A Publisher S Rant Why I Hate Your Articles

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 NOT talking about what you write, just how you organize and format it.

Building article pages on sites is a tedious process. If dealing with your article is going to require me to make a lot of modifications, I will not publish it. More so, I will NEVER look at your articles again. Despite your captivating headline, I will simply bypass it as soon as I see your name. Whether you realize it or not, you have a reputation with webmasters, publishers and editors.

But I Need You

I hunt through article directories because I need your content. New content equals happy visitors for the sites I work on. With the exception of a few of you, however, I loath the very ground you walk on because you make my job miserable. Yes, miserable. The problem I have with your articles is you create them in a style and format that makes my teeth grind. Again, I am not talking about WHAT you write about, just HOW you put it together.

When I look for articles every two days, I am trying to find something I can slap onto the sites as quickly as possible. This means your article should be formatted to make meta tagging and hyperlinking as easy as humanly possible. Keep in mind that I am publishing hundreds of articles a day, not one or two. Time is at a premium. If you make the job easy for me, I will snap up articles as fast as you can post them.

Why Should You Care

You should care about my gripe because many of my peers feel the same way. When we get together, bitching about your articles is a popular subject. That hurts you from both a readership and link building perspective. You want to get publicity from your articles and we want to give it to you. Comply with our demands and we will paste you all over the net. Don’t and you can watch the proverbial tumbleweed continue to roll by your site.

Now, you’re probably thinking none of this applies to you. In truth, I suspect it applies to 90 percent of the authors publishing in directories. Yes, this is even true for the authors publishing hundreds of articles.

I am going to publish a series of articles on this subject all at once. These articles will cover in detail what I want to see in each section of your article. I pray that you will read them and ease the misery of all of us lowly publishers.

BONUS : 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, inbound links are far more valuable than reciprocal links. Inbound links are interpreted as an indication the site in question has highly relevant information and should be ranked high in search engine results. If you don’t believe me, give some thought to the IRS.

The IRS has an excellent site covering every tax topic you could possible imagine. The IRS doesn’t link to anyone, yet it ranks at or near the top of the search rankings for practically every tax keyword phrase. Why? Roughly 971,000 sites link to the IRS. These sites include CPA firms, newspapers and so on. All of the links are inbound. Get it?

Keywords and Bylines

When writing your byline, don’t just blabber on about how great you are and so on. You are wasting the links when you do so. If you need an ego boost, go talk to yourself in front of a mirror. Instead, the byline should contain the keywords you emphasize on your site. If you do this, the search engines will associate the links with the keywords and move the appropriate pages of your site up in the rankings.

Assume you’ve written an e-book on how to lose weight and have a site. Assume further that your primary keyword phrase on the home page of your site is “how to lose weight”. Your byline should read something like:

“Halstatt is with http://www.domainname… - teaching people how to lose weight permanently. Dropping pounds is easy to do once you learn how to lose weight.”

You’ve now correlated your inbound link increases to the keyword phrase you are trying to get ranked under. Rankings are sure to follow if you keep pounding articles.

Unfortunately, most people write bylines such as:

“Halstatt was a fat slob until he had a moment of enlightenment after eating bad sushi. While spending a miserable night in the bathroom, he found that food poising was an effective way to regain his self-respect and get washboard abs. Visit http:www.domainname to read more.”

Do you see the difference? The first byline is going to move you up the search engine rankings quickly. The sushi byline isn’t going to help nearly as much. It doesn’t even include the correct keyword phrase!

Again, I rarely discard an article because of a byline unless it is over four lines. Many of you, however, could get better mileage out of yours.