Bugaboos of Article Marketing in Web Content Management Systems (CMS)

One of the most common blunders by those using articlemarketing to distribute free reprint articles is to includeperiods after domain names at the end of sentences. Surelythose authors who have made this blunder realize that if thatperiod gets included in the URL, the link will lead to a 404error or "Page Not Found" message any time a visitor clicks onyour link from any web site that used your articles.Publishers complicate things by not visiting links included inauthor resource boxes and failing to correct the address errorin the URL once they do notice it.

To be fair to publishers, it is often difficult to edit withinsome content management systems and it simply takes too muchtime to make those changes. To be fair to article authors, wecertainly ought to be able to use correct punctuation in ourwriting, even if it does cause problems with automated linkcreation in CMS (Content Management System) tools. To be fairto CMS programmers, writing exceptions into the software onCMS sytsems to remove that period leads to incomplete andtruncated filenames along with other complex unintendedconsequences.

But the ultimate responsibility for this issue rests squarelyon the head of web content authors who write articles intendedto gain them links from other websites. Most have figured outthe eccentricities of the web and know how to avoid thisproblem after seeing a few bad links or URL's that are nothyperlinked by web content publishers. You MUST understandthese issues to successfully use article marketing to get yourweb content used by publishers.

For those web content authors who have NOT figured out theeccentricities of publishing on the web, here a a fewguidelines:

1) I'll repeat the opening admonition here because it bearsrepeating as the most common error by article marketers -Don't follow web addresses with periods or the resulting linkwill lead to an error page. Include a space between domainnames and periods if you must use a period following a webaddress. Content Management Systems (CMS) used by web contentpublishers will include that period in the hyperlink!

2) Never cut and paste from Microsoft Word documents or otherproprietary word processing software, because most usenon-ascii text which replaces common punctuation with codeunique to their software to create punctuation marks such ashyphens, elipses, quote marks, accents, exclamation marks,dashes and underscores. It is very irritating to read articlesthat include those odd looking foreign characters on webpages. Most publishers cannot, and the remaining publishersWILL not take the time to fix those strange characters in yourtext before publishing them to a web page or pasting them intotheir plain text newsletter. So your article simply will notbe used in most cases.

3) Start a new line each time you include a web address withinthe body of the article AND in your resource boxes, becauseemail clients often "break" web addresses if they are longerthan 64 characters. Count the characters in any web addressyou use in articles or in your resource boxes because iftheyare longer than 64 characters, many will wrap onto thefollowing line of text, those content management systems (CMS)will then ALSO truncate your web address and send anyone whoclicks that incomplete URL to a "404 error, Page Not Found."Use one of the recognized URL shortening and forwardingservices to make the longer web addresses short. My favoriteis http://www.shorl.com

4) Don't use proprietary software to paste your articles INTObefore distributing to ezine editors, article distribution andweb content sites because that proprietary software convertsboth previous proprietary punctuation from word processingsoftware and previously ascii text punctuation within yourarticle to use IT'S own proprietary punctuation which shows upon web pages as bizarre foreign and unrecognizable charactersas it sends that article to web publishers. Again, leading toyour article not being used by web content publishers.

5) Always remember to use the leading http:// portion of webaddresses that you want converted into links by web contentpublishers because, once again, their content managementsystem (CMS) won't recognize it as a URL (web address) if thatportion is missing from the domain name. Most will not takethe extra time to add that required element to your address tocause their CMS to embed the hyperlink for them and almostnobody will return to add the hyperlink if their CMS fails todo it for them - many don't know how to write the necessaryHTML to embed links but would be required to add it if theirCMS didn't do it for them initially - so they can't link toyou if they want to.

6) Use only those article distribution sources that embedhyperlinks in your resource boxes to distribute your articles.I've run across dozens of sites using my articles thatreferred me back to the articles distributor saying, "Theydon't provide the hyperlink from their site". If you do use anarticle distribution source that DOESN'T automatically embedhyperlinks for users of your articles, learn how to embed themyourself during submission. Most web content publishers simplywill not take the time to add it if they use those articledistribution sources that don't provide it to them.

7) Never distribute articles with HTML already included to embedlinks as it will result in web content publishers NOT usingthe articles because their CMS then DOUBLE embeds hyperlinks-often breaking those links and leading to further error pages.Even if it the resulting hyperlink works properly, it makesreading difficult since you'll then see the HTML codedisplayed in unicode characters on the page of somesites.

Learn the bugaboos of Web CMS and take advantage of theknowledge to out-perform your article marketing competitorswho haven't yet learned how to manage Content ManagementSystems to their advantage.

Copyright © August 12, 2005

Mike Banks Valentine operates http://Publish101.com - a webcontent resource for article authors and publishers. He offersa Text to HTML converter for web publishers who don't haveexpensive Content Manangement Systems to automatically insertparagraph tags, create HTML lists and hyperlink domain namesfor use on the web without the need to learn HTML. Just cutand paste articles into the converter, click a few buttons andpaste pre-formatted articles into your web page template.http://www.website101.com/cgi-bin/t2h/Mt2h.cgi