Get Your Articles Blasted Across the Web

By Stephen Bucaro

The most effective way to promote your online business is to write articles for publication in ezines and on web sites. Many successful marketers use articles as the primary means of promoting their businesses. Unfortunately, many people think all they have to do is type up some dribble and publishers will be waiting in line to promote it.

As a member of several free content groups, my email is filled with articles every morning. Unfortunately, less than one in ten of those articles is good enough for publication. In this article, I reveal the criteria I use to accept or reject an article. I'm sure that some publishers use different standards than I do, but I suspect that most are similar to mine.

The most important element of an article is the subject. The most desirable subjects are:

 Web business
 Web marketing
 Web design

Non-web related articles can get published if they are about practical useful matters, such as time or money management, health, computers, or employment. Don't waste your time writing about:

 Off line business
 Emotional or philosophical subjects
 Dated subjects (like 911)
 Book or product reviews (advertising)

Another important criteria is the content of your article. Your article must contain practical, useful information. Most articles I receive are worthless dribble. After you have completed your article, re-read it to see if any of the statements below apply.

 It should be a letter to my mother.
 It should be an entry in my diary.
 It should be chatter for my coffee clutch.
 It should be passed around at my church.
 It's just rhetoric containing little practical or useful information.
 It's about the basics, like ten million similar articles already out there.

The format of your article is also a very important factor in getting your article published. Follow the rules below to increase your chances of getting published.

  Your title should be six words or less (not counting connecting words like "the").

 Your paragraphs should contain between three and six lines. Keep your paragraphs short, but don't write an article full of two sentence paragraphs or straggling sentences.

 A publisher should be able to use your opening paragraph as a "lead".