by Tag Craig

Before we begin, just remember one important thing during all this. People want to know about your web site. They want your knowledge about any subject on your site. Even small sites have hundreds of articles that can be written about. Use your imagination and get those hits to your site!

The number of websites, both commercial and for individual use has grown drastically over the years. Relatively cheap or even free software is available to enable people to have their own little piece of hyperspace. The problem then becomes one of attracting visitors to your space. How do you get them sufficiently interested in your site to want to visit IT rather than the millions of others out there? Since you are reading this article, you are already aware of the advantages of using a website such as bookwired.com, to post an article about your website, and allowing other people to use your article to generate hits to your site.

The purpose of this article is to tell you how to go about writing your own, ready for submission to an article-hosting site. It will not tell you what to write exactly. That will vary according to your website. It will, however, give you some general guidelines.

The article will cover the following areas.

1. How to decide what part of your website to describe in your article,
2. What to say in your article, and, most importantly,
3. What not to say,
4. How to actually submit your article to a hosting website,
5. How to decide on a headline for your article
6. Some general matter of courtesy when submitting your article.

Choosing What to Write

When choosing which part of your website to write about, remember that if your article is sufficiently interesting to the reader to make him want to visit your site in the first place, then you do not need to try to describe the whole thing. Remember hyperlinks on your own site. These will enable visitors to easily go to different parts of your site, if they want to. If, for example, you are a company making several different items, then it is better to write several articles about each than one long one describing them both. If you have a tourism website with information about attractions and accommodation, then write an article about each attraction. Someone might be interested in historic buildings and others in lovely gardens. Keep each article specific about one area of your site.

The idea of you writing an article is to make readers interested enough to visit your website. If it is too long, they will get bored, and move somewhere else. Keep your article as short as it needs to be to cover everything you want to say. Your article is meant to describe what your website is about - not be an exact copy of your site. To use the manufacturing example again, briefly describe your product, and what it can do for you. There is no need to go into great technical detail. That is what your site is for. Or, to use the tourism example, if a part of your website is about a Castle, for instance, tell the reader what he can see and experience if they visit the real thing. If you are a golf club, give them a short description of one of the facilities you offer on each article. How many courses there are, what dining and refreshment facilities are available, etc. Keep your article accurate. If the reader already knows about your product, or an attraction, or your golf club, and you lie, they won’t trust anything you write.

How to write and what not to write:

As far as possible, keep your writing in the third person. Say, an excellent round of golf can be played here, rather than I enjoyed a wonderful round of golf. Maybe you did have a fantastic time on the golf course. You were lucky with the weather, you had good companions and you played out of your skin. The next day, it could have been raining like Noah’s flood, your companions were the most boring people on earth and you could not hit a fairway.

Try whenever possible to avoid negativity in your article. If the attraction you’re describing gets overly busy with long queues at times, don’t tell the reader that. Say instead that it is best to arrive early, to enjoy all the attraction can offer. If your golf club gets lots of visiting players who just turn up expecting a round and then have to leave disappointed, say that a phone call to reserve your tee-off times is recommended.

Never ever lie in your article. Many hosting sites will check your article for outright untruths. If they find them, not only will they not host that article, but almost certainly they will refuse to have any further dealings with you.

You can also give a direct link to an article on your site if you wish. Do not constantly refer to your web site, or have repeated hyperlinks to it in your article. One hyperlink, at the end in a sentence would be: Author: Tag Craig, lives in New Mexico. You can visit his web site at http://bookwired.com for more information on how to write.

How to actually submit an article:

When you actually come to submit your article it is generally a straightforward process. There will be a link on the home page worded Submit an article or something similar. Clicking that link will enable you to either login using your username and password, or to register as a new user. If you are a new user, simply complete a simple form and click submit. Usually, you will see a page saying that your application has been received and you will receive an e-mail with instructions to confirm your application. However, if you have a pop-up blocker installed, or your browser uses one, you may need to disable it temporarily, generally by holding down the ctrl key and clicking, to receive the messages.

Once you’ve successfully registered, a window will open where you can submit your article. Details vary, but there will usually be boxes for headline, sub-heading, first paragraph, and main article. Copy and paste into the relevant boxes and click preview to check if it looks ok. If it does, click submit and the article is submitted.

For some sites, it helps if you have a basic knowledge of HTML. If you have prepared your article using a word processor, with paragraph breaks, and just copy and paste it into the boxes, especially the main body text one, it will almost certainly appear as one continuous block of text. You will need to separate the paragraphs by using the tag. Using one only creates a line break. You need 2, that is, < br > < br > to force a paragraph break.

Check your spelling, punctuation and grammar. If possible, get one person at least to proofread it. Often, if you fail to notice a misspelled word when you read it over the first time, chances are you always will.

Deciding on your headline:

Deciding on a headline should be comparatively simple. It is there for one reason only, and that is to grab your reader’s attention. Keep it short. If space allows, you may be able to use a subheading to elaborate on the headline. In your headline, think of what your article is about. People tend to rapidly scroll through a webpage looking for key words that interest them. For instance, if your article is about a golf club, be sure these words are in the title.

A little known bonus:

It is not just common courtesy to include on the page on your own site the article is linked to, a link back to the article site. This helps your site get a link-back to a site with more ranking and in turn, adds ranking to your site, maybe not right away, but the more you do it the higher your ranking will go in the long run. Most sites will have available a selection of icons and logos you can use for this purpose. This is a bonus on top of the fact that in a few days articles will start to appear all over the net with your article, link, and homepage.

Get busy! An article every two weeks is pretty good, and you will enjoy the benefits you and your site will receive, however one a week is even better! As you look around different places you will actually see new places to post your articles.

Tag Craig Lives in New Mexico and Writes Internet articles, his hobbies include dramatic photography. bookwired.com

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