Netsense Intelligence

As promised here is the 2nd part of this 5-part series focusing on how to win the battle for article marketing visitor superiority and it covers the summary. As previously mentioned I do place a bit more importance on the summary of my submitted articles to Ezinearticles.com then most article marketers do and it is because when someone arrives at Ezinearticles.com without finding and clicking through your article in the search engine rankings than you are in a battle with the other article marketers that have submitted their own articles to Ezinearticles.com. If that seems confusing I’ll attempt to provide clarity a bit later in this post but for now I’m going to discuss what your summary should and should not contain in order for it to be a strong weapon in your quest for article marketing visitor superiority.

First, you have to understand and acknowledge that your article summary is the teaser portion of your article. The more formal title would be the abstract but seeing as how I was never really very good with language arts in high school/college so for caveman purposes I’ll stick with calling it the article teaser.

Its primary purpose is to work hand in hand with your article title in coaxing a human visitor to want to read your actual article. Let me repeat that so there is no confusion, the article summary is the pitch for your article and if you have done your job with the article title you know you have the visitor’s attention so you need to make darn sure your article summary is well constructed because it could be the difference between having your article read or merely ignored.

Advice that I have been giving is to view your article summary as an extended adwords ad but instead of concentrating on getting your point across in a small amount of space you have the opportunity to accomplish it in 3-5 sentences allowing you to add a bit more visitor enticing sizzle. Another huge tip is instead of writing your summary like you write your article (as an author) focus on writing your summary much like a copywriter writes their cash producing headlines.

The summary is where you list benefits that are emotionally charged in order to get the visitor pumped up and wanting, no, make that needing to read more. Because chances are good that the reader is targeted towards your niche topic you can literally reel them in like a fish on a hook by constructing your summary around their interests which naturally should be strongly related to the subject of your article. Another key point is to fill the summary with various reasons why the reader should continue to read your article and how they can benefit from the content of your article.

I’ve yet to mention keywords but I think you already know that your article summary should be peppered with a minimum of 3-5 keywords. I prefer to have my main keyword phrase once and then a few ancillary keywords that compliment the niche topic. This combination has proven useful for search engine rankings but you need to make sure you don’t lose sight of the fact that your summary is built around the reader and not the search engines, so don’t crazy and sacrifice a quality summary just for the sake of adding a few extra keywords.

That pretty much covers what needs to be in your summary, now I’ll focus on what shouldn’t be in your summary because without a doubt it is more important to know what not to put in your summary when compared to what should be in your summary.
The summary is not the time to try and sell yourself or your business. Remember, it is there to sell why the visitor should read your article. Your time to sell them on your service, product, business…etc will come later in your resource box.

Always avoid using a URL in your summary. Fortunately Ezinearticles.com makes this easy to do because they don’t allow URLs in the summary and thankfully so or chances are good we would see nothing but links to websites eating up this valuable space. With that said, there is really no need to dwell on this subject. Just note that if EZA doesn’t allow it then don’t use a URL in the summary for other directories because it makes you look cheap and amateurish.

I think I already covered earlier when I pointed out that the summary is not for selling anything but your article but it defiantly is worth repeating. No self-promotion should be seen here unless it is purely on trying to get the visitor to read your article. In terms of length, anything under 3 lines may be too little and anything over 6-7 lines is defiantly overkill.

Additionally, I recommend you always try and avoid repeating unnecessary wording such as your name, article title or for that matter a paragraph from your article. Also, merely plugging in a paragraph from your article to fill the article summary is one of the main faults I see many new or inexperienced article marketers make on a routine basis with it usually either being the opening paragraph or the closing paragraph from the article body.

In fact, if you read some of the earlier articles I submitted to EZA at the start of my article marketing career you will see I was as guilty of doing this as everyone else. However, I later realized that this was a huge mistake because it cheapens the content of your article and it can also serve as a way to send your reader elsewhere especially if you use the opening paragraph as your summary and the reader sees the same content immediately upon reading the article.

Many writers also use the following phrases in their article summary “This article is about”, “This article explains” or “This article contains”. I believe this is a bit of a turnoff and it takes up space which could be put to better use by outlining the benefits a visitor will reap if they take the opportunity to read the rest of your article.

Some final notes on writing the perfect article summary include understanding that you are using the summary to explain the benefits of reading your article to the visitor. Remember, this may be your only shot at pitching to the person why they will personally benefit from reading your article. Never confuse your resource box with your article summary. The resource box is dedicated to pitching your website while the summary is dedicated to pitching your article. Construct it correctly and you will have won 55% of the battle for article marketing visitor superiority.

I’ll close for now with the next posting covering the importance of keywords.

Respectfully,
Tim