Cover Your Ass - Double Check Your Work Before Submitting Articles
I spent most of this weekend updating one of my side-project websites. To be frank, it is a site I built with HyperVRE. While the HyperVRE product is pretty good, it is not ideal for big websites. So long as you are sticking to 10-page websites, this is a good product. But the site I have working on is a 500-page website.
The problem with the HyperVRE comes to light when you are working sites in excess of 20-pages. It takes a long time to compile large sites, and updates and template changes can be very painful and time-consuming.
This is where I have been with my 500-page website, that I built in just a couple of days using the HyperVRE package. It simply takes too long to update with minor changes. What I did was to decide to hand-repair the site and convert it to my own operating system platform, so that future repairs and tweaks could be implemented easily. (If you are wondering, I believe that this may someday become a stand-alone product, but I am a bit too busy to aim for that just yet.)
So, my adapting of the website has been made much easier with my php knowledge. But, I am still having to edit each article display page and put it into my new template system. I have cleared about 100-pages in the last 12 hours, so progress is good. I only have 400 pages to go….
So here is my point.
I have been looking at each of the individual articles, as I am morphing them to the new system. Far too many of these articles from a wide variety of article directories have lots of problems. I am going to document for you here the major problems I have seen, so that you can prevent yourself from getting caught like a lot of these writers have been caught - fluttering in the wind, with their article marketing campaign in ruins.
Resource Box - General Notes - The whole point of putting articles into circulation is to get your link out on the web, in newsletters and on websites and blogs. Don’t forget to put your links in the authors’ resource box!
Resource Box - Link Specific - Make sure your links work! Far too many of these articles have inoperable links, because the HTML for the HREF tags are seriously hosed. Noted Tips: 1) Put a space between the A and the HREF, between the HREF and TARGET tags, etc.; 2) Make sure there are quotes on each end of the URL or not. The HREF tags will work, with or without quotes around the URL, but putting only one quote around the URL breaks the link; 3) Make sure to include a http:// version of your link in addition to your embedded keyword links; 4) Don’t put punctuation at the end of your URL, unless you are including just the domain name, with no deep links (links to pages within your website). Even if you are linking just your domain name, I solidly recommend that you do not follow the URL with any punctuation.
Use The ENTER Key Sparingly - You should only use your ENTER key to break paragraphs, and then use it twice, to put a blank line between paragraphs. DO NOT hit ENTER after every type-written line. It will hose the proper display of your articles — and it is really hard to fix at the webmaster end. (I actually did just delete some articles, because they were so full of mistakes that I did not want to invest the time to fix them.) If you absolutely have to… hit ENTER at the end of each type-written line (strongly recommended against), make darn sure that you hit the SPACE key before hitting the ENTER key. Some directory sites will strip your extra ENTER keys out of the text, but those same sites will fail to put a space in there for you at the end of the line. The result is wordsthatrunintoeachother. This is damn annoying to the webmaster who has to choose whether to delete your article, OR fix your mistakes.
Sub Headings
When you are including a sub-heading in your text, you should make sure that you do two things: put a blank line between the subhead and the next paragraph, and always cap the first letter of every word in your subheading. Extra Note: If the directory will let you include BOLD html, then be sure to bold your sub headings.
If you are going to put a numbered list in your article, please put a space between your number and the first word that follows it. It looks like crap if you don’t.
If you are putting an unordered list in your article, please separate list items with a blank line between them, unless you are going to include the LIST ITEM html coding.
—
If you are using an article distribution service to get your articles out onto the Internet, then you generally have three kinds of choices:
- Do-It-Yourself Software;
- Low-cost and mostly Do-It-Yourself distribution service;
- The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service - full service.
Why do I mention this? For one, I own The Phantom Writers. But, I am not mentioning this to brag. The reason I mention this is because with my distribution service, we actually provide a full-service operation. We will put your articles together for distribution, and our team of experienced people will ensure that everything is working as it needs to work. We make sure all of your links are formatted properly and working. We also make sure that all of your T’s are crossed and your I’s are dotted.
My point, if the people whose articles were in my automotive website were distributed by us, instead of someone else, the multitude of problems I saw today would never have been, because my staff would have made certain that your article distribution went off without a hitch.
—
If you are struggling with high fuel prices and trying to figure out how you will be able to pay for your online advertising endeavors, please consider getting a copy of my ebook, “How To Increase the Fuel Mileage of Any Vehicle.” By utilizing the gas-saving tips and gas-saving strategies I recommend, you should easily be able to improve your fuel efficiency by at least 30%! In these days of $4 per gallon gasoline, 30% will add a whole wad of change back into your monthly budget… just enough to enable you to build your income streams, so that maybe you won’t have to worry about conservation next time around.
—
Bill Platt 405-780-7745 - 9am to 6pm CST
