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 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!
Copyright 2005 Fisher Swanson
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