There is one article marketing mistake that consistently tops the list. It is awful. This single mistake made by an author can ensure that the article is not published as widely as it could be. It’s a deal killer.
Every week I meet with the Article Marketer editorial team to discuss the top editorial concerns surrounding articles submitted during the week. Our editors have reviewed articles by over a thousand authors, so they’ve pretty much seen it all. In preparation for our weekly meeting, they come together and report on the most common mistakes authors make. Our editors work with these authors to correct errors and ensure that their articles are published more widely.
Every week many of the same issues are listed:
* Sales letters posing as advertisements.
* Information from the resource box within the body of the article.
* Spelling and grammatical errors.
Even these egregious (and frequent) problems pale in comparison to the more pervasive and insidious problem facing publishers looking for high-quality content:
Biggest problem: off-topic articles
Off-topic articles target the wrong audience. Off-topic articles contain content that does not match the chosen category. The Article Marketer editorial team tells me that they spend most of their time helping authors and Internet marketers correctly categorize their articles so they reach the right audience. It’s about results.
How are items misclassified?
It is usually an innocent mistake. After all, it certainly doesn’t surprise internet marketers that free reprint articles try to educate readers and provide good content for webmasters and publishers. Everyone knows that “content is king” on the web. Google spiders go crazy when they find relevant content. Internet marketers offer content-rich, copyright-free articles in exchange for that all-important resource box that contains a relevant backlink and draws the reader back to the author’s website. It is a win-win situation.
Imagine an author or Internet marketer who has gone to great lengths to provide wonderful information about, oh…let’s just say, “cats.” The article teaches the reader what grooming tools to use, provides a history of cat domestication, and explains some of the traditional breeding guild traditions and techniques.
This is absolutely perfect content for publishers with newsletters or cat sites. It’s even a good match for “pets” or “little furry things.” It’s going to be a spectacularly popular item. Cat newsletter readers will love this article. And it reaches a target market perfectly suited for the author: a retailer of cat toys. Everything is wonderful. Until the author makes a critical mistake.
When submitting the article to thousands of editors and publishers, the author does not select the “pets” or “cats” categories, but the “Educational” category, because the article is educational.
OH NO!
What otherwise could have been a dazzlingly successful article will now fail. The article may be “educational” but it’s not a good match for someone who publishes an “educational” newsletter.
Choose the correct categories for your articles.
There is a mix of art and science in selecting the appropriate categories for a free reprint article. It requires an author to change focus and put himself in the other’s place for a moment. From the author’s perspective, the article itself is an education, so it fits well into the education category.
But take a moment and imagine that you are a publisher interested in receiving articles in the “education” category. You have a niche newsletter or content site focused on the education market. When you search for articles in the “education” category, what type of articles would you like to see?
You probably want tips for teachers, student management techniques, grading strategies, articles related to the teaching process, how to be a more effective educator, how to get your point across to a group of undisciplined students, etc. Imagine you’re looking through the “education” articles and come across an article about grooming a cat. Hey? This is not about education. It’s spam!
That is the crux of the problem. So many people are writing articles these days that the problem of “article spam” is spreading like wildfire.
Publishers are hypersensitive to article spam. Some will simply remove the offending article, but others will take drastic measures to prevent further spam, even to the point of banning an author from submitting any further articles.
In our meetings, editors tell me that they spend most of their time working with authors to make sure their articles meet the guidelines. A large part of that effort is focused on categorization.
real world example
So let’s see how the rubber meets the road. This is an article about “royalty-free reprint article categorization errors”, written for publishers all over the web. How should it be categorized? What newsletters would be interested? What article directory categories would be suitable?
The article is written for writers and internet marketers, so that’s where I’ll start. The first thing to figure out is how to best reach that audience. It’s not hard to decide that the “Internet Marketing” category will make the list. Article marketing is a very effective form of internet marketing. Internet marketers would be interested in this article.
Because this article provides tips and tricks to get articles published more widely, the “Writing” category makes sense. Authors who wish to publish their articles will find this article useful. A publisher who publishes a writers’ newsletter would like this article for that newsletter, because it’s all about meeting the needs of subscribers.
If you are reading this article, you are probably reading it in a newsletter or on a website for writers or internet marketers. You are likely interested in articles free of copyright, copywriting, or internet marketing.
Now up to you. What are you doing to correctly categorize the royalty-free articles you provide to publishers? Are you making things easy for them? Are you giving them the correct information to ensure that your articles appear in the correct places? It is a good strategy for you. Your articles get wider exposure by laser-targeting your audience.