Once that first rough copy is written, set it aside and don't look at it any more that day. After a day or two have passed, pick it up again, and read it over. You'll find a lot of sentences to add or subtract, change around, or rewrite completely. Great new ideas will pop into your head, making your article much more powerful and useful to the reader than before.
After you finish polishing it up, your shiny new feature story is almost ready for submission. Two things the completed article needs are a signature line and blurb. Write a short factual sentence or two (called a blurb) about yourself and your business or product. Include a live link back (called a signature line) to your own web site or blog URL.
It is a good idea to provide a "copy and paste" HTML link, to make it easy for the editor to include it. An HTML link is important to receiving passed along Google PageRank from the many web pages where your article appears. You will want to avoid being published with a link that search engine spiders can't follow, or one that fails to pass along Google PageRank. Without a useful link back to your website, part of the benefit of the article is completely lost.
You may also want to provide an extra line, giving permission to freely reprint the article anywhere; provided full credit and a link back are provided to you and your site, respectively. That is optional, of course. You might want to maintain tighter control over where your articles appear. In that case, you would not provide the reprint permission.