Lack of Submissions: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #1

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This is Part 1 in the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It! 

This has happened more than a few times:

Someone writes in to say, "I've been doing article marketing for the last 6 months, and I don't see any difference! What gives?"

Then I look at their submissions to try to help them figure out what the deal may be. Indeed, I see that they did start submitting articles 6 months prior, but guess what?

Over the past 6 months they submitted only 3 articles.

Hmmm, I wonder why their results are less than they hoped ?

The Solution 

There is a delicate balance with article marketing–submit too many articles and publishers won't appreciate it, but submit too few and you won't make enough of an impact on Google to see much of a difference.

The solution is to submit between 1-8 articles every 30 days (this is what we recommend at SubmitYOURArticle.com). 

That is a moderate article submission schedule, and if you stick within that healthy range you'll have the best chance of seeing optimum results.

I often tell folks that article marketing is a "less is more" situation, but don't take that too far and stop submitting entirely! You must submit a steady amount of articles (1-8 a month) to see lasting results.

9 Tips for Developing a Healthy Article Submission Habit  

Of course there are events in life that make it so we don't write as often as we had planned, but if you're finding that you are consistently not submitting articles even though you'd like to, here are 9 tips to help you get back on track: 

1) Set goals. Although I have been submitting at least 1 article a month, I recently decided that I wanted to take things up a notch. I've set myself a goal of submitting 4 quality articles a month. (There is nothing magical about 4 articles–your goal may be 1 article a month or 8–it's up to you!)

When I made the specific goal of submitting 4 articles a month, I was also inspired to plan how I would achieve that goal. I created a writing schedule for myself where I planned out which days I would write articles and which days I would submit them. I keep the schedule beside my desk so that when I start working in the morning, I know what I need to do. 

2) Get support and inspiration from colleagues. If you have this goal of submitting a certain number of articles a month to benefit your website and your business, you will have a much easier  (and fun) time of accomplishing your goal if you surround yourself with other folks who have similar goals. 

I know this sounds biased , but I strongly encourage you to participate in the community we have here at Creative Article Marketing–this place is all about learning, about trying things and sharing results, about getting inspiration when we are feeling totally drained, and about getting support for accomplishing our goals. 

We are a community of your colleagues, and we're eager to help and encourage in any way we can! Take advantage of this free resource! 

3) Get an accountability partner for your business and/or article marketing goals. I started doing this last month with my Operations Manager, Sharon. She tells me her monthly goals and I tell her mine. We write them out, and then at the end of the month we revisit our goals and tell each other how we've done.

Believe me, actually stating your monthly goals to someone and knowing that you'll be telling them how you did in a few weeks will  really light a flame under your feet and spur you to find a way to make things happen!

4) Schedule your time like a professional writer. I wrote a post on this topic a while back, and I cannot even tell you how much of an impact scheduling my time like a professional writer has had on my writing productivity.  The difference in output is amazing, and I find that I actually spend less time trying to write, and more time writing productively during the peak times of my writing creativity.

So definitely, read that post about scheduling your time like a professional writer, and also this one about learning to write first thing in the morning.  Yes, a trick of professional writers is to write in the morning (often very early in the morning) while their brain is still fresh and distractions are at a minimum. I can attest–I do write first thing in the morning, and it works!

5) Do timeboxing. Again, for many folks the reason why you haven't been submitting articles consistently is because of time constaints—writing takes too long, or being "creative" is not something that you think you can work into your schedule.

This is where timeboxing comes in–Timeboxing is a productivity technique where you allot yourself a limited amount of time to complete an activity. The human brain is a cool thing–when it perceives that time is limited, it kicks into high gear and maximizes its efficiency, helping you to do things within a shorter span of time than if you had no time limitations.

Now, you must be reasonable with this–it's unrealistic to give yourself 10 minutes to write a top quality article. If you're just starting out, give yourself an hour. Tell yourself–"I have an hour to write this article. After that, my time is up."

If you haven't finished your article first draft by that time, then the next day do another timeboxing session–give yourself 30 minutes to wrap things up with your article.

Seriously, this timeboxing technique works, and you can use it to help you maximize your efficiency in any aspect of your life (Chrismas shopping, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, work stuff)–when your brain perceives a sense of urgency, it will kick into high gear for you!

6) Write from a new angle. Sometimes habits can come back to bite us–we get so used to writing about the same old stuff in the same old way that we bore ourselves to tears! Try tackling a topic in your niche from a different perspective to shake things up and get those creative juices flowing. Or try writing in a different voice, maybe one that is more fun and friendly. Change the way you think of yourself as you relate to your target readers–Why not think of yourself as a trusted teacher who is telling them how to do something that they're confused about? That approach never fails!

7) Plan out a series of articles. This is one of my new article writing techniques–plan out a series of articles under a larger topic.

An example of a series would be something like this blog post series that we're doing right now–How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing. In the same way that I'm doing this series on this blog, I could also turn around and use my outline for this series for my article submissions. 

This helps me soooo much, because I have a plan that I'm following, a map that I'm using as I go throughout the month. When I sit down to write, I know what I'm supposed to be writing about. There is no dreading sitting at the computer, no wondering, "What should I write about?" It's all spelled out for me because I've pre-decided that for a particular month I'm writing a series of articles on a certain topic. 

Big warning: It is just fine to write a series of articles, but please do not put "Part 1" and "Part 2" in your article title or anywhere in your article body–each article in your series must be able to stand alone. So, anyone looking at your articles will be able to tell from your titles that they are on the same topic, but they won't be seeing Part 1, Part 2 etc.

The reason why we advise not to do articles that are in parts is that it decreases the chances of your article getting picked up by an ezine editor, and it also may decrease the likelihood of someone reading one of your parts that they find separate from the others. Just trust me on this–don't write articles that are continuations of other articles.

Conquer writers block. Sometimes we stop writing articles because we freeze up–we are just blocked on what to write! If you've ever had writers block, it is the worst feeling! A while ago I wrote a post about How To Conquer Writer's Block, so you may find that helpful. I actually wrote that post because I had writer's block, but after following the steps my creative juices started flowing again!

9) Just write! Have you ever heard of the term "theoretically productive"? People who are theoretically productive spend bunches of time trying to figure out the most efficient way to do things, but in the end they never really do what they were planning on doing. 

It is so easy for me to fall into that trap myself, and I could go on and on giving you tips for kick starting your article writing. At a certain point though, you just need to stop reading and start doing.

Sure, get your plans in place, create a schedule, map out a series, and then hit the ground running.

When you start you'll get your momentum moving in a forward direction, and you'll find that actually doing the writing is much easier than dreading doing it.

So, hop to it–start writing an article now!

If you're not a member of SubmitYOURArticle.com yet and would like to join, we'd be happy to welcome you–you can sign up here.  

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