Thoughts on Marketing…

Writing articles is fun – for me, at least. I do it for myself and for several of my clients.

Those articles get posted on on-line sites, along with a resource box to send people back to our websites for more information. The links add “Google Juice” to our sites while showing our prospective clients that we have something worthwhile to offer.

It’s important that the articles represent you well, because if they don’t, no one will follow the links. Resist the urge to buy those $5 articles you find on line and use them just to improve your search engine optimization.

Instead, write something helpful for your customers and would-be customers. Give them information they’ll be glad to have. If you absolutely can’t write well, get someone else to do it for you.

But what about duplicate content?

I’ve been reading a lot about that lately, and it’s the reason why I’ve always concentrated my efforts toward just one site: EzineArticles.com. But now I’m reading that it doesn’t really matter. The place where duplicate content counts against you is on your own site.

I don’t really understand why anyone would post two pages just alike on their own site, unless perhaps it was because they’re testing different lead generation.

One thing that is important, if you’re using EzineArticles, is that the content on your site and the duplicate content you submit for an article both have the same author name. They’ll reject any article that looks like it was “stolen” from someone else. So if your site doesn’t show your name, they’ll reject the article. But – your site should show your name, anyway.

If you’re ashamed of what you’re offering, you shouldn’t be offering it.

I did have a frustrating experience this week with EzineArticles – I copied an article from an old blog post, added to it a bit, and posted it. And it was rejected. I kept getting a message that there was an imbedded HTML tag. But I sure couldn’t see one.

I cut the whole article out, put it back on a word doc, checked it thoroughly for the 10th time, and re-posted it. Same thing happened. Finally, someone from Ezine told me to turn off the WYSWYG function and check.

Sure enough, at the end of the article I found several lines of “gobbledy-gook” coding.

In my original post a book title had been a link. When I changed the article to add to the article site I had deleted that link and re-typed the book title, but for some reason, part of the code attached to the link stayed behind.

So, if you get a strange rejection message, turn off the WYSWYG function and see if there’s something hiding in your copy.