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Article writing is undeniably an excellent marketing tool for any online business. We discuss some simple tips and ideas to make the writing and publishing processes as effective as possible. My suggestions are:

Write your article in a word document, and pre-format your document to about sixty to sixty-five characters per line including spaces, as this is the most commonly accepted format for internet articles, required by most Article Directories.

Use a simple font such as Arial, with a font size of about 12. Keep the fancy fonts for personal correspondence and other uses. My suggestion is to save your articles in a folder system, for easy reference. You could group them by time period or by subject matter – for simplicity’s sake I choose to group each two-month batch of articles in a separate folder.

There are several excellent programmes for converting your articles into Text for ease of publication.  Simply copy and paste your document and save again as a text document. Most article directories readily accept this format for publication without any amendment. Again, you’ll find that the directories provide you with a standard layout for submitting your articles for publication. It’s then quite simple again to copy and paste your article into the boxes provided.

Take a little time to proof-read your article again after submission, to ensure that the gremlins haven’t altered your layout. If you’ve used bullet-points or numbered sentences, you may have to uncheck the Autoformat box for your article to ensure that each point begins on a new line. Generally keep your layout as simple as possible, without the use of complicated structures or punctuation, as this also aids the conversion process for publication.

There are many Article Directories available to you. Some offer a limited service free of charge. Much depends on your budget and the time you have available. You can manually submit your articles to each of a number of directories, or if your finances permit you can select one of the directories which will redirect your articles to a number of other directories. Thus one manual submission is automatically passed on to several others.

There may be an initial signing-up process for each additional directory, which takes some time and effort to complete, but thereafter the process is much quicker.

Don’t forget to design your resource box very carefully. This is your only opportunity to tell a little about yourself and to provide links to your web and blog sites. Your article cannot contain any advertising material, or you will be accused of spamming and may be blacklisted.
My personal preference is to publish articles on my blog sites in addition to submitting them to the directories, as all of these help to generate the all-important traffic necessary to grow and market my business.

I trust that you will have found these tips of some use to you. Above all, take the plunge and start writing!