These author guidelines are designed to help you understand what we accept and don't accept for inclusion in Leadersdirect Thinking.

   1. GENERAL REQUIREMENTS

To have your article accepted, it must meet the following conditions:

• MUST BE AN ORIGINAL ARTICLE THAT YOU WROTE.
• MUST BE informative and share your unique expertise. Include tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles. Like any other publication, magazine, newspaper or journal, we have quality standards for the acceptance of articles. We look for new insights not just re-hashes of widely known ideas or superficial summaries. Just as any editor would do, we reserve the right to reject articles that do not meet our quality standards.
  
• Be at least 600 words in length and up to 3000, ideally between 700 to 800 words
• MUST NOT be a press release, advertisement, sales letter, promotional copy, or blatant and excessive self-promotion or hype.
• ARTICLE CATEGORY or SUB-CATEGORY: Please choose the best category or sub category based on the theme of your article and not the theme of your business. Here are some general hints on how to select the best category for categories that are often confused.
• ARTICLE SUMMARY: Every article must have a 2-5 sentence article summary and not exceed 200 words. The purpose of the ARTICLE SUMMARY is to give an abstract or summary of the benefits of your article.
• MUST NOT be a submission of the exact same article as one that you already submitted. Some authors have submitted the same article multiple times with only a few words changed in the body -- we reject these and ban authors who engage in this practice.
• MUST NOT include a reply to a personal email, letter or other correspondence.
• MUST NOT be keyword stuffed with excessive keywords or key phrases that are repeated and/or bolded too many times in your articles.
  

   2. FORMAT

• TITLE: Your Title MUST Be In Upper and Lower Case Letters With The First Letter of Each Major Word Capitalized.
• TITLE KEYWORD RICHNESS: Your title should be "Keyword Rich." The first 3-4 words of your TITLE determines the success of the article in terms of how much traffic your article will generate...so choose the first 3-4 words wisely.
• YOUR FULL AUTHOR NAME: You must include your first and last name as the author of the article.
• ADDING KEYWORDS: Adding the top keywords related to your article helps us to bring more traffic to your article.

Ideally, your keywords should be optimized based on the most commonly searched keywords as published by Overture.com for your particular niche. It helps to use a good keyword research tool to help you determine which ones are best to use. You should have a minimum of 4-5 keywords and a maximum of 25. We do not accept keywords that are completely unrelated to the content of your article.

   3. More on KeyWords - Follow this section carefully so your articles will be found on search engines

• Success in terms of pageviews and profile for authors on the search engines depends totally on how good you are at selecting good keywords and including them in your articles.
• There is not much to be gained by using single keywords. Phrases are much better. For example, a single word like "leadership" is over used and won't get you to the top of any search engine page.
• Instead, use phrases like: leadership development,effective leadership,the meaning of leadership,definition of leadership,leadership style,participative leadership, etc.
• As in this example of key phrases, separate them by a comma only, NO SPACES. Some searchers even use whole sentences in their searches, like "What is management?"
• After a few days, do a search on your key phrases. If your article isn't coming up high on the search engine pages, you need to try again. Go back to your article and add more key phrases to your article and/or try some different key phrases. It's a matter of trial and error to work out what phrases people are actually using to find content like yours. If you don't make this effort, then you are virtually wasting your time if you want to increase your profile and get more people visiting your website. Without this effort, you will have a link from your article to your website but that won't do much for you as everybody else is trying to get by with this minimal effort.
  
• It is important to use your key phrases two or three times in the body of your article, perhaps once in the summary and title. Don't overdo it or the search engines will see you as a spammer.