your account. If your purpose is to get people to read your articles and click on your links, don't alienate them with questionable word choices.

Writing articles that will be accepted and published quickly isn't rocket science. It's mostly a matter of following the publishing guidelines and Terms of Service. Editors may not remember those people whose articles are on-topic, informative and easy to read: they will simply approve the articles with the click of a button after a few minutes of review. But editors will certainly remember those people whose articles require repeated editing, repeated reviews, or rejection for offensive content. If you want to get the links in your articles published as quickly as possible in as many places as possible, try to be one of the authors that the reviewers have no reason to remember.

David is a Perl and PHP programmer for web-based database applications. He is the programmer responsible for the functionality and interface design of IncredibleArticles.com.