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Home::Copywriting
The Power of Articles, Reloaded
Author : Alex Goad
In the days of one way back links and ever increasing
competition for traffic from search engines (not to mention
traffic in and of itself), articles are one of the sharpest
tools in your web-arsenal.
When reading this, several of you will probably sigh and say
something along the lines of "I wish I knew how to write". While
I'm going to save the pep talk for another day, let me just say
that it's *probably* simply not true. Writing is as much about
putting together verbs and nouns as it is about personality. If
you don't have any, you're in trouble. If you do, no matter what
it is, you can start reaping the benefits of distributing your
own articles.
Writing articles will go a long way to infuse power in your
marketing. When you finish a piece, you will submit it to as
many article directories as makes sense. Article directories
exist in the thousands but there are 100 or so good ones. It's a
painstaking process to submit to them all and you will find
yourself in the land of diminishing returns past the ten biggies.
Not only can you include links inside your article itself with
most directories, but you will almost always have the chance to
fill in a little "author bio box". This box allows you to tell
your readers who you are and what site (s) or other
accomplishments you are recognized for. Since the text in these
boxes serve as anchors to your links, you will want to make them
varied to squeeze the most recognition possible from search
engines.
Article directories make your work available to ezine publishers
and other content hungry marketers, which in sort fuels
distribution. You may find it worthwhile to submit your article
to different ezine publishers by hand yourself. A great place to
find these publishers is Charlie Page's Directory of Ezines
(DOE).
Another very important benefit of writing articles is that is
solidifies your name and reputation. Articles establish your
given expertise which not only attracts customers to you but
also pre-sells them by instilling quiet confidence in you, your
products and your ways.
Of course you can do the same thing with ebooks while stepping
it up a notch. An ebook is a much larger investment of your time
and in such it's only fair that you would reap subsequently
larger rewards for publishing one and allowing free
distribution.
The advantage of ebooks is that they can contain your affiliate
links and a lot more information about your activities, products
and objectives. They can also achieve greater distribution
because marketers are constantly on the lookout for new bonuses
to offer their visitors and customers.
How do the two come together? It's been nearly two months now
that I wrote the final part of "The Rich Jerk, a Marketing
Odyssey", and yet I still hear about it nearly every day.
Recently, I had two people suggest to me in the same weekend
that I should put them together and make a mini ebook out of
them. This would save readers the trouble of hunting down the
missing parts and give me ever greater publicity, promotion,
credibility and all that good stuff. Great idea I might add.
If you keep this possibility in mind when you write articles,
you will find that you can multiply your return on investment of
time by an impressive factor, producing a quality report or
ebook in under an hour when it might have taken you days or
weeks otherwise. All this from something that has already served
it's purpose well.
Let those creative juices flow, and whatever you do, don't
ignore this facet of marketing, it will cost you more than you'd
care to imagine.
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