Guide to make money online!

The most common reason why articles are declined by publishers is that the article is considered “promotional” or self-serving.

What is a promotional article and how can you submit articles that have the greatest chance of being accepted by publishers?

It helps to know that the purpose of the articles used in Article Marketing is first and foremost to educate and inform, and not to promote yourself, your website, your products or your business. The information conveyed in your article should be for the benefit of your readers and not written with the intention of making sales for your products.

Here’s where the confusion comes in–the reason why people love article marketing is that it’s a great tool for driving traffic to a website which in turn can increase sales. So, the reason why you started submitting articles may have been to increase sales, grow your customer base, or simply get people to visit your website.

This does not, however, mean that you would use the article body to accomplish these goals. To increase website traffic you do not need to say anything about your website in the article itself.

Article marketing is more subtle than that–increasing traffic to a site is an inherent side effect of submitting articles:

You submit an article to an article directory, then website owners see your article, like it, and decide to reprint it on their websites. Each time your article is republished, your resource box containing a link to your site is also republished. This builds links, and an increase in links can elevate your search engine ranking. An increased search engine ranking for your major keywords can of course build traffic dramatically for the long-term.

So, what causes traffic to build is the accumulation of links, rather than a direct plea in the article body for the reader to do something to benefit you.

Always, always, always–your article body should contain information designed to inform and educate the reader. The appropriate place to toot your own horn and talk about your website and products is your resource box–that is the author bio box that sits below your article.

In order to give your article the greatest chance of being attractive to most publishers, you need to remove any impression that your article is written for the purpose of making a sale or drawing readers to your website (remember–save that type of info for your resource box).

Here are 5 things that make an article look promotional (self-serving):

1. The article has a sales slant to it.
2. The article is about a product that you’re selling on your website.
3. The article uses hyped up language, like what you would see in an advertisement.
4. The article tries to get readers to go to your website. (The resource box is the right place to try to get folks to visit your website.)
5. The article is about you and how wonderful you are. (Remember, save that type of info for the resource box.)

If you are having trouble getting out of the “promotional article” mindset, try thinking of yourself as a teacher rather than a sales person.

A teacher provides information that educates and informs.

A sales person presents information with the intention of getting a person to buy a product.

Even if your website sells products, you still need to approach your articles from the perspective of a teacher.

This isn’t to say that your articles shouldn’t be on the topic of your website–your articles should always be on the same topic as your website, but they should not be about specific products that you’re selling on your site.

For example, if your business is Lizzie’s Gourmet Chocolates, an appropriate article topic would be anything having to do with gourmet chocolate or chocolate in general, but it’s best not to write articles about your specific brand of chocolate.

So, that would be NO to an article called “Why Lizzie’s Gourmet Chocolates Taste Best”, and YES to an article called “10 Ways To Tell If Your Chocolate Is High Quality”.

As long as you’re writing articles, why not craft them in a way that maximizes the number of publishers who will accept your article?

The more publishers who reprint your article, the more backlinks you’ll receive. The more backlinks you receive, the bigger impact on your search engine rankings. A higher ranking in Google is what you’re after–that is what will bring the increase in traffic (and sales!) that you’re looking for.