Phone In Your Content: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #6

(294) Phoning it in
Originally uploaded by Sarajea

This is Part 6 in the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It!

Article marketing is where art, craft and technology meet.

When we think of SEO and technology, we sometimes think that things are super-complicated, that you need to think like a machine, but actually that couldn't be further from the truth! 

Your ability to write a thoughtful article is much more crucial to your success than understanding the technical stuff surrounding article marketing.

Surprisingly though, sometimes the area where people slip up the most has nothing to do with technology, but involves more the "art" and "craft" part of the equation. Instead of producing well-written educational articles, folks can fall into the habit of phoning in content. 

To determine if you've fallen into this trap, let's look at the 2 areas where "phoning in" of content occurs:

Problem #1

Link building tunnel vision.

There are some folks who regard their articles as simply a means of obtaining a backlink (from the author resource box), and therefore they create a thrown together, makeshift "article" that is only marginally acceptable to some publishers (and unacceptable to many others).

I'm talking about an article that just barely makes sense (yes, I see these sometimes!), that is not compelling to read, and does not teach anyone anything. It's just filler, and I won't point to any article as an example of what I'm talking about, but trust me–you would know for sure what I'm talking about if you saw one of these babies.

I know where this approach comes from–article marketing is known for being a great way to generate one-way backlinks, and while that's true, it's also paramount that the articles you distributed give something before you receive those one-way backlinks. 

Like we talked about in the post about not acting like a salesman in your articles, before you get what you're looking for out of article marketing, you need to first please 2 other groups of people:

a) The publishers

b) Your target readers 

If you're all about "gotta build links, gotta build links" and you forget that the medium you're using (article marketing) involves pleasing not only yourself, but publishers and your readers, you will produce really bad articles that will not represent you in the way that you would like, don't produce the click throughs that you're hoping for, and don't get published as widely as if you had sat down and taken the time to craft a truly helpful, educational article.  

The Solution:  

Remember that the object when you're creating your article is to:

1. Come across like you know what you're talking about
2. Come across as unbiased, like you have nothing to gain from providing the helpful article
3. Put the reader at ease and heighten their curiosity about whatever your topic is
4. Provide information that teaches your reader or answers a question that they have.

Article marketing is not a link building tool that exists in a vacuum where you just press the submit button and collect a fresh crop of one-way backlinks. Your articles are a representation of YOU, so there is no phoning in of content allowed. If you do you will not see the results you're looking for. 

Problem #2 

Simply being in a hurry, not taking the time to write coherently and be sure your grammar and spelling are correct.   

The Solution 

Now, this is one we can all relate to–we decide we want to submit a certain number of articles a month, and we want to crank them out!

We start writing, and at the same time we're thinking, "I wonder if I can get this submitted before lunch."

And then we rush through, do a quick read-over, and think to ourselves, "Yeah, sure, it's good enough", and then we submit it not really realizing that we've got an embarrassing typo in our TITLE (eek!) and we've misused "your" and "you're" throughout, and we have a sentence that seems to go on for a dozen lines or so without a stop!

Yes, most of us have made this mistake of submitting an article in a hurry at one time or another, so the tips below are a good refresher for all of us:

*Proofread, proofread, proofread! Remember, your article will be on tons of websites over which you have no control potentially for years to come (maybe even FOREVER!) so it is worth it to be sure it's something that you're proud of. 

*Put your article aside for a few days. I would recommend writing an article and then putting it away for a day or so before reading it over again. It's amazing how many more typos and errors you can find when you look at your article with fresh eyes!

*Make technology work for you. Run the article through the grammar and spell-checkers of your word processing program.

*Get a second opinion. If possible, get someone to proofread your article.

At SubmitYOURArticle.com we offer a huge bonus in that we have professional Editors on staff who screen each and every article.

Now, they will not proofread your article for you, pointing out every last thing that's wrong, but if you do have recurring grammar and/or spelling errors, they will send your article back to you and ask you to make corrections before re-submitting it.

Every once in a while I'll run into folks who are in a super-hurry to get their article submitted who get annoyed when their article is sent back to them requesting that changes be made, but from my point of view I am thankful whenever the editors send back one of my articles–they've just saved me broadcasting my spelling and grammar mistakes to the entire internet!  

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