Article Submission Guidelines for Authors

How quickly we respond
You will receive an e-mail acknowledging receipt of your submitted article as soon as we receive it. Your submission will be sent to a senior editor, who will respond to you within 48 hours. Should your submission be accepted, it will be published immediately.

The first half of the battle is to write a good article. DO NOT neglect this! You don't have to be a professional author or an English professor. But you do need to pay attention to details and follow good article submission guidelines.

For your article to be chosen choose an article, it would have to be relevant to the Energy Trace site, have keywords that we use on the site, be well written, and most of all - be of interest to our viewers.

WHEN WRITING YOUR ARTICLE:

• Write about what you know and what interests you. Most people have expertise in some field. Leverage this. If you are writing articles to promote your site, write articles on subjects that your visitors would also be interested in. If a visitor finds this article - and a link to your site - they will more likely be a potential customer. Also, make sure it is something that you feel other webmasters would want. An article on your particular product will have a very limited audience. However, comparing a few similar products in a non-biased fashion would be of value. "How to" articles are also good candidates. Also, your professional opinion on a related subject would be good.
• Use a spell-checker on the article. You would be surprised at how many articles have spelling mistakes. If necessary, copy and paste it into Microsoft Word. I would normally reject any article with spelling mistakes since it would make my site look less professional.
• Have a friend proof-read it. This is just to pick out any obvious shortcomings.
• Make sure that the title is really catchy. A good title will make or break your article. If you have a really good title, more people will read it - and more will click on the links embedded within.
• Limit the links in the body of your article to the minimum necessary.  A link to your site is normally done in another section called the author biography.  Be prepared to have links in your body removed. 
• Limit the amount of formatting in the article. Note submission guidelines for the articles. Some allow you to use only a few HTML tags for paragraphs, page breaks, and lists. Never format the text fonts or colors when preparing the article. These are normally rejected because the webmaster that publishes your article wants to have tight control of the font and color schemes of their particular website. I would recommend that you start with two versions (one text and one html formatted). Make special tailoring for different article warehouses as needed.
• Make it easily to scan and get the main points. Use subheadings in your article - formatted in bold or capital case to highlight main points and making it easy for the user to scan. Also, use bold and italic formatting to bring out points within the text. For those submission places that allow limited formatting - this will be an enhanced article. For an example, quickly scan this article. See if you can pick up a lot of great points within 30 seconds.