Journey

Article writing costs you nothing to write and is still one of the best free ways to advertise and get you noticed in your niche. Any earnings (& traffic) you get from article-writing is pure profit.

We used to do it for SEO but NOT anymore.

We used to do this as search engine tactics but it doesn’t work for that anymore now that Google has upped it’s game for duplicate content, but that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a fantastic idea to get targeted useful content in front of your niche. People only need to find value in whatever you have to offer to become a lifelong customer.

You need to think about where you syndicate these articles to, and they need to be unique and valuable.

You need to get this knowledge & expertize in front of real-eyes, real-potential customers, not just write for computer bots. 

I know that most of the products I’ve purchased online has definitely NOT been from clicking on an ad.. it was because they offered some valuable information or tip … as a result, I learn’t something new or I resonated with their story, and then I went to their website or squeeze page and signed up to get more.

Today’s Task for you: Write 5 new articles for your site and syndicate them to as many relevant places as possible.

Today’s Checklist:

• Write 5 articles based on your niche, put links in them to your website, blog or squeeze page.
• Convert into different formats (see below)
• Submit the articles in front of your target market.
• In any profile that you setup to submit, in your by-line, signature or user profile, place your autoresponder link, site url, or social media link so that people can subscribe to your free course, like your page, signup to your webinar, visit your website, etc.
• Make sure your article is worthy of being put on someone’s site and worthy of sharing, you want it to be useful to the readers and to be valuable enough to click through to get to know you better.

What to write about?

• How-to:
  An article that explains how to do something, get something, use something or find something.
  (SEARCH niche forums and your social media space (Twitter (http://replyz.com), LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+) to get content ideas that will actually help people. Go to the help section or search section of any of these sites and find out questions people are asking in your niche – write your answer, reply right there and then – and then convert it to a more formatted document to syndicate the answer everywhere!)
• Opinion:
  An article focusing on an emerging aspect of your business, and offer your opinion on how it will affect the industry.
• Personal story/inspirational essay:
  Your compelling reason you went into business for yourself. Why you chose the path you did. You can make it humorous, or inspirational, or both.
• Excerpt:
  Your new e-book or e-course can be used to offer a free sample chapter, condensed versions of the articles.
• Top ten lists:
  Top 20 Ideas, 3 ways, Five Steps to… etc.

Remember to stay away from making your articles sound like advertisements.
People read articles to be entertained, get ideas, or learn something they didn’t know before.

And remember – every single helpful email or forum response online – could be turned into a helpful content piece for your website, for your faq, for your email newsletter, for a video, or to syndicate. You probably have a bank of knowledge just sitting in your email “sent” box, never realizing it could be valuable to others until now.

Quick Points:

• Use short sentences and short paragraphs.
• Keep the language level conversational.
• Talk directly to the reader “if your..” “you could” etc.
• Use bulleted lists to break up the text.
• 500 to 800 words is a good general target (we want useful content and we’re not caring about search engines for this task – note: to make search engines happy, you want the content to be 1000+ words & every article to be unique).
• A link to your autoresponder, free pdf, facebook page, or website in your Bio box.

Where to Submit? And in what Formats?

Following are some of the many places to syndicate your content for reprinting and distribution:

• Guest blog posts to other websites in your niche, especially authority sites.
• Convert article to a PDF and submit to relevant PDF/eBook sharing places
• Convert article to a DOC file (Word document) and submit to relevant or popular DOC sharing places
• Convert article to Slideshow (PPT) and submit to relevant Slideshow sharing places
• Convert article to Video and syndicate to YouTube and the top video sharing places
• Convert article to Audio (MP3) and syndicate to iTunes and relevant audio sharing places
• Submit to forums as valuable content for industry forums (remove the links and just use your own user profile for the link to your site)  ** this one is Gold
• Submit it to your Facebook notes, your fan pages, your Google+ pages, your Twitter profile, and relevant LinkedIn groups
• Answer sites (Yahoo answers, etc)
• Create an infographic or use a graphic and write the article title on the graphic (i.e. 10 Tips for Shinier Hair – with a stockphoto picture of shiny hair) – and syndicate it to the image-sharing sites (Pinterest, etc)
• Place it in your autoresponder or newsletter
• Save it for use in a chapter of a future Kindle book you create
• Is it a great discussion topic? Create a podcast episode out of it.
• Is it something that people will need further help with? Create a webinar about it. Or a 5-day email course. Or an eBook or video series.

One bit of content can be syndicated in so many different ways & re-purposed to be unique and not duplicate content, to help you reach & get in front of your target audience.

Don’t take this post likely. Add this to your calendar: “Write 5 articles”, then decide how you are going to best distribute them (what formats to convert them to..maybe one can be a video, another can be a slideshow, another can be a guest-article, another can be a podcast, another can be a forum discussion, etc.)

.. do it, take action, and syndicate it today!

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