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This Article Written by Karri Flatla
If you’re an entrepreneur with a literary flare, writing articles is an affordable, highly effective marketing tool. You can revise and rewrite as many times as it takes to present your shiniest, smartest, most confident self. Too bad you don’t have a gargantuan subscriber list yet for your new Ezine! Or maybe you have articles sitting in a folder somewhere on your computer waiting to see the light of day (gasp!). Your written work can be the dangling carrot that converts prospects into clients, and marketing it as such is less work than you may realize. Here are five simple tactics for leveraging your writer savvy: 1) Disappointing as it is, prospects don’t spend as much time perusing your website as you would like them to. They may even miss your newsletter archive altogether. However, this can work to your advantage. An online newsletter makes for an effective, super accessible chapter of your portfolio. Just point prospects to it in your sales follow-ups. This shows that you’ve been busy doing more than just hunting for business. You’re an expert, and you know how to communicate that expertise effectively. A thank you email is the perfect opportunity to insert a few hyperlinks to your favorite pieces. No attachments necessary. 2) Speaking of archiving, are you posting your articles and/or newsletters to your website? Or to your blog? Don’t let all that juicy content wind up in your Ezine subscribers' trash folder. Instead, give your ingenuity a permanent home on your website. Search engines gobble up fresh, relevant content. Archive articles into topical categories with a keyword-rich hyperlink to each one. Then hyperlink each title to its respective article. This is low-tech, high impact search engine optimization (SEO). Both Google and your site visitors will thank you with better rankings and more inquiries. 3) Though you may receive inquiries from an array of prospects, chances are that you find yourself answering the same questions over and over again during those initial meetings or emails. Instead of continuously reinventing the wheel with your answers, why not attach a ready-made response in the form of a professional looking article? Just email your prospect a PDF of the article or a hyperlink to it if it is published online. So, if you find yourself copying and pasting the same old email reply to the same old question, take that as inspiration to write a new article! 4) Perhaps the easiest way to market yourself through article writing is by submitting to article directories around the web. This is not necessarily a targeted approach, but it is a quick and easy way to generate back links to your website (using a hyperlink in your byline, usually). Just be sure to focus on quality over quantity. Many directories are actually edited by human beings, not computer programs, and a sloppily written article may not get published. Besides, there are already enough junk articles floating around the web to choke a landfill. 5) A more targeted twist on the above is to find authority sites that have paid human editors and a loyal readership. If some of the site’s content is accessed by subscription only, all the better. Send a friendly but brief email to the section editor outlining why you enjoyed the site and how the content you produce would be of benefit to its readership. Paste a sample article into the body of the email and hit Send. (Don’t send attachments in this introductory email. If the editor doesn’t know you, your email will get deleted for fear of viruses.) Follow up after about a week if you are confident you have found a marketing match, but don’t be a pest. The only thing left to do is consider retaining the services of a proofreader and possibly an editor. Proofing and editing your own work is extremely time consuming and often difficult to do effectively, especially if your day is a busy one. (Who ever said “it would be fun to run a business part time” probably opened a lemonade stand.) Your articles should put your best foot forward—there is nothing worse than submitting your work to a zillion places online only to discover an embarrassing typo three days later. Article writing is not for everyone. But if you have a flare for the written word, or if you are a thinky or creative type, try article marketing to enhance your profile and build credibility with your target market. It will be time well spent. And who knows, you might even get a little bit famous along the way. Karri Flatla is a business graduate of the University of Lethbridge and principal of snap! virtual assistance inc., an online consulting firm providing business communications and Internet marketing services to busy entrepreneurs. Karri also produces Outsmart, the email newsletter for small business with big purpose. Visit http://www.snap-va.com for more information.
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