Perhaps, like many start-ups, you have lots of ambition but little money, and are willing to do all the work yourself, if you could just be pointed in the right direction. You want to maximize your investments of time and money and ensure you produce results.

Article marketing is just the key you are looking for, especially if you use an affordable article writing and submission service. According to experts, article marketing is one of the key components of SEO (search engine optimization), meaning that by having articles published on the internet which link back to your site, you will gain many benefits, including higher search engine rankings. This means people will be able to find you when they search for content that is relevant to your site, and they will click on the links in your articles because they will perceive you as an expert.

You may have heard of article marketing, but the thought of writing and submitting the number of articles necessary for your desired results is intimidating. There are scripts you can buy which promise to submit your articles, but they are expensive, you don’t know if they will work or if you’ll understand how to use them, and you still have to write your own articles.

By using an article submission service, especially one which provides free custom articles geared to improve your site’s search engines rankings, you can save both time and money by having the work done for you. Your site will gain valuable permanent back links (very important for traffic and rankings) in the hundreds or thousands, and all article content will be completely relevant to your site’s topic or niche. You choose the keywords you want your site to rank for, and the article service provides you with relevant articles, custom written for your site, and then does all the submission work for you.

A quality article submission service is the perfect solution for any website owner wanting to build traffic, page rank and a great reputation.

Shauna Arthurs is the owner of http://2Catchup.com, a popular article writing and submission service. Visit today for some of the best packages and pricing available online! Affordable and fast link directory submission packages are also available!

"2Catchup.com has been approved by the SEO team at DeveloWare LLC. Shauna provides outstanding writing and a submission service that has yet to be surpassed by any company we have used thus far. (Joseph Mas- CEO DeveloWare LLC)"

I just needed a quick fix for a site I was working on. The posts were long so before the fix, if you have 5-10 posts you have to scroll way down the page. We just needed a summary of like the first 5 sentences of each posting.

You can see it in action here:
http://www.procollectionjobs.com/arm-industry-news/category/credit-collections-finance-and-risk/

After searching for a plugin I did find a couple of them but they did not work with the latest release or my theme. Therefore, I whipped this little fix up.

Are you ready? Heres how I did it:

First, open "/wp-includes/post-template.php" and add the following function to the file:

//—————————————————————————-

function the_content_shortened($more_link_text = null, $stripteaser = 0) {

 $num_of_sentences_post_to_display = 5;
 $content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser);
 $content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
 $content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);

 $contentARR = explode(".",$content);

 $shortened_content = "";
 for($i=0;$i<$num_of_sentences_post_to_display;$i++)
 {
   $shortened_content .= $contentARR[$i].". ";
 }
 $shortened_content = force_balance_tags($shortened_content . " …");
 echo $shortened_content;
 echo '(<a href="' . get_permalink() . "\"#more-$id\" class=\"more-link\">Read full news article</a>)";
}

//—————————————————————

Next, find and open the following file:
What ever your theme is replace "yourtheme" below with your theme.

/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/index.php

Now, in the file replace this line (yours might be slightly different but "the_content" function is what we are replacing, just look for it):

<?php the_content('<span>Read the rest of this entry…</span>'); ?>
with this:
<?php the_content_shortened('<span>Read the rest of this entry…</span>'); ?>

Save your work and WAAAAA…… BAMMM! thats it. All done.

Note: you may want to apply the fix to these other pages also as they usualy show multiple posts like your home page.

Here are the most common files that you would be interested in:
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/index.php
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/archive.php
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/archives.php
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/search.php
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/page.php

Let me know if this helps you.
Joe