Write with Distribution in Mind
Improve your articles’ chances of being ‘picked up’ by publishers!
EzineArticles alone is a great place to gain exposure for you and your business, but it also serves as a excellent stepping stone for even more exposure through online distribution. Articles you publish on EzineArticles have a good chance of being picked up and republished by a variety of online publishers.
This stroke of good fortune can significantly increase the size of your audience… provided you haven’t mistakenly done something to limit your articles’ ability to be picked up in the first place.
What to Avoid:
- Using language like “In my other articles on this site” or “here at EzineArticles…”
- Placing a reprint rights statement in your resource box which prohibits distribution. We don’t allow this and will place your article in problem status for being in violation of the reprint rights.
- Writing article parts. Article parts are not distribution friendly and may hurt your chances of being picked up by publishers. Every article should stand alone.
- Adding graphs, charts, or other formatting which are not as easy to reproduce as plain text.
- Using your first article to introduce yourself to the EzineArticles community. Do not say things like, “This is my first article. I am looking forward to writing many more. My future articles will be about…” This doesn’t make sense when published on other sites.
- Writing articles which are 1000’s of words long. Several shorter articles (400-750 words) will outperform one long article (over 1000 words), and are more likely to be picked up by publishers.
- Writing research papers which are stuffed with sources and references. Publishers are looking for you to share your own unique expertise; they may be turned off by an article which looks like it’s only appropriate for a peer-reviewed journal or academic site.
- Writing ‘time sensitive’ articles. Publishers won’t be able to update or change your content, so make sure it is “evergreen.” It should be as useful and informative today as two years from now.
Best Practices:
- Imagine your article will appear on many different sites, and realize you may not always know which sites they are. Use wording which applies to a broad context.
- Imagine your article will be reproduced in many different formats: to websites, blog posts, ezine newsletters, email alerts, or RSS feeds.
- Picture what it will be like to read your article 2 years from now. Does it still deliver the same value?
- Write in ‘plain text’. Rely only on sentences, paragraphs and lists to get your point across. Keep the format simple and make sure the article is easy to reproduce.
- Keep it short (400-750 words) and make sure YOU are the primary source of your unique ideas. Leave the research papers to college students. ;-)
- If you include a reprint rights statement, make sure it adheres to the EzineArticles TOS for Publishers.
- Put yourself in the publisher’s shoes… If you were going to reproduce someone else’s article on your site, what would turn you on/off?
Avoiding these pitfalls and following these best practices won’t guarantee your articles will get picked up by publishers. The content of your article still needs to be fresh, lively and interesting enough to appeal to a larger audience.
What optimizing your articles for republication does do is prevent an otherwise great article from being automatically disqualified before it’s ever given a chance.
Do you use other ways to optimize your articles for easier distribution? Leave a comment to share them with the rest of the EzineArticles community.
How can you tell you have been published on other website? 61 times?
November 19, 2009 at 12:27 PMthanks.
[Reply]
The “Articles Published” statistic in your account shows how many times people have clicked on the “EzinePublisher” button on your article.
This doesn’t guarantee that they published your article, but it does indicate that they had interest in publishing your article.
There is no tracking provided for who and when your articles are republished. I would suggest possibly using Google Alerts to help identify this for you: http://Google.com/alerts/
November 20, 2009 at 12:45 PM[Reply]