Mike Muir

Top Home Businesses: More Tips About Article Writing

We discuss practical tips and ideas about writing and publishing articles on the internet as a means of marketing a website.

There are many advantages of using article writing as a marketing tool for an online business. We look at a number of simple steps to make the writing and publishing go smoothly:

Pre-format your article to about sixty-five characters per line (spaces included) and use a word-type document which converts easily for publication.

Use a simple font such as Arial, with a font size of about 12. Keep the fancy fonts for personal correspondence and other uses. My suggestion is to save your articles in a folder system, for easy reference. You could group them by time period or by subject matter - for simplicity's sake I choose to group each two-month batch of articles in a separate folder.

There are several excellent programmes for converting your articles into Text for ease of publication. Simply copy and paste your document and save again as a text document. Most article directories readily accept this format for publication without any amendment. Again, you'll find that the directories provide you with a standard layout for submitting your articles for publication. It's then quite simple again to copy and paste your article into the boxes provided.

Take a little time to proof-read your article again after submission, to ensure that the gremlins haven't altered your layout. If you've used bullet-points or numbered sentences, you may have to uncheck the Autoformat box for your article to ensure that each point begins on a new line. Generally keep your layout as simple as possible, without the use of complicated structures or punctuation, as this also aids the conversion process for publication.

There are many Article Directories available to you. Some offer a limited service free of charge. Much depends on your budget and the time you have available. Manual submission to each directory is time consuming but quite simple. You may prefer to submit to one of those directories which re-distributes onward to a group of other directories, if your finances will permit this. Thus one manual submission is automatically passed on to several others.

There may be an initial signing-up process for each additional directory, which takes some time and effort to complete, but thereafter the process is much quicker.

Don't forget to design your resource box very carefully. This is your only opportunity to tell a little about yourself and to provide links to your web and blog sites. Your article cannot contain any advertising material, or you will be accused of spamming and may be blacklisted. I choose to to publish my articles on my blogs, as well as submitting them to the directories, as these combined efforts all assist towards generating the traffic needed to grow the business.

I hope you will have found these ideas of some value. Above all, take the plunge and start writing!

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR