The Power of Articles, Reloaded

In the days of one way back links and ever increasing competition for traffic from search engines (not to mention traffic in and of itself), articles are one of the sharpest tools in your web-arsenal. When reading this, several of you will probably sigh and say something along the lines of "I wish I knew how to write". While I'm going to save the pep talk for another day, let me just say that it's *probably* simply not true. Writing is as much about putting together verbs and nouns as it is about personality. If you don't have any, you're in trouble. If you do, no matter what it is, you can start reaping the benefits of distributing your own articles. Writing articles will go a long way to infuse power in your marketing. When you finish a piece, you will submit it to as many article directories as makes sense. Article directories exist in the thousands but there are 100 or so good ones. It's a painstaking process to submit to them all and you will find yourself in the land of diminishing returns past the ten biggies. Not only can you include links inside your article itself with most directories, but you will almost always have the chance to fill in a little "author bio box". This box allows you to tell your readers who you are and what site (s) or other accomplishments you are recognized for. Since the text in these boxes serve as anchors to your links, you will want to make them varied to squeeze the most recognition possible from search engines. Article directories make your work available to ezine publishers and other content hungry marketers, which in sort fuels distribution. You may find it worthwhile to submit your article to different ezine publishers by hand yourself. A great place to find these publishers is Charlie Page's Directory of Ezines (DOE). Another very important benefit of writing articles is that is solidifies your name and reputation. Articles establish your given expertise which not only attracts customers to you but also pre-sells them by instilling quiet confidence in you, your products and your ways. Of course you can do the same thing with ebooks while stepping it up a notch. An ebook is a much larger investment of your time and in such it's only fair that you would reap subsequently larger rewards for publishing one and allowing free distribution. The advantage of ebooks is that they can contain your affiliate links and a lot more information about your activities, products and objectives. They can also achieve greater distribution because marketers are constantly on the lookout for new bonuses to offer their visitors and customers. How do the two come together? It's been nearly two months now that I wrote the final part of "The Rich Jerk, a Marketing Odyssey", and yet I still hear about it nearly every day. Recently, I had two people suggest to me in the same weekend that I should put them together and make a mini ebook out of them. This would save readers the trouble of hunting down the missing parts and give me ever greater publicity, promotion, credibility and all that good stuff. Great idea I might add. If you keep this possibility in mind when you write articles, you will find that you can multiply your return on investment of time by an impressive factor, producing a quality report or ebook in under an hour when it might have taken you days or weeks otherwise. All this from something that has already served it's purpose well. Let those creative juices flow, and whatever you do, don't ignore this facet of marketing, it will cost you more than you'd care to imagine.