When publishers are reviewing your article to decide if they want to publish it, they will look at the author bio area as well as the article. Publishers will have editorial guidelines for this portion of your article, and if yours does not abide by those guidelines, the article will be declined.

Not sure what to aim for when creating the author bio for your article? Here are seven common things that publishers look for in a resource box when evaluating your article submission.

1. It needs to contain more than just a website address
It may be tempting to regard your author bio as just a place to put the link to your website, but it’s so much more than that. This is the one spot in your article submission where you can tell a little about yourself, your business, and your products. You can (and should) give the reader a reason to visit your website.

If you just put a link there and leave it at that, you’re missing out on the opportunity to connect with your reader and lure him or her back to your site. You’ll have a much better chance of getting traffic from your articles if you invest some time and effort into formulating your resource box, rather than just putting a link there.

2. It needs at least one link
While it’s not all right to just have a link in your author bio without any other information, you do want to be sure to include a link to your site somewhere. Some people get so focused on the biography aspect, they forget the only way the article will drive traffic to their website is via that precious link – don’t forget to include one.

3. Be sure the link works
This is a very common mistake that can easily be avoided. After you enter your article into the submission form, preview it and be sure to test out the links in the resource box. Click on them – do they go where you want them to?

4. Anchor text is too long
“Anchor text” refers to the words that are used to form the link leading to your website. The anchor text that you use in your resource box should be a keyword phrase you’ve researched, ideally two to three words long. Some publishers limit the length of the anchor text to three words maximum, so keep that in mind.

5. Too many links
Many publishers will allow a maximum of two links per author bio. Keep in mind that your goal is not just to generate backlinks, but to craft your resource box in such a way that the reader will want to click the link(s).

Because most publishers have length limits on author bios, if you put more than one or two links, you won’t have enough room to try to convince the reader to click them.

If you put too many links in there and don’t give the reader a reason to click them, odds are the reader won’t click any of them.

6. It has too many characters
A common length limit for author bios is 400 to 450 characters. That’s not a lot of text – you really have to choose your words and the information you decide to include strategically.

7. It doesn’t have any biographical information
Some people will just put information about their business or products and a link to their website, without mentioning anything about the actual author of the article. While you don’t have to mention anything really personal, it’s a nice touch to start by mentioning the author name (you’ll be writing in the third person), why you should be regarded as an authority on your topic, and what your business is.

Each individual publisher decides what editorial requirements he or she has for article submissions, but there are some common ones that many high-quality publishers have. Whether a publisher requires all of these or not, your resource box will only be made better by abiding by these seven guidelines. The better your resource box, the better chance that publishers will accept your article and that readers will click the link leading to your website.

“A company that I am an affiliate of has made some articles available to me to use for marketing purposes. I was wondering if I could submit these as free reprint articles? Would I need to change them, or can I even submit them at all?”

Great question! A similar situation is one where a person has acquired some PLR (private label rights) articles, and they’re wondering if those articles are suitable for use in article marketing. For anyone who doesn’t know, PLR articles generally are very cheap and are sold to anyone willing to buy them. So, the same article is sold to multiple people, in the same way that articles that affiliate companies provide are shared with multiple people.

In those cases, there is no exclusive copyright ownership and, consequently, that type of content is not suitable to use in article marketing.

When submitting articles to publishers, the content needs to be 100 percent owned by you and no one else. Publishers do not want to receive the same or very similar content multiple times, so you really do need to make the effort to produce (or pay a professional writer to produce) articles that are unique and owned exclusively by you.

You may be wondering, how would a publisher know if the article you submit was not owned by you exclusively? Many publishers will employ a tool that detects whether content is already appearing on the Internet. There are various online services that do this sort of thing. Many times, website owners or other online publishers will use a tool like that to discover if content is plagiarized.

People who hire writers to create content for them may also use that sort of tool to tell if the content that’s been produced for them is unique.

From a publisher’s point of view, it is not necessarily a deal breaker if he discovers the article that you’ve submitted is already appearing elsewhere online. If the content is clearly marked as belonging to you, there will probably not be any problem.

However, if the publisher sees that the article you’ve submitted is appearing other places on the Net under different author names, then that is a red flag.

With many publishers, that would result in an article decline.

You may be wondering then, can you just take that non-copyrighted material and “change it up” a bit?

Unfortunately not. The only time when you might re-write content would be if you had decided to take content that you wrote for your own blog or website to resubmit as a free reprint article. In that case, since you already own the content, it would be perfectly fine to re-write it to submit as an article. For content that you don’t own, however, you should not try to re-write it and submit it as a free reprint article.

The idea is to create articles that have unique tips and ideas and that contain information that is not found all over the Internet. It does take extra effort to create unique articles, but that’s just the way that article marketing works. The effort involved in producing quality content will pay off in two ways: the number of publishers interested in publishing your article and the value your article brings to your readers.

Did you know that after you submit your article, it will most likely be reviewed by an editor before it is published on a website? This editor will have a list of editorial guidelines that he or she is using to evaluate your article.

If your article passes the test, then it will be published. If it does not, it will be declined. One of the first things publishers/editors look at is the title. There are several reasons why an article might be declined right out of the gate due to issues with the title.

What’s so important about the title?
The title is the very first thing a reader will see and it’s often the primary means by which a reader will decide if he wants to read your article. If your title is great, more people will read the article than if it’s just so-so. The title can have such a big influence on the success of an article, that publishers will often decline articles solely because of problems in the title. The rest of the article may be perfect but, if there are problems with the title, then the article can be declined.

If you knew what publishers were looking for, you could craft your articles around their requirements. In this article we’ll cover some article marketing tips and common title issues that result in publisher declines:

1 — Improper grammar or spelling.
It’s absolutely paramount your title be grammatically correct and have proper spelling. One error could result in an immediate decline from publishers.

The title is also an indication of the article’s quality — if the title contains errors, it will be assumed the rest of the article will too.

2 — The title does not accurately portray what the article is about.
The title serves the purpose of informing the reader what the article is about. If it drops the ball on that count, the article will be declined.

Here are some ways that a title may not reflect the content of the article.

• If you say that an article has 25 tips on a certain topic, it has to contain 25 tips. Someone once asked me if she could have a title that mentioned 25 tips and then only include 24 in the article with the promise of providing the 25th on her website. She was thinking of this as a way to lure readers to her site. In the article marketing world, that would be a no-no. If you say the article has 25 (or however many) tips, then you must list 25 tips in the article.

• If the title mentions a location, the content must apply specifically to that location. Sometimes when a person is marketing a local business, he will want to include the city in the title of the article. That would be fine if the article contained information about that city, but oftentimes the information is just generic. If your article is: “10 Tips For Hiring A Babysitter In Miami,” then the article needs to contain tips on that specific topic, rather than tips that would apply to any location.

In most cases, it’s better to leave the city name out of the title and write an article appropriate for all locations. Then refer to the city in your resource box.

3 — Title is too short to be descriptive.
I’ve seen some super minimalist titles, as if the author thought the title didn’t matter. At many quality publishers, the title must be at least two words long, but I encourage you to elaborate even further.

Some people who are very keyword focused will simply use their keyword phrase as the title, which results in a very bland, non-descriptive headline. It’s great to use your keyword phrase in the title, but ideally you’ll work it into a more descriptive title that includes the keyword phrase in a natural way.

4 — Overuse of keywords in the title, to the point where the title does not read well.
The title is a great place to include your keywords, but it defeats the purpose if you use so many keywords that the title ceases to make sense. Publishers are very sensitive to overly keyword-optimized titles and articles (and readers can easily pick up on it too). It’s essential the title and article serve the reader first and foremost. Just one keyword phrase worked naturally into the title in a grammatically correct way is sufficient.

5 — There are other less obvious things that publishers look for.
These can still be serious enough to merit a decline of the article, such as not putting the title in title case (where the first letter of every major word is capitalized), putting the title in quotation marks (which is unnecessary), or ending the title with a period (also unnecessary).

These are the major things that publishers look for with titles. If you keep these guidelines in mind when creating your article submissions, then your titles should be acceptable.

Here’s the truth: Although it is important to have a variety of links coming from different types of sites, it does not hurt your website to have many different sites publishing the same article.

There is a lot of confusion when it comes to duplicate content, but the penalty only occurs when one website publishes the same content repeatedly, rather than when multiple sites publish the same content. Do you see the difference?

Google objects to having many pages on one website all featuring the same content. That is not the situation with article marketing though. When you submit articles, you can end up with multiple websites publishing the same article one time on each site, which is not something that would result in a penalty to your site.

Having your article published on multiple websites is similar to distributing a press release or some other form of content syndication, such as RSS. Content syndication is essential to how the Internet works, and it is very common.

When a piece of content appears on multiple sites, Google will try to determine the originating source that published the content and use that source as the main reference in its search results.

Having multiple copies of the same article appearing on different websites does not adversely affect the site that is being linked to. Think about it — if that were the case, it would be very easy to destroy a competing website simply by creating a lot of content that linked back to it. That would also mean that no business would dare to submit a press release, for example.

When marketing your website it’s important to first focus on creating a quality website that offers readers value.

Getting a high ranking in Google isn’t just about marketing a website, it’s about creating a site that is worthy of a top ranking. As you build up the content on your own site, it’s natural to take some of it and repurpose it as free reprint articles (rewriting the content so that the information on your own site remains unique).

As you focus on creating quality, free reprint articles that are truly helpful to your readers, you get wider exposure for your website and yourself. Many times people will read your article and then click the link in your resource box to get more information from your website. This is the type of ‘warm lead’ that is very valuable for converting customers and increasing sales.

It’s also important to do keyword research. Then link back to your website using a variety of keyword phrases associated with your niche and link to different pages on your site.

The topic of your article along with the keywords in the title and especially the anchor text in the resource box helps Google to know what your website is about, which assists Google in determining where to place your webpages in its rankings.

Article marketing is still an effective means of driving targeted traffic to a website. The main things to concentrate on are: creating a website with lots of quality content, using that content to create syndicated content that offers value to readers (free reprint articles), as well as making use of a variety of keywords in your article submissions.

Focus on the value that your website and the content that you create brings to your readers. Make your marketing efforts more about enhancing the experience of your target readers. The result? You will naturally attract readers to your website.

That’s a great question. The answer is yes, especially if your website is newly established, building links too fast could harm the SEO for your site. You should space your article submissions out and limit them when using an automatic article submitter.

Being required to submit fewer articles is actually a bonus for most people — the daunting thing about submitting articles manually is you need to submit such a large quantity that it’s really not humanly feasible to keep it up on a consistent basis. Think 50 articles a day — that’s too much for even the most prolific writer to keep up with.

But if you submit your articles automatically, you can see excellent results with a mere eight articles a month, presuming the site is well-established and has backlinks from other sources as well. That’s a quantity that most people find very doable.

If you have a brand new site though, it’s a good plan to start out slowly and gradually increase your article submissions up to eight a month. You should also use other marketing tools for building links, such as press releases, forum posting, etc.

Some automatic article submitters offer a useful tool that will allow you to ‘trickle’ your article submission over a predefined period of time, so your article is not distributed to a large chunk of publishers all at once.

That type of tool is extremely helpful because it allows you to build links more gradually, which looks more natural to a search engine.

Why not submit articles by hand to just one or two directories?

The problem with that approach is the exposure is so limited that you can’t submit enough articles to make an impact — either with the SEO for your website, or to draw enough readers to your website.

Think about it–some of the most popular sites on the Internet are article directories. It’s to your benefit to get your article published on as many directories as possible, because by doing so you increase your chances of funneling some of that traffic to your website.

Article submissions services will often also send your articles to a variety of online publishers, such as article directories, blog publishers, ezine editors and other types of website owners. It is beneficial to your SEO to build links from a variety of websites, so the increased distribution that an article submission service can offer gives you something that you can’t accomplish on your own.

It may help to realize that article submissions are similar to press releases. The content itself is different, but they are similar in that they are each distributed to different websites that publish the content and then link back to your website.

When you submit a press release, you’re trying to have it seen by as many people as possible, just as with an article. It would be kind of silly to submit a press release with the intention of getting it published on as few sites as possible and seen by as few readers as possible. You want the press release to get widespread exposure, be published on many sites, and to come before the eyes of as many people as possible. It’s that way with free reprint article submissions too.

So, what’s the answer — how can you submit enough articles to see an impact with search engines while at the same time not build links so quickly that you hurt your website ranking?

Just use an online article submission service, and either submit eight articles a month (if your website is established) or gradually build up to eight articles a month (if your website is brand new). Also find a service that can submit your articles in a trickled out fashion, so that your articles get submitted to just a few publishers a day, rather than a bunch at one time. By using this strategy, you will benefit as much as possible from article marketing, in the most time efficient way, without building links too quickly.

I’ve actually done this myself several times. Especially when I go on vacation, I try to write enough articles to last while I’m away, so I have less work to do while on holiday and so that my website marketing can continue without missing a beat.

It takes a little planning, but it’s worth it, and it makes the vacation so much more enjoyable knowing that my article marketing campaign is still going strong.

Here are some article marketing tips for pre-writing articles in preparation for a vacation:

1. How long will you be away from writing? You must first figure out how many articles you’ll need to write ahead of time. Ideally, you would do this at least a month before you leave for your trip to give yourself enough time to produce the articles. The more advanced time you give yourself to write, the easier it will be to produce the extra articles.

2. Let’s say you need to write 16 articles in one month (eight for the current month and eight pre-written for the following month). How in the world do you go about doubling your article output when it’s already sometimes a challenge to come up with writing topics?

The best approach I’ve found is to write all the articles on a related topic. That way, each article bounces off the previous one and it makes it much easier to generate the article topic and also to get your mind warmed up to the new article topic (since it is somewhat related to the last one).

3. Start by writing a list article that lists several main points. By “list article,” I mean an article that has a title like “Seven Ways To Improve Your Writing.” The article itself starts with an introductory paragraph that leads into a numbered list of each of those seven items. Each item will be followed by a short description or summary of what the item is about, and the article will end with a concluding paragraph.

By the end, you’ll have one article that lists seven main points. This is your first article.

Your next seven articles will each take their cue from one of the seven points listed in that first article, so each point from the original article will end up with an article that covers that point in depth.

When you finish writing those articles, you’ll have eight total – you’re halfway to the finish line. You just need to repeat the process with another article with seven main points. In the end, you’ll have 16 articles.

Why do it this way? Because writing about one overarching topic that is broken down into smaller points is easier than thinking of eight separate article topics.

If you write an article called “The Seven Best Places To Hike In The Fall,” for eight articles you know what you will be writing about – you’re going to be writing about the best places to hike during the fall season. After you write that first article, every time you sit down to write, you’ll know exactly what to write about, which makes things so much easier.

Do you have a vacation coming up? If so, I encourage you to do a little planning and pre-work so your article marketing campaign can continue even while you’re lounging on the beach or skiing down the slopes. It all starts with one seven-item article and some relatively easy writing after that. The hardest part is coming up with topics for the articles, and with this strategy, you only need to do that once.

You know your articles are being published online, where anyone can find them. There may be some niche specific websites that publish your articles, but many times your article may be published on a more general website or article directory that is divided into categories.

Sometimes people come to me with the concern of “how can I be sure that my articles are being read by the right people?”

That is an excellent question. There are things you can do to help search engines such as Google direct your target readers to your articles.

1. Write articles on the general theme of your website.

For example, if your website sells surf boards and other surfing paraphernalia, then all of your articles will be on the general topic of “surfing.”

The articles should not be about your website – never talk about your website in the article body. Rather, the article body is for teaching readers about your general niche. That is what will attract the right readers to your articles.

You may have wondered: “Does it matter what topic I write my articles on, when the only thing that matters is the link in the resource box?”

Yes, it matters a lot. First of all, the link in the resource box is not the only thing that matters. If your website is about surfing and you have a resource box that reflects that topic, but the article itself is about one of your other interests, such as ballroom dancing, then you can anticipate the people you will attract to your article will be interested in ballroom dancing rather than surfing.

When they finish reading your article and they look at the resource box, they’ll be very confused that it talks about a site that has nothing to do with what the article was about.

So keep in mind, readers will be attracted to your article because of the topic. If the topic of your article is on the same general theme as your website, then you’re attracting your target customers.

2. Do research for keywords associated with your niche.

Keyword research allows you to zero in on the actual phrases that target customers are typing into Google when they do searches. By knowing that information, you can craft your content so that your articles answer the very questions your target readers are asking.

Keyword research also allows you to use those phrases in your title and article body which, in turn, helps Google to associate your article with those keywords.

Ideally, by keyword optimizing your articles, you will be better able to create content that your target readers are looking for, while at the same time making it easy for Google to associate your content with the things that your target readers are searching for (which results in the content receiving a higher search engine ranking).

By connecting these two strategies -writing on the same general topic of your website and also doing keyword research, you are setting your articles up to be easily found by people in your target market.

When your articles are published on the Internet, you don’t have to concern yourself that your article is visible to every random person who wants to look at it. What you do need to concern yourself with is in creating content that is specifically designed to meet the needs of your target readers and that it is keyword optimized to ensure search engines will direct readers to your articles.

When you do those two things, your can be sure your target market is reading your articles.

First of all, I want to caution you not to get caught up in trying to measure the success of individual articles. Article marketing acts as more of a combined effort with multiple articles being submitted consistently over time, rather than having “success” tied up in how any one article does.

The real gauge for how your article submission campaign is doing is where the web pages on your site are ranked in search engine rankings for keywords associated with your niche. With consistent article submissions that are geared toward those keywords, you can improve where the pages on your website appear in Google’s rankings. That is the sort of change that can dramatically affect the traffic to your website over the long-term.

Unfortunately for those who like to see immediate results (that’s all of us, right?), impacting your search engine rankings is an ongoing process that does not yield immediate results. It takes time and effort, but you will not be able to submit one article and then immediately see an impact in the search engine rankings. Rather, by consistently making article submissions over time, you can gradually influence where your web pages are appearing in Google’s rankings.

Back to the question about article views over the entire Internet – there is not a way to measure that. You will, however, notice that many popular article directories provide statistics that apply to their own sites, so you can see how an article is doing on one particular directory.

The “article views” statistic that you see on a directory indicates how many people have looked at the page where the article is published on that site. Article views go up over time, so articles that are more recently published will tend to have fewer views than articles that have been around for a while.

What if you have several articles that are about the same age where one has a significantly higher number of views than the others. What does that mean?

It could be that the topic of that article really filled a need, and you may wish to explore that subject matter more deeply in other articles to capitalize on that.

It could also be that the title of that article was more attractive to readers – the title is what will draw people to read your article. Is the title of that one super-popular article different from the rest in style? Maybe it was a provocative title, maybe it was a title in the form of a question, or maybe it was different in some other way. If it was, then you can use that knowledge to experiment with titles in similar styles.

Another thing to consider with a very popular article is if you did keyword research to determine the topic and did you use the keywords in the title? Even if you didn’t, you may have inadvertently keyword optimized your article, which resulted in more search traffic being sent to that particular article.

It’s always a good idea to create titles and build articles around popular keywords for your niche. Those keywords are what your target readers are typing into Google anyway, so why not deliberately create content that satisfies the needs of the people you want to attract? If you do that, then your article has a much better chance of being read by more people.

Attracting a lot of readers for an article is very satisfying, but keep in mind that your article marketing success is not tied up in the performance of any individual article.

You may have one article that is published in a popular ezine that sends scores of readers and customers to your website and blows your sales sky high, while you have other articles with more modest initial views that end up paying off in more subtle ways over the long-term. Really, it takes the combined momentum of regular article submissions and, with consistent submission over the long-term, you can gain a higher search engine ranking, which can in turn dramatically increase the traffic that comes to your website.

Here are seven tips for turning blog content into article submissions:

1. What kinds of content from your blog can you turn into articles?

Any content that teaches the reader how to do something and is not sales-oriented.

Free reprint articles are also sometimes called “educational articles.” Their purpose is to educate the reader on a topic having to do with your niche. You, as the expert, are in the position of “teacher” in all your articles. You can include sales-oriented material in your resource box (rather than the article), which usually sits below your article on the published page.

2. Focus on writing blog posts that contain educational information about how to do something practical in your niche.

People who are reading your articles will be looking for solutions to problems. Think about the types of questions your target readers have and write articles that provide the answers. Also, think about the types of things your target readers need to know how to do, and then teach them how to do those things through your articles.

3. When re-writing a blog post to be submitted as a free reprint article, the content needs to be written in a more formal manner.

Many times the writing on a blog can be quite informal, because you’re the editor and you can publish anything you like. When you’re submitting free reprint articles, however, they need to pass editorial approval first. Most editors will appreciate a professional sounding article.

Another thing to keep in mind is he people reading your blog may already know you – they know your sense of humor and the way you think, but the people who are reading your articles will probably be “meeting” you for the first time. For that reason, it’s a good idea to put your most professional foot forward.

4. Articles should be free of spelling and grammar errors.

If you make a mistake on your blog, you can easily edit the post. It’s not a big deal. But when you submit an article, it will be published on many different websites and you won’t necessarily have access to edit the content should you spot an error after the fact.

The readers of your blog will often be completely new to your work, so they won’t know you usually write well and that the mistakes they’re seeing in your article are uncharacteristic. You only get one shot to make a first impression. Keep in mind the article you’re writing may be the only article of yours that some people see.

Finally, submitting an article isn’t the end of the line – a publisher has to agree to publish the article before it can do your marketing efforts any good.

Publishers will routinely decline articles that are poorly written, so it’s worth it to spend extra time proofreading your article.

5. Don’t link to other sites in the article body, unless necessary.

You can link all you want on your blog, but most publishers have rules concerning the links that are in articles. Firstly, most don’t want you to link to your own website from the article body. (You can, however, link to your own website from your resource box.) Some publishers also don’t want you to have any links in the upper half of your article. Some publishers restrict the number of links they allow in the article too.

A good practice to make your articles as attractive to as many publishers as possible is simply not to include links in the article body, unless you can’t avoid it. Try to write content that does not depend on outside sources.

6. Pick topics that will stand the test of time.

Free reprint articles will potentially be published on websites around the Internet forever, so choose content that is evergreen and won’t become obsolete.

7. Totally re-write the blog post before submitting it as an article.

The reason you do this is to ensure the content on your own web pages remains unique. Content that can’t be found anywhere else is more highly valued by search engines, so re-writing your blog content before submitting it as an article is an SEO strategy.

You can look at the main points of your post as being the starting point of your article, but the article itself should stand as a totally unique piece of content.

You may have noticed this with some of your own articles. You may have read your article a million times then, a week later you read it again and think, “How could I have missed these obvious mistakes?”

Writers can use a variety of little tricks to help them to see their content with fresh eyes. The key is to make the article appear as unfamiliar as possible so you can read it objectively and spot errors.

Here are eight article-marketing tips for detecting grammar and spelling errors in your article submissions:

1. Use a different font and change the color of the font. Also, you can make the font size bigger.

This helps trick your mind into thinking it is reading a brand new piece of content. If the words on the page look different, then your mind perceives the article as being less familiar. The larger font also helps you to spot errors.

2. Print a copy of your article and proofread from there.

You’ve probably written your article on your computer and have been reading it on the computer as well. By actually printing your article (try changing the font, font color, and size before printing), it can help trick your mind into thinking it’s reading something it hasn’t seen before.

3. Listen to your article being read aloud.

You can slowly read it aloud yourself, or you can enlist the help of a friend. Some word processing programs even have a tool that will “read” the text you’ve written aloud.

Hearing your article read aloud is very useful in spotting misspellings and grammar issues.

4. Take it from the bottom.

Instead of reading your article in the normal way, start at the last sentence and read up from there. By taking each sentence out of context, you can more clearly focus on the structure of each sentence.

5. Give your article a break.

This is the most obvious way to make proofreading easier. Simply take time away from your article. An overnight break should help considerably, but if you can take a few days away you’ll be sure to come back to your article with fresh eyes.

6. Get a second pair of eyes to proofread for you.

If you have a friend who has excellent grammar skills, ask him or her to proofread your article for errors.

7. Read through your article checking for different things each time.

The first time you may just check punctuation. The second time you may be looking for subject/verb agreement. The third time you may look for spelling issues. Being systematic in the way you proofread your article helps ensure you don’t miss anything.

8. State things as simply as you can.

Be on the lookout for confusing language or any points that are repetitive. You’re not just looking for grammar and spelling — examine how easy your article is to read and understand. Avoid sentences that are long and complicated.

Proofreading your article may seem like a big job, but it gets easier if you use the tips in this article. Even if you have read your article dozens of times during the creation process, the proofreading stage requires special attention and different tactics. The tips in this article will help you to thoroughly proofread your article so that by the time you submit it, your article looks professional and is something you can be proud to be associated with.