Submitting Articles, What To Do And What Not To Do

When first getting into article marketing many of you will find out that coming up with good content for an article can at times be quite challenging but this is just the first step of getting your article viewed by people. After you have finally been able to get your article written then comes the task of getting it approved by all the directories you want to submit your article too.

This in itself can prove to be very frustrating since directories all have their own rules on what types of articles they are willing to approve. It is not the content they will have a problem with rather the way you have put the article together. Some directories will accept things that others disapprove of. Over the last few years I have been able to come up with some sort of standard for my articles which seem to be acceptable for the majority of directories.

The first problem you may run into when submitting your article is the title, or head line as it is also called. What is the proper way of writing a title? Unfortunately the directories can?t seem to agree on this and as you will see, some of them want the title written in all capital letters while others prefers it written in small letters. What is a writer to do? Well what I did was to make the first letter of each word capital and believe it or not, they are all accepting it.

The next big thing is to make sure you do not write your article as an advertisement. Stay away from words like ?I? and ?me?. It is preferred that an article is written in third person. Another thing which is often a reason to decline your article is if you put your URL in the article itself. Most article directories has a special place for this called a resource box and within this you may talk about yourself. Therefore I never include any links or URL?s in my articles.

Yet another issue you may come across is the length of your article. Although I have never had an article declined because it was too long, I have had them declined for being too short. A good measurement to go by in order to make sure your article will be submitted is to never keep it less than 400 words. There are many people out there who write great long articles but in general people tend to just skim thru such articles. An ideal length of articles, from what I have seen, is around 6-700 words.

One more last thing and that is about paragraphs. Most people like to put spaces between each paragraph and that is great because that is what I do too, but what do you consider a paragraph? What many people do is that they put a space after each second line and this is something that many directories consider ?hard line breaks? and that is unacceptable. Make it a rule to make a paragraph at least 4-5 lines and then put a space, just like I have done in this article.

Following these few, simple guide lines should help you get your articles submitted to the various article directories out there. These are only suggestions but after all I have done this for a few years now and I can not remember the last time I had an article declined.

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