What Do Your Articles Say About You?

So you’re using article marketing to promote your blog, website, or affililiate products. Great! That demonstrates that you’re prepared to put in the extra effort to sell your wares. But what are your articles saying about you?

I know you’ve seen many articles with excellent information in them, but are so badly written that you would never bother to click on a link in them. And then again, maybe you’ve sometimes clicked a link in a really bad article, in order to find out if the website was equally as bad, only to find an extremely nice, professional-looking and well-written website.

So what’s the deal? Why are some of us putting such junk out there? If all you care about is getting links for the search engines to see, then I guess it doesn’t matter if your article is junk. But if you expect people to actually publish your articles, and want them to actually read your articles, well let’s make them sparkle!

This isn’t about having intriguing content, or subconscious triggers designed to draw them inside the sales funnel, it is simply about making your articles readable. In that respect, here are some basic things that you need to pay attention to when writing articles.

• Spelling
• Capitalization
• Punctuation
• Making Sense

Spelling

This one is almost too simple. Use a spell checker. If the program you are writing the article in doesn’t have a spell checker, cut-and-paste it into a program that does.

But then again, there’s always a challenge with words like there, they’re, and their. Or using defiantly when it ought to be definitely. Spell-check can’t help you here, since each word is spelled correctly, whether it is used correctly in the sentence or not.

If you’re just not good at knowing the correct spelling, find someone who is and ask them to look everything over before you finalize your article and publish it.

Capitalization

You would be Surprised At How often you’ll see sentences that have words capitalized in Them For no apparent reason. All I can say here is to keep in mind the old elementary school refrain – person, place, or thing – and then PROOFREAD!

or sentences that start with a lower-case letter. and not just one sentence, which you might consider to be an oversight, but several times within one article.

This is another easy one to fix. The first letter of a sentence is always upper-case. There may be a few exceptions, for example, if you started a sentence with a word that is always written completely in lower-case, like the popular email program sendmail. But other than with a very few exceptions like that – the first letter of a sentence is upper-case.

Punctuation

There are many articles that don’t use enough commas. They have run-on sentences that have several thoughts in them but don’t use the comma to separate those thoughts and so pretty soon you are not hearing what is being said in the sentence so much as you are trying to figure out where the separation of the thoughts should be and you get completely lost and don’t know what you are reading.

Then again, some people use, the comma, too often, in the, wrong places. The best way to check yourself on this is to read the sentence out loud and put the commas in the spots where you actually pause a bit.

You’ll also see articles that end their sentences with a couple of spaces and then the period  .  All the way through the article  .  I think this is usually the result of using an article spinner and not checking your work  .  In this case, spin the article – several times – proofread each copy and go back to make the necessary changes!

Making Sense

Flow

Many articles just don’t flow. What I mean is, they will have a sentence about subject A, then a sentence about subject B. Then a new paragraph about subject C, but the forth sentence will suddenly go back to subject A. And then it will come back to Subject C for a while, then it will say something about Subject B again.

My suggestion here would be to first make an outline for your article. Maybe something like an intro, subject A, subject B, subject C, and the conclusion. Or simply an introduction, the body, and the conclusion. Or you could use the old journalistic standby – tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and then tell ‘em what you just told ‘em. Actually, there are lots of layouts that can be used for writing articles. Find one, or make one up, and make sure your article follows the plan.

Sentence Structure

These Actual Sentences Just Leave You Scratching Your Head….

• Among the best ways of rank for any given search phrase …
• This is exclusively helpful for re-adding your settings and saved content material soon after reformatting a challenging generate.
• This hair thinning are treated.
• …connected the body’s hormones.
• The condition are usually…
• Teenage sufferers encounter often experience from extra severe cases …
• The therapy gains folks in literally hundreds of several ways,…
• …that consuming additional frequently will guide your Physique construct the metabolism that it must shed the fat…
• Everyone who is major about shedding weight unearths themselves…
• millions of folk who appear to struggle to reach The excess fat size you ought to want?

Here again, read your article out loud. Make sure your sentences make sense!

Using Spinners and Making Sense

Many articles don’t make sense, not because they’ve been poorly written, but because the article has been spun. Spinners can be an excellent tool, when used properly. Just don’t blindly accept all of the possible word substitutions offered, or your article is not going to make sense.

See if you can pick out the words in these sentences that were substituted and figure out what the original word was. The orginial word would have made sense, but the new word, even though it means the same thing, causes the sentence to not make sense. (The answers can be found at the end of this Article Marketing post on my blog)

• If you are like most people, you rarely go beyond the first page on the seek results.
• It can be all to easy to acquire sidetracked.
• You may come across that the planet of blogging…
• Having your website on the first page of search effects…
• Starting a business requires hard function.
• …that were utilized to seeing tacked on towards the end of advertisements.
• Your Classic Boulder Depot

Don’t accept substitute numbers where you would normally use the word:

• However 1 of the best methods of …
• 1st you should set up an account…

I mean, it works, but we simply don’t write this way.

The Best Spinner

Most of the article spinners that I have ever used leave a great deal to be desired. Although I’m no expert on spinners, and have only tried a few, I can say that there is one that stands out above the pack. The Best Spinner actually IS the best spinner, IMHO.

Instead of working off a built-in thesaurus, it works off of a central database. Synonyms from a thesaurus are shown, but each time any user adds their own word or phrase, it goes into the central database, and is then available to all users. Therefore you won’t be stuck for a word or phrase, because someone has undoubtedly thought of something to use. What a great way to make use of crowd-sourcing!

Still, the Best Spinner is not perfect. You can’t just blindly accept all substitutions. You will still need to proofread and check your spun articles.

So…

Make the effort to see that your articles make sense, are easy to read, and are grammatically correct. Get the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation right, and you simply can’t fail. This is not to say that you won’t still make an occasional mistake, but there won’t be as many, and your articles can be enjoyed by all! After all, your articles are a reflection of both you and your site.

And now that you’ve got your articles looking and sounding good, I would like to invite you to register for my free 5-part email course on article marketing, so you can learn more great ways to publicize them.