Act Like a Salesman: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #2

Day 15 Death of a Salesman
Originally uploaded by hey_rabbit

This is Part 2 in the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It!

Who would have thought that article marketing could teach you how to be less self-absorbed and to put other people's needs before your own?

Sounds like a pretty profound teaching coming from an internet marketing technique, huh? 

But it's true–when you're submitting your articles, you need to remember that there are 3 players involved whose needs must be met:

1) Publishers

2) Your target readers

3) You 

Notice the order of these players–there are two groups of folks that come ahead of you, but don't fret that your needs are going to be left out in the cold. Actually the cool thing is that if you aim to please the first two groups on this list, you will in fact be meeting your own needs in a spectacular way.

You may think that in order to meet your own needs with your articles that you need to shove ahead of everyone else and create articles that are all about you, you, you (or your business, website or products), but that is totally not the case.

Article marketing is actually one area where you can be quite gracious, putting the needs of others first, all while knowing in your heart that to please your publishers and your readers you are actually doing yourself a good turn as well.

But let's go through these players just to be sure you know the reason why you're in the #3 spot:

1) In order for your article to get published on any website it must first pass muster with the publisher.

You might not have thought of it before, but when you submit your articles, whether you're doing it manually or through an automatic article submission service such as SubmitYOURArticle.com, it is not a given that your article will be accepted for publication. 

It is 100% up to the individual publishers if they will publish your article on their site, and the best publishers screen each and every article that is sent to them.

What do you think they're looking for when they're screening?

Well, most quality directories have guidelines that they adhere to, and they weed out any articles that don't fit within their rules. There are a number of guidelines that most publishers use, but one that is super important pretty much across the board is that quality publishers want educational articles that will bring value to their readers. 

This means that they don't want articles that are promotional or self-serving in nature–and a promotional article is any article where the author talks about his or her own website, business, products or affiliate products within the article body.

That is not an article–that is a sales letter, so don't even go there!

(The appropriate place to mention your own site is in your author resource box, not the article itself.) 

2) Your target readers.

When you write your articles you must take off your salesman hat and put on your expert hat.

What value can you bring to your target readers? What can you teach them? What advise can you give them? How can you help them get the help they need? 

No matter what your business is you CAN write an article that satisfies the needs of your target readers without mentioning your own business, website, products or affiliate products.

The truth of the matter is that when a person is reading an article, the minute they detect that you're putting your needs first, that you're trying to get something from them or sell them something, their inner RED-Alert alarm goes off saying: 

"Abort reading this article! Waste of time! They're just trying to con you and sell you something!"

And then they abruptly stop reading your article, which is not what you're going for! 

If you have a website, you're an expert in something. Make your goal to be to show your readers how well you can teach them rather than how well (you think) you can sell to them. 

The object when you're creating your article is to:

• Come across like you know what you're talking about
• Come across as unbiased, like you have nothing to gain from providing the helpful article
• Put the reader at ease and heighten their curiosity about whatever your topic is

3) And that leads us to YOU.

Yes, you're sitting in the last spot, but that doesn't mean you lose. You just need to realize that you WILL accomplish your goals if you write articles to please publishers and your target readers.  

So, forget about trying to write articles that are all about the specialness of you–sorry, but no one wants to read that stuff anyway!

You're doing yourself a favor by elevating the quality of your articles so that they reflect your expertise, your gracious sharing of educational information, and at the same time tweaking the curiosity of your readers so that they say,

"Hmmm, that article was helpful to me–I wonder if this author has any more useful info back at her website! Let me click the link in her resource box and take a peek!"  

For more detailed information about the best way to write a non-promotional article and show your expertise, please check out this post:

What is the best way to write articles to drive traffic back to my product website?

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