Preventing Self-Promotion Overload
Yet another trick to get your articles approved faster:
In the realm of article marketing, self-promotion is a good thing… but like all good things it needs to be done in moderation.
One quick look at our editorial guidelines will tell you that we allow up to (2) active URL’s in the Resource Box that are self-serving (any link that you own or control). This guideline is designed purely as a quality control measure to help keep self-promotion to a minimum.
There is no technical reason why we couldn’t allow more active links, but an article stuffed with self-serving active links looks “spammy” or closer to “article vomit” than a clean article with a single or double URL in the Resource Box.
It’s also well-established that ezine publishers and webmasters value articles with LESS links, not MORE when it comes to their decision as to which articles they are going to reprint. MORE links creates more metaphorical link payments that have to be made to the author to use his or her article… thus articles with fewer links get higher distribution.
This issue is ripe for abuse and every single day we turn away dozens of articles (more than ten thousand articles a year) that are sent in with more than 2 active self-serving links.
Keys to Preventing Self-Promotion Overload:
- Keep your active self-serving URL’s to 2 or less per article and preferably in the RESOURCE BOX.
- If you put an active link in the first sentence, your article will be rejected for selling too hard and may be removed from our queue.
- If you put a link in the first half of your article, it will be frowned upon and potentially rejected without notice.
- If you put more than 3 active self-serving links in your articles, we’ll problem status your article for being too self-promotional.
- Try to keep non-self-serving links at the bottom of the article body below above the fold.
- If you’re including anchored text links, we limit the # of words that you can anchor to no more than 3 words. [source]
Simple Solution: If you want more inbound links to your website from us, send in more articles. =)
Good points. It seems to me that there are some natural links in most articles but many (including blog posts) seem to be written with the links coming first, and the text fitted around them.
Writing in this way tends to look “forced” and therefore fails to flow the way a great article should.
Personally, if I like the content of an article I will read it to the end, and then follow the link at the bottom to find out more
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