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Free
Reprint Articles - Inexpensive Advertising For
Your Business
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by:
Fisher Swanson
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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!
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
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