I receive over 40 articles per day from individuals who would like me to republish their article. When I was in law school, I was told that when sending in a resume, the average time spent reading the resume is 7 seconds, due to the volume of resumes received. I have found that to be true with articles as well.
Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world. You may be the most intelligent writer in the world, and have breaking information, which, if people actually read it, would benefit them and their business.

Problem: most, if not all, publishers of articles don't have the time to read the whole article unless they are "captured" within 7 seconds. So that tells us that, when submitting your articles to newsfeed services, publishers, bloggers, and the like, you have about 7 seconds to capture their attention (and I personally believe that is a liberal amount of time - my experience tells me more like two seconds).

Example: An excellent article was written just today, if you read the content of it. But the title almost instantly created a "deletion response" from me.

Titles must be captivating, yet relevant as well to the content of the article. Major mistake would be to post an article with a title that has nothing to do with the content - but that is a completely different discussion.

In summation, please spend time on an effective title - and that will get your article read and spread across the Internet.

Copyright © 2005 Matthew Foster

About Matthew: Matthew Foster is the President and CEO of ArteWorks Business Class, a company that specializes in online marketing, ecommerce and public relations for business. Self-educated in HTML and HTML 4.0 certified by the National Computer Science Academy, Mr. Foster has been actively involved in Internet policy, international banking and ecommerce, website design and search engine optimization since 1995. For further information, please visit www.arteworks.biz.