Effective Reprint Statements For Reprintable Articles
Publishing articles that you allow others to freely use and
republish is an effective business strategy for online business.
It is a practice that has its roots in offline business
promotion. It has been particularly prominant in financial and
real-estate circles. Offline, a real estate agent, for example,
would write a short tip-sheet explaining the top 10 things to do
before you sell your home. This would then be sent out to media
outlets for for possible publication. They always included
by-lines and resource boxes so that readers would know where to
go for further information (and where to hire a qualified
real-estate agent).
It works very much the same online. You write an article
relevant to an issue in your market area and then submit it to
free article directories (like reprint-content.com) for
distribution. Included with the article is your by-line, a
resource box, and a copyright/reprint-rights statement.
While the resource box and by-line are very important, this
article focuses on the reprint statement. This little statement
is a very important part of your article. Sadly I see it used
incorrectly or ineffectively all too often. This happens because
people confuse the purpose of reprintable articles.
Simply put, articles you produce for distribution should be seen
as indirect profit builders only. Their purpose is to produce
leads for your business, to drive qualified traffic to your
website that you then convert into income. In order to get the
maximum result from your articles you need them to be
distributed as widely as possible.
To get that wide distribution you need it to be as simple as
possible for someone to use your article. There should be as few
restrictions on use as is humanly possible, and access to the
article in a variety of formats should be simple.
The first step in this is to use very a clear reprint permission
statement that is as unrestricted as possible. Putting
restrictions on the use of your articles, results in fewer
people actually using them. Since you want maximum distribution,
make it very clear and very simple to use your articles. Your
statement should be up-front at the start of the article, and
not part of your resource box (that has other purposes).
A simple statement like the following is enough: "You have
permission to use this article freely in any publication as long
as the resource box and byline are included as-is and any
weblinks are made 'live' when published on websites".
Some people also like to ask to be contacted if an article is
used. Do that if you wish. It can be a good way to build a list
of publishers to contact directly with future articles. However
don't expect to get hordes of people writing you back; most
publishers don't contact writers before they publish - even if
asked.
You should also make a point to distribute your articles in
directories that provide publishers with your article in
different formats. For example, reprint-content.com gives
publishers access to your articles in plain text (for ezines),
in basic html (for websites) and RSS format (for syndication and
website publishing) all from one place.
This makes it much easier for you, the writer, to simply write
one version of your article, but have it available to publishers
in a variety of popular formats.