By Stephen Bucaro

The most effective way to promote your online business is to write articles for publication in ezines and on web sites. Many successful marketers use articles as primary means of promoting their businesses. Unfortunately, many people think all they have to do is type up some dribble and publishers will be waiting in line to promote it.

As a member of several free content groups, my email is filled with articles every morning. Unfortunately, less than one in ten of those articles is good enough for publication. In this article, I reveal criteria I use to accept or reject an article. I'm sure that some publishers use different standards than I do, but I suspect that most are similar to mine.

The most important element of an article is subject. The most desirable subjects are:

-Web business -Web marketing -Web design

Non-web related articles can get published if they are about practical useful matters, such as time or money management, health, computers, or employment. Don't waste your time writing about:

- Off line business - Emotional or philosophical subjects - Dated subjects (like 911) - Book or product reviews (advertising)

Another important criteria is content of your article. Your article must contain practical, useful information. Most articles I receive are worthless dribble. After you have completed your article, re-read it to see if any of statements below apply.

- It should be a letter to my mother - It should be an entry in my diary - It should be chatter for my coffee clutch - It should be passed around at my church - It's just rhetoric containing little practical or useful information - It's about basics, like ten million similar articles already out there

The format of your article is also a very important factor in getting your article published. Follow rules below to increase your chances of getting published.

- Your title should be six words or less (not counting connecting words like "the"). - Your paragraphs should contain between three and six lines. Keep your paragraphs short, but don't write an article full of two sentence paragraphs or straggling sentences.

- A publisher should be able to use your opening paragraph as a "lead".

Most of us, particularly those who regularly deal with a wide swath of public, know how to adjust our conversation according to experience level of our audience. If someone asks to see a particular camera, a retailer explains it differently, depending on whether person seems to know as much as he does about cameras, or next to nothing. An oncologist explains same case of cancer differently to patient than to patient's doctor.

On paper and on Web, however, we tend to orient our promotional material to just one kind of audience and only one level of sophistication. If we do this strategically, great. If we make a conscious choice to target one audience rather than another, because former accounts for higher profits, terrific. But that's not what I saw at camera store sites.

For beginners, people who don't know much about a product or service, it's a huge mistake to lead with detailed product information. Too much "APS 505 AiAF f/2.8 2x" overwhelms when I'm wondering whether a digital, 35mm or disposable point-and-shoot camera would fit my needs.