I am an AUTHOR - Is this the next big fad? By: Martin Lemieux Website Development / Website Development Posted by ovlazare on Jun 16, 2005 - 04:41 PM Write an article, get the traffic. Well sort of! Since the birth of writing articles, our industry has caught on to the phenomena of increasing your website?s traffic by becoming the professional in your field. The only problem with this is that for every serious professional in one field, there are a thousand other writers who are jumping on the "band wagon". This article phenomenon is hurting every industry! From bloggers, column writers, and e-books, the writing industry is yearning for more great writers. The internet marketing community is especially hurting for better content. With the birth of SEO (search engine optimization), people all over the world are searching, browsing, and reading everything they can on how to promote their business on the internet. Because of this demand for different content, the supply of writers are increasing everyday but the quality of articles is decreasing exponentially. Everyone is writing about the exact same thing! My company receives on average 10-20 articles per hour submitted to us. I would have to say that only 1 in about 100 articles submitted are ever published within our website. Those numbers are extremely low and for good reason. It's all about "substance" - or lack of it! Many articles we review are nothing more than simple "babble" and most of them are pointless. You can seriously tell right away whether the article is just a promotional piece or something with actual substance within the content. Great content is very important. There is a misconception out there that most people won't read your content and you can pretty much post anything you want within your website as long as your website is clean, professional looking, and can be found online. YOU ARE SOOOOO WRONG! If there is one constant online, it's the fact that the general public is getting smarter and more knowledgeable on how to research for honest, reputable companies on the internet. Unfortunately, authors these days are simply stealing from other great authors! I am not talking about posting someone else's article on your website! Copying content from other leaders in your industry will only hurt your company. This is why the writing industry is getting worse; many writers out there simply select a topic they want to write about, then they go online and find 5 articles on that topic. Once they have some other great articles, they simply proceed to combine each article for themselves, by personalizing the content a little. Do you ever wonder why for specific topics within your industry, you can find hundreds of authors that wrote almost the exact same thing? I call these people "Content Copiers". Even worse are people who buy articles to post online ! ! ! This gets me every time. Did you know that you can now hire a company to write something for you and insert your company information as the source and author of the article? This strategy is seriously sad considering I can almost guarantee you that the article you just bought was also sold to a handful of other companies. All they do is tweak the article a little bit and insert a different title. No one knows your business more than you do. If you are seriously good at what you do, 9 times out of 10, you probably have enough knowledge to write an article that makes sense, that is unique in content, and that has your personal touch. We've all come across different situations while operating our businesses. These small but important situations are what gives us confidence in what we do. When you learn from your mistakes, you should also consider educating people on what you've learned in order to help your potential clients or even help better educate your industry. Think beyond yourself and write down something helpful. I hope you've enjoyed this article! About The Author: Martin Lemieux is the president of the Smartads Advertising Network. Smartads helps all sorts of companies to increase their business online and offline. Visit our network today! International: http://www.smartads.info [1] Canada: http://www.smartads.info [2] For more of Martin's articles, go here: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter/archive [3] ------------------------------------------- Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as the entire article remains the same. This article is from WebsiteDevelopmentNews   http://www.websitedevelopmentnews.com/ The URL for this story is:   http://www.websitedevelopmentnews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=136 Links in this article   [1] http://www.smartads.info   [2] http://www.smartads.info   [3] http://www.smartads.info/newsletter/archive