Draw Them In With Titles and Descriptions

For one thing, online articles contain two features that print articles typically don't -- description text and categories. The description text is a short teaser paragraph that gives readers a quick look at what your article is about. This is your chance to grab and hold their attention, so get creative! Promise them good, informative content, and get ready to deliver.

Article distribution services require you to choose a few categories for your article. Make sure those you choose make sense. For example, if you've written an article about waterskiing, choose categories like "Sports" and "Outdoor Activities." Think like a publisher: where would you look to find an article on this topic?

Another important rule for effective article marketing concerns your title. Your title is the first thing readers see. Make it just so irresistibly compelling that authors have no choice but to read it! Give your article a gripping title of four or more words; titles with fewer than three words are almost always auto-stopped.

You must use an acceptable title case format, such as:

Capitalize only important words and the first word of the title; or

Capitalize the first letter of every word in the title.

Don't write your title in all caps (no need to shout!) or in sentence case where only the first word is capitalized. And, never end a title with a period. A question mark or single exclamation point is okay, just don't go overboard (!!).

Once you've got a good title, keep the reader's attention with strong opening lines. Beginning your article with a question, subheading, or any one-liner that looks like a second title is bad form, and your readers are likely to click away to a different article. Instead, make the first couple of lines interesting introductory text. Because reading a screen is different from reading a newspaper or magazine, the body of your article must be written in short blocks of text rather than the longer paragraphs you see in print articles. Text blocks are separated by a single blank line.

What Do You Say?

The content of the article must be useful information other than what your website or company has to offer. In other words, the article itself is never an advertisement for your business. Instead, write about topics that are related to your business and that will pre-sell your products and services.

Avoid including links to web sites (other than the major, well known ones like Google, CNN, etc.) that might be construed as advertising. If you're going to include a link to a specific web site, including your own, you must also provide links to at least two other competing sites.

Multi-part series of articles are generally best to avoid. Each article you submit must be capable of standing on its own. Give readers complete information every time, and the publishers will just love you.

Clean Counts! Make Sure It's Error-Free

Be sure that your content is well-written and error free. Get very friendly with the spelling and grammar check features on your computer. And know also that they won't catch every error. Have another person review the article for you.

Wrap It Up With The Resource Box

Finally, your author or resource information (the whole reason for writing the article!) must be written in a way that it can be posted on virtually any site. The only HTML tags to use are Anchor (a href), bold (b), and italic (i). Other tags may result in an article that appears incomplete and that readers cannot follow to your website.

You may be asked to provide both an HTML version and a plain text version of your author or resource information. Submit the same information in both -- typically, only one version is sent to a particular publisher -- and be sure your links are formatted correctly.

Get Ready To Make Some Noise!

Once you've created that fabulous article, distribute it the easy way. There are some good services out there -- like Article Marketer.com, thePhantomWriters.com and ArticleTrader.com -- that will distribute your articles deep and wide, to get you the exposure you need.