Fresh, unique ideas are always attractive, and ezine authors don't mind publishing others work, (along with a complete research box, (THIS IS YOUR AD) as well.

If you can learn and excel with this kind of content writing, you can win in two areas. Promoting your own site, or writing content for others site owners and earning dollars as a ghostwriter.

I have been writing and promoting on the web for over 3 years. Here are the tips I find most important to a beginning --article for promoting-- writer.

Articles should be short enough to read in less than 5 minutes.

Ideally they should be between 300 and 600 words (an average page in a printed novel is about 300 words).

Top 10, or 7, (the number isn't that important) Tips on (your subject) are great attention grabbers for articles to promote your website.

Write in short paragraphs, forget what you learned about in English class, if a paragraph is long, find a good point where you can cut it and put an extra line break.

Browsing for content, readers are more likely to stick with reading something the eye can easily skim from top to end. (Notice with this article, I have added spaces between each bullet in this list :o)

If your article is long, break it into 2 or 3 parts. For a real web traffic puller, and list building technique, request them to sign up for an autoresponder version to receive 2nd or 3rd part. (be sure to give them opt-out options when you do it this way)

Here is a mistake I see many online authors' making. Don't use huge big vocabulary. You are not writing a thesis, or essay for school. Write so that someone with a 8th grade education could easily read it.

Don't try to impress with large vocabulary words, you will lose readers, who feel your writing is condesending to them. (See, how many do you think I may have lost using condesending?

Try to write with passion. Put feeling into your words. Pull in as many of the five senses, experience stories, as you can. For an example of this, read this article.

Articles should educate, entertain or inform. Imagine how popular your article will be if it does all three.

Make sure your article is well formatted. You can post it at a site like ezinearticles.com and use their ("get this article page" to get your article in different formats, both text and html.)

These sites also allow you to input your own personalized summary, and keywords, which allows webmasters to find them and use them as well.

Set a goal to publish a certain number of articles per week to a certain number of article directory sites.

It is easy to find sites to submit your articles too. Just go to google, type in articles, then, scroll to the bottom of the page. You will find a button which says, search within results.

With this search button type in "free articles" or "free content" or "free to republish" and you will find several submission sites. You can also type "article submission directories"

I have set a goal to do five things each day toward promotion. Each persons goals will be different, but remember, to be effective you must write new content and promote on a consistent basis.

However, if you have a good article, it will also duplicate itself quickly and spread across the web like a forest fire out of control!

You can optimize your article to get the exact keyword density for search engines, but that could fill another whole article. For your main keyword, try to use it about 7-10 times throughout the whole page.