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Market Your Business With Articles
Author: Alyice Edrich
How many times have you wished for a larger advertising budget, dreamed of seeing your company’s advertisement in one of the national trade publications, or paid hundreds of dollars in advertising only to see your ad campaign flop?
If you’ve optimized your website using search engine optimization techniques, tried pay-per-click ads, and swapped links with just about every site on the web and still haven’t seen the results you were looking for, it may be time to start an article-writing campaign.
An Article A Week Keeps Advertising Costs Down
Yes, you’ve heard right! You can cut your advertising dollars in half by having articles written about you, your company, and/or your products and services. Or you can write the articles yourself and include an extensive byline that acts as an advertisement for your company!
Since you have more control in writing and distributing articles yourself, here’s a simple seven-step plan to help you begin your article-writing campaign:
Find A Topic Specific To Your Company’s Niche.
Every article you write should somehow relate to your company’s service and/or products. The idea behind writing articles is to gain recognition in your industry and to inform others about your service and/or product.Write Your Article.
Write your article so that it doesn’t sound like a full-fledge advertisement—but rather an educational tool. It should have a beginning, middle, and an end and it should flow. If your article sounds too choppy, is full of typographical errors, or your grammar and punctuation isn’t up to par, editors won’t want to publish it.Create A Byline.
Your byline is the area at the end of the article that tells a little bit about the author. While your byline will differ in size and detail depending on the publication you write for, most publications will allow you a 3 to 5 sentence byline. In your byline, include your name, your company’s name, your company web address, and a short blurb that entices the reader to learn more about you and/or your company.Edit Your Article
Once you’ve written your article and byline, put it aside for a day. Then go back to your article with a fresh pair of eyes and edit your work. If you’re not good at editing, hire a proofreader or copyeditor to do the work for you.Decide Distribution Method
How valuable is the article you’ve written? Would you like to get paid for your article or would you like to distribute it for free? If you’re looking to make money on your article, you’ll need to learn more about writer’s guidelines, querying, rejections, and publishing rights. If you’re looking for exposure and not money, than you simply need to locate a publication that would be interested in your article, find the editor’s email address, paste the article into the body of the email, and attach a brief note that basically says, “I’d like to offer this article for your publication free of charge. Publishing guidelines follow.”Locate Publications
The easiest way to locate publications who might be interested in your article is to join free article distribution services, such as the one located at Article Announce. But a more profitable way to distribute your article is locate specific publications related to the topic of your article. You can find those publications by doing a search online or by purchasing the book, Writer’s Market.Distribute Articles
The important thing to keep in mind is that if you’re going to start an article-writing campaign, you need to send out a minimum of one article per month. If you can muster the time to get more serious with your article-writing campaign, set aside one day a week to write and distribute a new article every week.
If you simply can’t write or don’t have the time to research information and put together a quality article worthy of publication, you can always hire a ghostwriter!
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