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Part 4f - Article Marketing - Publishing Your Article

Now that your article is ready to be published, where do you go, what do you? You go to an article directory or distribution website. These websites give authors a place to publish their articles, and they give editors and publishers an ever-growing source of content for websites, ezines, newsletters and blogs.

Some of these sites charge for their services, but we won't be using any of those. We're going to use the free services.

If you'd like to conduct your own research, just type "article directory" or "article distribution" into any search engine. Just know there are dozens of these sites, and not all of them are quality operations.

But I'm going to save you time and trouble by listing the ones I've had the most success with. By success, I mean the sites that have helped me put my articles at the top of the search engines (in addition to increasing the traffic levels and search engine ranking of my own websites).

EzineArticles.com - This site is by far the best of its kind. The site itself is extremely high-ranked in Google, so it will give your articles more search visibility than any other article directory. It also has the best tools and features for authors.

Three other sites worth mention:

GoArticles.com | ArticleDashboard.com | EasyArticles.com

Like I said, there are dozens of sites like these, but quality varies. I recommend you do your own research and experimentation. But I highly recommend the sites listed above, especially EzineArticles.com.

Personally, I'd rather submit my articles to three or four quality directories than to 20 or 30 less professional sites. That way, I can get good distribution and spend less time doing it, which means more time for writing quality articles.

How the Article Publication Process Works

Each of the websites listed above has slightly different procedures you must follow. But it would require pages for me to try and cover them all here. Fortunately, each site has an "author's guidelines" section. So your first step is to find, read and respect these guidelines.

Though each site differs, the basic publication process goes something like this:

1. Register yourself as an author at the site (for free).
2. Familiarize yourself with their publishing procedures and guidelines.
3. Once you've registered and read their rules, log in to submit your article.
4. Fill in the blanks with your title, article body, and author's bio.
5. Preview your article for general appearance and proper link function.
6. Click "Submit" or "Finished" or whatever their final button is called.
7. Your article will be reviewed (takes anywhere from one to three days).
8. If approved, your article will be published live on the site, available for republication by publishers of other websites and blogs.

Use Caution With Microsoft Word

Article directories will automatically convert your article into HTML (Web code) for proper display. But HTML editors often have trouble interpreting some of Mircrosoft's special characters (curly quotes, auto-formatted dashes, and the like). As a result, they may display weird characters in place of the special characters.

My advice ... if you write your articles in Microsoft Word like I do, copy and paste them into Notepad first, or some other text program. Notepad only accepts plain text, so when you copy the article from Notepad and paste it into the article directory, any special formatting from Word will be removed.

Microsoft Word > copy/paste > Text Program > copy/paste > Article Website

So now that you've begun publishing your articles online, what's next? Well, you can move on to other areas of your web marketing program. If you've taken the time to create excellent articles, the article-distribution websites will do the work from here on. That's the reason for submitting your material in the first place.

But it's nice to check on your success from time to time, and that's what we will talk about next — how to track your article publishing success.