Beyond the Basics of Article Marketing April 25, 2009

Posted by Gregg in Article Marketing, Blog.
Tags: article clustering, Article Marketing, traffic generation, web traffic
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Everyone who writes an article will tell you they know how to create their master piece, however, once someone else starts to read the article they immediately will see places where different words or phrases could be used.  These difference are great if you want to use spinning techniques create unique content.  However, when those differences are related to common word usage mistakes the article spinner and on-line dictionary can’t help you.

Let’s look at several examples of the most common word usage mistakes:

Examples:
1. Lets vs. Let’s
“Let’s” is the contraction of “Let Us”.
“Lets” is used to show action.

2. Its vs. It’s
“It’s” is the contraction of “It is” or “It has”.
“Its” is a  pronoun. It is used to show the possessive form.

3. Loose vs. Lose
“Loose” shows a condition.  It is the opposite of tighten.
“Lose” is an action or a verb.

There are many such word usage entanglements in the English language to trip up anyone that doesn’t pay attention.  You can’t rely on your spell checker to find and fix these anomalies of our language.  Other common combinations of word usage include:

• Know  vs.  No  vs.  Now
• Effect  vs.  Affect
• Choose  vs.  Chose
• You’re  vs.  Your
• To  vs.  Too  vs.  Two
• I.e.  vs.  E.g. 
• A lot  vs.  Allot  vs.  A lot
• There  vs.  Their  vs.  They’re

 It’s easy enough to put any one of these combinations into your search engine and get a detailed explanation of each one.  Don’t be lazy.  Good grammar and word usage shows professionalism.  If English is not your primary language and you struggle from time to time then hire a writer.  Just put “article writer” in your search engine and you’ll find many possible writers.  You can have them write fresh articles for you or you can provide them with your rough draft and they’ll return you a polished English article.

The next most common mistake in writing English articles is Capitalization.  Everyone seems to have a different style where they use capital letters.  Let’s review some basic points:

• Capitalize the first word of every sentence.
• The personal pronoun “I” is always capitalized, including all of its contractions.
• Capitalize a proper noun such as the name of a person or place.
• Capitalize points of the compass only when they refer to specific regions.
• In a sentence ending with a colon, do not capitalize the first word if it begins a list.
• Capitalize the first word and all the words in titles of books, articles, works of art, etc. excluding short prepositions and conjunctions.

As you can see, grammar of the English language can be quite complicated even though world statistics have shown that it is one of the easiest languages to learn to speak.

In our next article, “Adding the EZineArticles.com Widget to Your Site”, we will show you how to add to add this widget in order to drive traffic to your site.  However, for now, let’s look at how you can integrate the Twitter in your EZineArticles.com profile so that each time your articles are approved a post will be made to  your Twitter account.

1. Log into the EzineArticles.com web site. Go to the Profile Manager then Edit Author Bio from the main menu.
2. Enter your Twitter account information into the fields “Twitter Username” and “Twitter Password.” This information is the same information you use to log into Twitter.
3. Submit an article.

That’s it. Your Twitter account will be automatically updated when your article is approved by the EzineArticles.com editorial staff and you will be listed here.

You can also find other niche experts that post on Twitter so that you can follow them in your Twitter account.

1. Log in to twitter.ezinearticles.com using your Twitter username & password. This is located in the left navigation.
2. Scroll down until you see the title Filter Options near the bottom of the left-hand navigation window. Below that is the Category button. Clicking on that button reveals a very powerful feature that will open near the top of the page: Filter by Category.
3. Clicking on the drop-down menu allows you to select your category of interest and also opens up a drop-down menu for the subcategories within that particular category. By picking a subcategory, you see only the EzineArticles expert authors in that specific niche who currently have their newly approved articles automatically posted to their Twitter profile.
4.  You can change the SORT order by Followers, Authors, Articles or Recent Tweets. The default sort order is by largest number of Articles.
This tool can help you identify the people in your niche of interest – both colleagues and competitors *without* having to surf each of their twitter profiles one at a time…saving you loads of time.

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Author:
Gregg Sterner at http://tjfy4008.ARTCLUST.hop.clickbank.net/
Don’t miss the first article in our series:
Basics Article Marketing Techniques
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Basic Article Marketing Techniques April 19, 2009

Posted by Gregg in Article Marketing, Blog.
Tags: article clustering, Article Marketing, traffic generation, web traffic
1 comment so far

Many articles have been written on the subject of article marketing.  They all seem to start with the same theme of, “You write it, they will come.”   They expect you to write article after article of useful content when in reality the end result is that many articles are spun from the same basic content with various words and phrases changed and stung together.  In many cases, the resulting articles end up being a jumbled mess.

If you are interested in blasting out articles for the sake of creating mass content then the basic spinning technique will do the job.  However, article directories are becoming more concerned about submissions since they are interested in improving the quality of their content.  You’ll find that moderators are increasingly declining articles with specific instructions on how the articles should be improved.

Several article directories are offering free newsletters on grammar and various writing techniques.  Anyone interested in writing many articles should take advantage of these free newsletters as there are many great tips in them.  Also, if you received that low grade back in high school or in your freshman English class these free writing newsletters are a great way to review and update your writing skills.  Remember, the more professional you appear in your writing the more people will search for your articles by the author name rather than by the subject.

In our next article, “Beyond the Basics of Article Marketing”, we’ll explore some of the techniques mentioned in those newsletters.  Also, in a future article about “Article Clustering” we’ll explore how to increase the strength and quality of your backlinks in your articles.  However, for now, let’s look at the basics of article marketing and how you can create better quality variations of your articles.

Article marketing isn’t rocket science.  Anyone with a firm grasp of conversation and grammar can create and market articles on the Internet.  Also, it doesn’t matter which language you use. You just have to read the rules (Article Submission Guidelines) of each article directory.  There are article directories available for almost every language.
When developing your article make sure that you follow the guidelines about the number of paragraphs and words.  In most cases you should have at least 5 paragraphs and at least 3 sentences per paragraph.  You can have from 400 to 5000 words per article with 700 words being ideal.  Again, the rules of each article directory will dictate the article’s requirements.

Publishing your articles is a lot easier than most people think.  Most article directories require that you register and provide some basic information about yourself in your profile.  The Internet has produced some amazing authors who would otherwise not be able to afford the cost of traditional publishing so don’t be afraid to tell a little bit about yourself in your profile.  Also, provide a picture of yourself as most readers prefer to see who you are.  It’s human nature to want to see who is talking and what they look like.  People identify much easier with an author when they have a clear picture of them.

When writing your article don’t make it a sales pitch.  Your article should educate the reader about a specific topic.  Tell a story or give instructions on how to accomplish a task,  Use the conversational style, not the narrative style.  As an example:  If you are selling diamond rings on a web site don’t put a link in the body of your article to the actual address of the web site.  Instead, explain about the clarity and facets of diamonds and use the word “diamonds” as your anchor text for the link.

Many article directories have a policy about the number of links you can have within the body of an article.  In most cases you can have a maximum of two links in the body and two links in the author’s resource box.  At least one link in the resource box should link to your web site. Use your links wisely as they are the source of your backlinks.

There has been a lot of talk about duplicate content of articles since many people buy PLR (Private Label Rights) articles in bulk.  Most article directories have the means to check articles on their sites to see of articles submitted by different authors are identical.  Some directories have enough programming resources to be able to judge the percentage of similarity between articles.

There are two views about identical articles on different sites.  One group believes that articles must be of unique content and that search engines penalize for duplicate content on various sites.  Another group has just the opposite view.  They believe that you are not penalized by the search engines for delicate content.  In reality, it does tend to irritate users if they find the exact same article on different article directories with a resource box that indicates the two articles were authored by different people.  When this happens, users typically will re-consider using articles by both authors. 

Now let’s look at how you can create variations of your original article.  The method of making variations of a basic article is termed Spinning.  There are even web sites that will take you base article and spin it into numerous variations.  However, this practice by these web sites can product versions that are totally senseless.  Buyer beware.

 The process of spinning an article is to change various words and word groups within the paragraph so as to produce a different article that essentially says the same thing.  When a paragraph is constructed properly you can use Spinning software to produce the variations you desire.

Let’s look at an example of Spinning. 

Example 1:
This sentence was originally written as, “Many article directories have a policy about limiting the number of links you can have within the body of an article to two links.”

Example 2:
Now lets look at a variation of it.  “Some directories only allow two links within an article body.”

Both sentences mean exactly the same.  Now let’s look at how the sentences would be constructed if you were to use a Spinning program to read the sentences within an article.

Example 3:
{Many article|Some} directories {have a policy about limiting the number of links you can have within the body of an article to two links|only allow two links within and article body}.

The variations are contained within the bracket characters “{variations 1 | variation 2}” separated by the bar “|” character.  This structure allows the Spinning software to know where the aviations are located.   Four complete sentences can be made from this one constructed sentence.  The more variation groups that you have within a sentence the greater the number of complete sentences that can be constructed by the Spinning software.

Look for our next article “Beyond the Basics of Article Marketing” where we’ll discuss writing techniques and Twittering your articles.

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This article was originally published on E-zine Articles by Gregg Sterner from Article Clustering
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