Publishing articles and making them available for free can be a
very effective way of promoting your business or website without
spending a lot of money. This article contains some tips and
resources that I have discovered by publishing free reprint
articles over the last 5 years.
Marketing With Content
Marketing with content, or free reprint articles, gives you an
inexpensive way to get your message in front of a lot of people.
It is one of the most effective, free, advertising methods that I
have found. All that it costs you is time it takes you to write
an article and make it available to publishers. You may have
already written an article that can be repurposed as a free
reprint article, which will cut down on the amount of time
required dramatically.
What Content Works
The best content is valuable information. It doesn't need to be
directly related to your product, service or website, but it does
need to be useful. It's best to write about a topic you are
familiar with and for which you can offer unique insight. For
example, if you are trying to market your real estate website,
you could write an article about preparing your home for sale.
Or you can write an article about which home renovation projects
will make a house more desirable on the market.
Your article doesn't need to be overly long. Don't confuse
quantity with quality. Keep your points as concise as possible.
You don't want people to fall asleep before they get to the
bottom of the article. After all, they need to get to the bottom
of your article to see your byline which is the point of writing
a free reprint article in the first place.
One way to get the most out of your free reprint articles is to
write about a topic with staying power. I have 4 year old
articles that are still being picked up by publishers to this
day.
Your Byline
The payoff for providing publishers with free content is the
byline. You don't want an essay or multiple paragraphs, just a
short description of yourself, your website, and your link. You
can also post your email address and phone number for people to
contact you. However, the most important address is your web
address. People who are online are much more likely to click on
your link to find more information than they are to email or call
you. Additionally, when you post your email address on the
internet, it can dramatically increase the amount of spam you get
at that address.
If you have an ezine that you want to encourage people to
subscribe to, you can post your subscribe address, but make sure
your list is double opt-in to prevent invalid subscribers. In my
experience, 90% of subscribers added by single opt-in are invalid
addresses.
Formatting Your Article
Formatting your article is very important. If you are posting
your article to an email distribution list you should hard wrap
your article at 65 words or less per line. Try to avoid posting
articles with spelling or grammatical errors. The higher the
quality of the content you provide, the more people will publish
it. Each new publisher that picks up your article could
represent thousands of impressions of your byline. I have one
article that has been published more than 100 times over the last
4 years.
Submitting Your Articles - Where to Start
The best and most gratifying result of writing a free reprint
article is seeing it published in an Ezine or on a website that
has readership that is likely to be enticed by your byline.
Submitting your articles directly to editors of Ezines or
websites that you know publish quality information related to
your topic is the first thing you should do. Many sites have
publishing guidelines and encourage content submissions. Submit
your article according to their guidelines with a personal
message to increase the likelihood of it being published. Keep
track of publishers that use your articles and submit your new
articles to those publishers first.
Article Depots - Let The World Know
I have found that submitting articles to depots isn't quite as
effective as contacting publishers directly but still WELL worth
the time. Most of the depots are well indexed by Google which
provides a valuable link back to your site and increases your
link ranking with search engines. Here are some free reprint
article depots (there are many more):
Cumuli Content - Community of Ezine Publishers
http://www.cumulicontent.com
Article Hub - Content Directory
http://articlehub.com/
Go Articles - Article Search Engine and Directory
http://goarticles.com/
Yahoo Groups
The best Yahoo Groups to post your free reprint articles can be
found at:
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/groups/
EzineArticles.com
EzineArticles appears to charge for submissions now but does
offer 10 free submissions.
http://ezinearticles.com/
Protect Your Reprint Rights
Just because you are giving your content away for free doesn't
mean you shouldn't expect something in return. Make sure to have
clear terms of use at the top of your article. Here are the
Terms of Use that I use:
"You are free to publish this article online or in print as long
as the byline is included and the url in the byline is
hyper-linked wherever possible. This article should not be used
in anything that could be considered spam. If you are using this
article, please send a brief message to fisherswanson@gmail.com
stating where it was published."
Happy publishing!
About the Author
Copyright 2005 Fisher Swanson
Fisher Swanson is the co-editor of ThriftyFun.com, a site that
publishes ways to save money. He can be contacted at
fisherswanson@gmail.com
http://www.thriftyfun.com