Writing Blog

Article Writing – Why Bother? * There are thousands of articles to be read on the World Wide Web, and many more are being added everyday. If you take the time to do more than skim them, you will find that many articles are about similar things. Why would you take the time out of your busy schedule to add one more? We all suffer from information overload- so why add to it? Why should I bother? Here are some good reasons to consider why it would be to your advantage to take up article writing: 1. Expert Status, By writing articles in your niche area you begin to establish your credibility as an expert in that field. When writing your article it is important to include key words in the article that relate to your specific area. This will make it easier for the search engines to link your name to your area of expertise, and your reputation will grow into ‘expert status’ 2. Your Articles Are Needed Webmasters, ezine editors, and publishers are looking for fresh content to publish to th...

Article Writing – The Midas Touch of Link Strategies - Everyone in the SEO community is aware of the power of having an effective link building strategy, but since recent updates at Google took place the playing field has changed. More emphasis is now being given to one way incoming links, and far less value for reciprocal links. The big question is: “How can I get a good crop of one way links?” By far the easiest way is to write articles for publication on websites. The principle is simple and it works because webmasters are hungry for page content. In return for giving webmasters free content they agree to publish your profile, which contains a link to your website. It should not be underestimated just how powerful this can be, but there are guidelines that need to be employed if you are to be successful. If you are new to article writing and wish to cash in on this invaluable technique, then the guidelines are listed below.  Firstly, at most of the article directories to which ...

Article Theft...What to do about it? - I have read several articles, blogs, and message board postings concerning the rise of article theft. Specifically, this is where your article is lifted from your site without your permission or pulled from a third party site. In many ways I consider the internet to be the "Wild West" in terms of lawlessness. Ignoring established and set rules is common,  meaning that us law abiding folks have our work cut out for us. It may surprise you, but I don't take action in many cases of known article theft. Why? Because, I just don't have the time to police everything. I know of authors who check every link to their site, but that work is both tedious and time consuming. <strong>A golden rule:</strong> If someone takes my article without my permission and the content and links are still in place, I don't worry about it. If they take my article and change the content, paragraph headers, the title, or steal credit for them...

Article Submission Trumps Ezine Ads and Google AdWords - You may have heard advice from Internet marketing gurus that ezine ads are one of the best forms of advertising.  You may also have heard that Google AdWords and other pay per click search engines are one of the best advertising methods.  But when it comes to marketing your web site, article submission trumps ezine ads and Google AdWords anytime. The advantage of article submission is trust.  Suppose you subscribe to an ezine in the form of an email newsletter.  You've just sat down at your PC, coffee in hand, to read your email.  There in your inbox is a copy of one of your favorite ezines, the one you read every time. Clicking on the newsletter, you see that this edition starts with a sponsor ad and then has a couple of great sounding articles and a couple more ezine ads.  Sipping your coffee, one of the articles catches your attention.  You read the article, and you were right.  It's a g...

Article Submission Software is an Indispensable Tool  - Ezine article writing is a proven method of generating traffic to your site.  No hype here, it works, and it works well.  After reading your interesting article, the reader clicks on your link in the last paragraph to learn more.  Every article I have read about Ezine article writing has been quite honest in stating that Ezine is a proven traffic generator, but that it requires work.  That is does.  If you are a newbie, this article has information that will get you off to the right start.  If you are an experienced article writer, let us review the steps to see why the process requires so much work, and what we can do to lessen the time required. The first step is to write an interesting article on a particular subject.  The article should be over 500 words, as that is a requirement of most submittal sites.  Be sure to read the Submittal Guidelines of each site before submitting your ar...

Article Shelf Life: Getting the Most Out of What You Write - I admit that the internet is definitely for the “here and now.” Always changing, what may be popular one day may be irrelevant the next. A den of “fast track fads” is what the internet has become. Still, if you are an article writer, you know that the web content you provide for your customers today must have an extended shelf life with it, otherwise your customers lose out and your reputation sinks. You can write relevant and persuasive content that doesn’t lose its sheen with time; read on and I will show you how. It is a given that if you write seasonal articles these very same articles will quickly lose their appeal once the season is over. Few people are interested in Valentine’s Day pitches outside of January and February, but you can keep their interest strong year round by not directly focusing on products, but on the <i>history</i> of the holiday. I have discovered that my seasonal articles are likely to...

Article Automation Rears An Ugly Head - Content is king. You have probably heard that a million times but it's true. That is why writing articles is one of the most utilized Internet marketing media today. It’s also one of the most abused marketing methods. The online advertising craze began picking up with the introduction of FFA (Free For ALL) sites. These sites allowed you to submit your link or ad, which slowly rotated off the page as new links were submitted. Once this method of advertising became known, scores of people rushed to FFA sites and began submitting their ads. Programmers invented ways to automate the process of submitting links to hundreds of sites within seconds, causing it to become an ineffective marketing option because of the scores of people who began using this system. Links would rotate off the page within seconds and this eventually led to the downfall and popularity of them. Another marketing method, which quickly became useless, was banner advertising ...

Art Shows - Clear designers are consistently in demand, and alike bodies after a academic clear architecture accomplishments can get gigs if they accept a acceptable portfolio to appearance off. Succeeding as a accomplished artist, on the added hand, is acutely difficult. There is a lot of money in the art world, but best of it alone goes to a few bodies – those who accept been best up on by the collectors and whose works can advertise for astonishing amounts of money. Of course, the key to acceptable one of the few is art shows. Although few art arcade shows are absolutely lucrative, it is amazing how bound the fizz can advance if you get the eye of addition in the know. Secretly, anybody with an art appearance dreams of communicable the admiring eyes of a patron. It is important to apprehend that there are some bodies who do absolutely able-bodied with art shows that baby to accepted tastes, but this can be a boxy life. You see, a lot goes into acclimation an art show. Each alone al...

Are these the worst articles ever? - Articles. We love them. Content-rich and drive visitors to our website. Inward links across the internet. Search engines count the keywords and count the links. We get a higher page rank. We come higher in search engines. Our Adsense goes up.  However, having read a few of them, I have to say I have not read so much crap in my life. Anyone who puts this on their website via an RSS feed or by copying the article wholesale is really being stupid. Very few of these "articles" are anything more than keyword-optimized web pages designed to pull in search engines, or outright adverts.  Excuse the length of the quote, but here, as an example, is a quote from a keyword-optimized article:  "The opinion on who’s the best free online dating service in America could vary, depending on the person being asked. But there was a popularity survey conducted among Americans and Canadians to find out the best online dating sites. The high rank though do...

An Indispensable Writing Tool - A small but indispensable tool if you're serious about writing is a notebook; I mean the paper kind and not the computer. Yes, that's right, a notebook. It should be carried around whenever you leave your home or office. Here's why: 1. You just don't know when an idea will strike. Unless you have a photographic memory, you'd want to write down that idea immediately so you may study it at a later time. Ideas often come when you are aware of the sights and sounds around you. 2. It's better to write down experiences as much as possible in real time then try to relive and write about it later. For example a first-time visit to a park or rain forest can produce emotions or feelings that would be difficult to duplicate in writing if recalled by memory when it's long over. 3. You might meet an important or exciting personality whom you'd like to quote verbatim. To write about it later out of memory might cause you to misquote th...

An Eye-Catching Art - The thread stroke on the front side produced by this is also called stitch. In the context of embroidery, an embroidery stitch means one or more stitches that are always executed in the same way, forming a figure of recognisable look. Embroidery stitches are also called stitches for short. Embroidery stitches are the smallest units in embroidery. Embroidery patterns are formed by doing many embroidery stitches, either all the same or different ones, either following a counting chart on paper, following a design painted on the fabric or even working freehand. Heraldic Hand Stitched Embroidery uses various combinations of stitches. In Heraldic Hand Stitched Embroidery you find a special name to help identify it. These names vary from country to country and region to region. Some embroidery books will include name variations. Taken by themselves the stitches are mostly simple to execute, however when you put them together the results can be extremely complex. Herald...

An Article Writing Philosophy – Do You Have One - Thousands of articles about writing articles are bouncing all over the internet and the printed media at any given time. Most of these articles are tips and advice, a few are about grammar and clarity and yet others are about subject matter and how to find it. A philosophy for writing articles is none of the above. Simply put an article writing philosophy is not about how you write but why. Although it is acceptable to write articles for publicity or hits to your website it is not the strongest motive. Then there are those who write by researching the most sought after keywords on the net and write articles that lead people to those words, thus to their sites. This also qualifies as a reason to write but only in the most strained sense of the word. Writers are somewhat like preachers, they have a soap box called the printed page and they have a message just like the minister, even if the subject matter is not homiletically inclined. As...

Add Some Factor with Your Body - A Heraldic Coat of Arms was more like a label for instant identification than it was like a painting. You wanted to know instantly who was coming toward you, so you could know which side he was on. Coats of arms later took on further significance and meanings. They also became a way of showing membership in the aristocracy, after they lost their significance in warfare.  <a href="http://www.heraldicnames.com.au"> Heraldic Coat of Arms</a> painted in different colours such as bright red, royal blue, sky blue, emerald green, royal purple, black. By using metals Heraldic Coat of Arms can paint in gold and silver. A Heraldic Coat of Arms can have several parts. The main part is a shield, which can have a crest above it, a motto, and animals supporting the shield. The terms used in heraldry are similar to a kind of old Australia. The idea is that a shield can be described by one expert in heraldry so that another expert could draw it c...

A Publisher’s Rant – Why I Hate Your First Paragraph - I’m a publisher for numerous sites. I HATE many of your articles. Here’s why I hate your first paragraph and what you can do about it. A Biggie First paragraphs are a huge issue with me. Better to have died a small child than get this one wrong. If you can get just this one thing right, your publication rates will go through the roof. Unfortunately, almost nobody does it correctly.  The entire issue comes down to meta tagging. When I create a page on a site for an article, I have to enter the meta title and meta description. Your headline is the meta title and your first paragraph should be the meta description. If your first paragraph doesn’t fit my meta description needs, I will blow by your articles like a debutante on Rodeo Drive with a new credit card. I don’t have time to re-write your masterpiece. Don’t make me.  Here is what I want: 1. No more than 38 words.  2. Preferably two sentences. 3. Your keywords in t...

A Publisher’s Rant – Why I Hate Your Byline - I’m a publisher for numerous sites. I HATE many of your articles. Here’s why I hate the byline of your article and what you can do about it. Bylines The byline of an article is your chance to pimp your site and yourself. I don’t really care what you write. There only time I would forgo using an article because of the byline would be if you’re one of those people that writes seven or eight lines of text. Please try to keep it to three lines or less. Something To Consider If you’re writing articles, you undoubtedly know it is a great way to build the link count for a site. Assume you put two links in the byline of an article. Assume further that 60 sites publish your article. You have effectively generated 120 links for your site, a number that would take forever if you were pursuing reciprocal link trades.  Article links are also valued highly by search engines because they are inbound only links. In the “minds” of a search engine, inbo...

A Publisher’s Rant – Why I Hate Your Articles - I’m a publisher for numerous sites. I HATE many of your articles. Here’s my rant and what you can do to change my mind.  Don’t Send Me Your Articles First of all, don’t send me articles. I only take them from directories. The purpose of this article is to give you a better idea of what I’m looking for in articles. It is not to create an assault on my email account.  You’re Killing Me Okay, "hate" is strong word and I probably shouldn’t use it. It is, however, the word that comes to mind when I blow an hour in an article directory trying to find usable articles! As an Internet marketing firm, we beef up client sites by adding article content. This means I handle the article sections of more sites than I wish to admit. Because of this, I spend most of my time hunting for good articles. By "good articles," I am talking about articles that are formatted and arranged in a manner that makes them ready for publishing. I am N...

A Publisher’s Rant – Why I Hate Your Article Headlines - I’m a publisher for numerous sites. I HATE many of your articles. Here’s why I hate your headline and what you can do about it. The Headline There is a school of thought out there that your headline should be designed to captivate readers. In the real world, this is probably true. When I am looking for articles, it is not.  I want keywords front and center in an article headline. This may come as a shock, but I am using your articles as part of a search engine optimization effort on sites. With seo, the keywords always come first. ALWAYS!   Consider the following examples: 1. California Real Estate – The Secret to Making a Bundle  2. The Secret to Making a Bundle in California Real Estate The first headline is by far the best. The keywords are front and center. I can easily turn this headline into a meta title for site page.  More importantly, this tells me that you may be a writer that understands what I...

A Publisher’s Rant – Why I Hate The Body of Your Article - I’m a publisher for numerous sites. I HATE many of your articles. Here’s why I hate the body of your article and what you can do about it. You’re Giving Me A Headache Let’s cut to the chase on this issue. I really don’t care what you write about. As long as it isn’t an overt sales pitch, knock yourself out. I am more interested in the format of the article, not your view or take on the subject matter. The readers on my sites may not like what you write, but that is your problem.  I do care about the flow and format of the body of your article. I strongly encourage you to have a point and stick to it. If another idea comes to mind half way through writing an article, turn it into a separate article. Don’t try to cram it all into one article.  One Sentence Paragraphs Don’t. For the love of God, just don’t write these. The only time you should write a one sentence paragraph is if it is a narrative. Occasionally, you can ...

A Publisher’s Rant – A Checklist of Items - This checklist is going to be short and to the point. Remember, I’m lazy. Go back and read the original article if you need more information.  1. Headlines – Keyword phrases should ALWAYS be the first words. No exceptions. 2. First Paragraph – No more than 38 words. Two to three short sentences with the keywords from your headline included near the beginning.  3. No one sentence paragraphs. 4. Cut up long sentences into shorter ones. If a sentence is over two lines, it can be cut down.  5. Linking In Article – Don’t. Just do it in the byline.  6. Body Headlines – Break up the article with headlines in the body. Just keep them short and capitalize the first letter of each word.  7. Last Paragraph – Sum up the point of your article. Don’t include links or a plea to go to your site. Use the byline for your begging. I do. 8. Bylines – Keep them under four lines. Try to include the keyword phrases you are using on your sit...

A new Collection of African Tribal Art - Each tribal art embeds the religion and culture of the African tribes people. The very essence of African civilization is seen in their craftsmanship as shown in genuine tribal masks and statues. African masks are depicted as one of the most important part of African tribal rituals. You can see a number of African masks displayed all over the globe in cultural museums and art galleries.  African masks are not made for commercial purposes. They are used in tribal rituals and ceremonies. Over the years, the African mask has been the icon of Africa's culture. They are used in religious ceremonies and everyday living. Not all African masks are old because most of them are used once or twice during rituals.  Creating your own collection of African tribal art can be very challenging. These are not pieces that you can easily purchase. Genuine African masks, statues and other original tribal art are very rare to find. Plus, you need a good eye...

A Marvellous Hand Work - Embroidery stitches are the smallest units in embroidery. Embroidery patterns are formed by doing many embroidery stitches, either all the same or different ones, either following a counting chart on paper, following a design painted on the fabric or even working freehand. <a href="http://www.heraldicnames.com.au/Embroidery.html">Heraldic Hand Stitched Embroidery</a> uses various combinations of stitches. In <a href="http://www.heraldicnames.com.au/Embroidery.html">Heraldic Hand Stitched Embroidery</a> you find a special name to help identify it. These names vary from country to country and region to region. Some embroidery books will include name variations. Taken by themselves the stitches are mostly simple to execute, however when you put them together the results can be extremely complex. <a href="http://www.heraldicnames.com.au/Embroidery.html">Heraldic Hand Stitched Embroidery</a> work by ...

13 Steps to a "Slippery Slope" Online Sales Letter - But here's the problem: I see many of them trying to sell their e-book, tutorial, etc. on a regular Web page. They list a paragraph about the info-product and give the price, and they expect a slew of sales. Wrong. You need a special sales page that has a "slippery slope" sales letter. Remember that game Chutes & Ladders? If you landed on a space that had a chute on it, you just went down, Baby. No turning back. That's how your sales letter should be - a "slippery slope" that pulls in the reader because it's so compelling and interesting. Here's a basic outline of the 13 elements you want to include. To see an example of them all in action, visit MY own sales page at www.BoostBizEzine.com. 1. Limit your navigation. The visitor should not be distracted by links that take her to your bio, other products, etc. The idea is to keep her on this page, reading your copy and leading her to or...

11 Quick (and Good) Content Ideas for Your Ezine or Website - Publishing articles, especially via an e-zine, is the ideal opportunity to showcase your business. By sharing your knowledge and expertise, you build credibility as an expert, while spreading the word about your services and products. While I'm sure that sometimes you have dozens of content ideas, I bet other times you find yourself staring at a blank computer screen, grumbling that it's publishing time again. Well, have no fear! Here are 11 quick (and good) content ideas for when you're in a pinch. 1. Give real-life success stories. Describe a problem you've solved for a client/customer, and use that as a springboard to offer more general advice. Show your readers how you've helped customers address challenges -- "case studies" if you will. This positions you as the expert in your readers' minds more than your coming out and saying so. 2. Think of three areas in which you'd like your c...

10 Article Writing Keys For Newbies - This article on the 10 (no, 11... yes, 11) tips for newbies is not written from the catbird seat point of view of the article host or database manager.  Rather it is by and from the perspective of an author who remembers the early misgivings. It is written especially for the beginning article writer.  The Tennessee Mountain Man has written and submitted hundreds of articles for publication to thousands of article hosts and database managers and still finds article writing his nemesis.   1.  Necessity vs Desire:   Articles and Blogs are necessary in today's scheme of search engine indexing.  Not what the newbie wants to hear.  Just remember what the Bible says, "there has nothing over taken you that is not common to man".  That's right!  All of us hate article and Blog writing at times, and some of us dread the journey to pen and paper (or keyboard as the case may be) all the time. Many a webmaster w...

9 Steps to Unique Articles - 1 Remove your limits  Reduce your subject to a single core word and then brainstorm around it. For example, if you're trying to write about "Study Skills", expand your thinking to "School". Now jot down everything that comes to mind when you think about School, and when you run out of ideas start asking yourself open questions around the subject and noting your answers.  Examples:  What did I enjoy about school?  What scared me?  What did I wish I'd known from Day 1?  This will help you get back into the mindset of someone struggling with school issues of all kinds and you'll start to get a feel for their concerns and worries.  2 Restore your focus  Once you've started to understand the general feelings of your readers, allow your mind to focus back on your original topic of Study Skills. From your new perspective, what questions would you ask? What would you want to know? Is this really a "Studying" issue or i...

7 Marketing Lessons We Can Learn From TV Infomercials - I hate to share this, but I love watching infomercials. And I've ordered more than once from them! Everything from cosmetics to a cell phone accessory. When pressed, my friends admit the same. If you sniff around most people's homes, you'll find SOMETHING ordered from an infomercial, whether it's the Ronco Rotisserie or Victoria Principal's skincare. You may think of these often annoying programs as "trash TV", but think again. Did you realize that they use many of the exact same strategies that we should? Now, I don't mean you need to scream at your customers or flash "$19.95" in blinking digits on your website! Those are gimmicks. But what most people don't realize is that many of the STRATEGIES that sell the kitchen doohickey gadget are the same ones that can also sell your products and programs.) Here are 7 of my favorites: 1. They grab your attention. Infomercials air on the mo...

6 Steps to Catch More Opt-ins Than Ever Before - Remember that when you have new visitors at your website, your #1 goal is to get them on your ezine list! That way you have permission to contact them again and again, educating them about your helpful services and products that they came to learn more about. But you can’t just put up a link that says “free newsletter”. No one cares! You need to carefully craft an opt-in box that works like a big net, catching the exact type of “fish” you want as your ideal clients and customers. Also remember, don’t hide your box at the bottom of your web pages. Right now, most testing shows that the best place for your opt-in box is the upper right corner… loud and proud! Here are six simple things you should have in your opt-in box that will help you get more signups than ever before. 1) An Attention-Getting HEADLINE Remember that online readers SKIM copy - they don’t read it word for word. So the headline in your opt-in box may be the ONLY thing the...