Writing for Publicity

by David Callan

Building your reputation online is one of the most important thing you can do to aid the success of your Internet business.

One of the most popular ways among the "Internet gurus" to do this is to provide highly useful, interesting and profitable information to people interested in your industry.

When people see you as a provider of good information that they can use and profit from, then your reputation and your companies reputation become more credible. When this happens people will be more likely to buy your products and services or indeed the products or services you recommend them.

One of the best and fastest ways to get your companies name and your own name spread on the web is to begin writing articles for other ezines and websites, or indeed just submit previously written articles to them.

If your articles are good quality and informative then ezine and website publishers will be interested and your work could end up being published in endless ezine editions and hundreds of websites. Not only will this increase your credibility, it could result in 1000's more visitors, this is because at the end of all your articles which you allow others to publish will be a link back to your site.

Don't forget also if lots or your articles are published on websites then your link popularity will improve drastically. This will result in higher search engine rankings in Google and the other engines which use link popularity as a ranking factor, which or course means lots more visitors and profit for you.

Take AKA Marketing.com, we are only a new site, might be news to some of you but we are. We launched in late April (02) if I remember correctly. We have already had articles published in two of the most popular ezines available for webmasters on the Internet. These are Webpronews and Sitepronews, our "Yahoo submitting tips" article was published in Webpronews and our "Banner design tips" article was published in Sitepronews a week or so later.

These publications have a lot of subscribers, easily well over a million between them. For our troubles akamarketing.com received a couple of thousand free visitors over the day of publication and for a couple of days after the original publication. All we did was send in two articles which were already published for all our regular visitors to view and read on AKA Marketing.com.

Hopefully with the above example in mind you can begin to realize the power of writing and distributing articles for others to use over the web. This article is your guide to getting published on the web.

First of, you have got to make sure your article is properly formatted. By this is mean readable, if it's not readable then it doesn't matter how good your article is, because no busy ezine publisher will bother to format it for you, that's your job.

Before we continue I have to admit that I have fallen down on this point, recently I submitted to article_annouce, a Yahoo group for, you guessed it, announcing your article to ezine publishers and other people looking for content.

Article_annouce is the biggest group of it's kind on the web with nearly 2000 members. However Shelley Lowery the group moderator emailed my a while later saying my "Yahoo submitting tips" article was rejected. It turns out the copy I sent to her was unformatted and all over the place.

This is the same article that Webpronews editors felt was good enough to send out to over 800,000 subscribers, so it was a good article. However it wasn't formatted so it wasn't accepted and nobody in that group got to see it, that time anyway (it was accepted a few days later).

The correct way to format your articles is to hit the carriage return button or enter button on your keyboard every 65 characters including spaces. It's recommended that you do this using Notepad as MS WORD and other word processors aren't good at this sort of thing.

I found this a pain in the butt, I knew it was essential to getting my articles published, but I thought that there must be a quicker way, and guess what there is.

However only users of MS Outlook and MS Outlook express might be able to do this. I'm guessing other programs have this capability too, but I only have the two MS programs mentioned above installed on my machine so I can't say.

Anyway if you want to properly format your articles to the 65 characters a line standard without manually counting and pressing enter after every 65 characters you can.

Simply startup which ever of the above programs you use for email, go to tools then options. The two program differ from here. In Outlook Express next go to the Send tab, select Plain text as the mail sending format and then click on "Plain text settings". You should now set the number to 65 in the "Automatically wrap text..." section.

In Outlook go the Mail format tab and select "Plain text" as the format and then go to settings, again select 65 here. You now have your email program configured to hit enter every 65 characters for you whenever you send email.

You can leave it at that and just send your articles via your email program, but lots of free content sites only offer forms to people who want to submit articles. They will still want all articles formatted, what do you do then? Well I usually send my articles to myself, yes I simply copy them from my site, and email them to myself, a couple of seconds later they arrive at the same account I sent them. Except this time they are nice, formatted and put straight into a special folder, all ready for me to copy and paste into any Internet form as I require.

The next thing we'll discuss is your article itself. It has to be informative and useful to the ezine publishers audience. Your article should be original and unique and not just the same as the last article you read on your chosen article topic.

What bothers me a lot about some article writers is the fact they think that writing articles is just about plugging their products. They don't seem to realize that the ezine publisher is looking for real quality content that will make him or her look better in the eyes of his or hers subscribers and not just a sales letter.

What I'm trying to say here is that articles sent to ezine publishers which were written to sell won't increase your chances of being published infact very few editors will
accept any articles like this. The ones that do have probably used your product in the past and liked it. Articles designed to inform and educate people will increase your chances of being published and also of making sales from people who have read your article. So stay away from sales letter based articles.

I shouldn't have to say this, but make sure your articles are grammatically correct and watch out for those spellings mistakes.

Lots of online content groups and directories stipulate that you must include your publishing guidelines at the top of your article. A good one I like to use is this:

"You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated."

Lets continue onto bylines (aka resource boxes). These are the couple of lines included at the end of your article, this is what you get in return for allowing people to use your work. Pretty much the same as an email signature, the idea is to attract people to visit your site or email you to find out more about your product. I usually use something like:

"Article by David Callan - admin@akamarketing.com
David is the webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com.
Visit his site for free Internet marketing articles,
advice, ebooks, news and lots more."

My resource box is quite small, you can get away with another line or two in most cases. Try however to stick to 4 or 5 lines if you can.

After your articles are written and before you go searching for places to submit them to, you can do certain things on your website to help them spread. Basically you just tell people they can use your article if the like, do this by including a little note at the end of the article, like the one at the bottom of this page.

You could even tell your visitors that your articles can be reproduced on your home page like we do. If your site is busy and in an industry with lots of ezine publishers around like "Internet Marketing" then this could help spread your article very quickly indeed.

Finding places to submit your articles on the web is not hard. It does however take time. The best places to start are likely to be the free content directories and articles.

I however like to start by simply searching for sites which are looking for your articles. This is a much slower process and the visitors you get will be few compared to being published in a popular ezine. I prefer submitting to sites over directories first because this helps my search engine rankings. I know this because most of the ezine directories use CGI generated pages when fetching articles from their databases, Google and the other engines can't read this, so I might aswell submit to individual websites first to give Google the chance to spider my article and register another few inbound links for me.

When searching for sites that are looking for articles on your industry use the following urls:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22<>add+your+art

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22submit+your+aing

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22write+foion

The text in red is your keyword (S), change this to match the type of articles you write. You should also try any other keywords you think people looking for articles would use. You'll find however that the above URL's will turn up loads of places that are interested in your articles either for websites, ezines or both.

Go to these sites, and confirm that they are looking for articles on your industry. Send your articles in two or three at a time at most. Do not send more than this, your emails might be considered as spam which nobody likes.

Make sure you have both your publishing guidelines and resource box included with all your article submissions.

The sites you submit to should go into a mailing list. The mailing listing should contain the article submit email address, the address of the site, and the name of thewebmaster if known. The next time you have articles to submit you can use a mailing program. You can use this along with your mailing list to send emails with your articles in them to multiple webmasters, this will savehours of time.

You'll find that most webmasters will email you informing you that they are using your article but some won't, so it is a good idea to check back with the more popular sites you have submitted to now and again.

After a couple of months you should find your link popularity filled with sites from your mailing list.

Next well talk about actual free content directories, free content groups and other content resources available on the web. There are plenty of these on the web, many are a complete waste of time, however others can really help to get your articles out there.

Free content directories are sites which categorize hundreds, even thousands of articles which writers have submitted and given permission for people to publish. When ezine and website publishers visit these, they search for articles related to their industry and publish one's they like. This is why you want ALL your articles in ALL the content directories, the directories that are worthwhile anyhow.

Here's a few of the most popular places writers like to submit their work.

http://www.ezinearticles.com - This is one of the biggest directories on the web, your
articles however have to be available via autoresponder otherwise they won't publish them.

http://www.ideamarketers.com -
http://www.goarticles.com -
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://www.authorconnection.com/
http://www.netterweb.com/articles/

Content groups serve the same principal as content directories - a place to connect writers and people looking for articles. These groups are hosted by Yahoo and Topica mostly. Writers can submit articles via the Internet or send them to the group email address. Most groups are moderated to prevent blatant advertisements and maintain a high standard of articles, so your article may not be published for a couple of days.

The moderator of the group usually selects his / her favorite articles from recent submissions, these articles are then emailed to members of the group. Some members however choose not to receive articles via email but to read them online instead.

Here are some of the content groups I submit articles to along with the latest member numbers.

Yahoo Groups - article_announce - 1821
Yahoo Groups - Free-Content - 848
Yahoo Groups - aabusiness - 839
Yahoo Groups - articles_archives - 594
Yahoo Groups - Free-Reprint-Articles - 237
Yahoo Groups - publisher_network - 209
Yahoo Groups - ArticlePublisher - 129
Yahoo Groups - FreeWrites - 118

Before you can submit to any of these you have to have a Yahoo id and then join each group individually. Also http://www.topica.com/lists/FreeEzineContent

Now I'll talk about the websites which publish ezines, but don't say if they accept articles. Just because they don't mention it on their websites doesn't mean they don't accept articles. For sites like these I use a couple of directories devoted to listing ezines only and not free content.

These include http://www.homeincome.com/search-it/ezine/ and
http://ezine-universe.com/ . These directories will usually tell you the following information and more about each ezine th

• Ezine
• Name and email
• Content
• Subscription
• If they accept articles or not, what type of articles they accept

Simply enter your search criteria and visit the bio page for each ezine. Be patient as for some searches there are 2500+ ezines listed. When on an ezines bio page, check to see if their circulation is above 500, (otherwise it will just be a waste of time) if it is check to see if the ezine accepts articles.

If they do add the editors/ publishers first name (if you can), ezine name and the article submission email address to your ezine publishers mailing list. It will take time to visit all the ezine bio pages, but after doing so your mailing list should start to take shape. Be careful not to have duplicates in your mailing list, this is sure to annoy the unlucky publisher who receives your same article 3 or 4 times.

The resources mentioned higher up the article are only a fraction of the resources available, doing a simple search for related keywords should return many more places for you to promote your article.

One more final point before I conclude, recently I came across a service on a website. The service offered to promote your article for $50 by sending it to 2,800 ezine publishers. I considered giving the service a try myself but then thought "What about the next article I want to submit". I'll have to pay $50 over and over again, am I'm not going to do that, so I decided against using this service. I would have to promote my articles myself.

The point I'm trying to make is to gradually build your own list of people who are interested in your article, then this list will be your for keeps. Don't borrow someone else's list. The process is slower but much more profitable in the long run.

That's the end of the article, in it you have learned the power behind writing articles for others, what's needed in order for your article to be published and what resources there are to help you. Hopefully you can benefit from the information you have read here. Happy Writing!

Free content for your website and/or ezine: Just a quick note to let everyone know that if they would like to publish this Writing for Publicity article on their website or in their ezine, they can as long as the following bio is placed at the end of the article.

Article by David Callan - admin@akamarketing.com
David is the webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com
Visit his site for free internet marketing articles, advice, ebooks, news and lots more.