I’m a publisher for numerous sites. I HATE many of your articles. Here’s my rant and what you can do to change my mind.

Don’t Send Me Your Articles

First of all, don’t send me articles. I only take them from directories. The purpose of this article is to give you a better idea of what I’m looking for in articles. It is not to create an assault on my email account.

You’re Killing Me

Okay, "hate" is strong word and I probably shouldn’t use it. It is, however, the word that comes to mind when I blow an hour in an article directory trying to find usable articles!

As an Internet marketing firm, we beef up client sites by adding article content. This means I handle the article sections of more sites than I wish to admit. Because of this, I spend most of my time hunting for good articles. By "good articles," I am talking about articles that are formatted and arranged in a manner that makes them ready for publishing. I am NOT talking about what you write, just how you organize and format it.

Building article pages on sites is a tedious process. If dealing with your article is going to require me to make a lot of modifications, I will not publish it. More so, I will NEVER look at your articles again. Despite your captivating headline, I will simply bypass it as soon as I see your name. Whether you realize it or not, you have a reputation with webmasters, publishers and editors.

But I Need You

I hunt through article directories because I need your content. New content equals happy visitors for the sites I work on. With the exception of a few of you, however, I loath the very ground you walk on because you make my job miserable. Yes, miserable. The problem I have with your articles is you create them in a style and format that makes my teeth grind. Again, I am not talking about WHAT you write about, just HOW you put it together.

When I look for articles every two days, I am trying to find something I can slap onto the sites as quickly as possible. This means your article should be formatted to make meta tagging and hyperlinking as easy as humanly possible. Keep in mind that I am publishing hundreds of articles a day, not one or two. Time is at a premium. If you make the job easy for me, I will snap up articles as fast as you can post them.

Why Should You Care

You should care about my gripe because many of my peers feel the same way. When we get together, bitching about your articles is a popular subject. That hurts you from both a readership and link building perspective. You want to get publicity from your articles and we want to give it to you. Comply with our demands and we will paste you all over the net. Don’t and you can watch the proverbial tumbleweed continue to roll by your site.

Now, you’re probably thinking none of this applies to you. In truth, I suspect it applies to 90 percent of the authors publishing in directories. Yes, this is even true for the authors publishing hundreds of articles.

I am going to publish a series of articles on this subject all at once. These articles will cover in detail what I want to see in each section of your article. I pray that you will read them and ease the misery of all of us lowly publishers.

This article was posted on November 21, 2005