Value of Writing Articles
Tony Subia May 2004
Subia Interactive.com

Promote Yourself As An Authority
There’s not a more powerful way to create free marketing than to write informative articles that promote yourself and your website as an authority in your particular area of expertise. It’s human nature that people (potential leads) trust and tend to purchase products and services from marketers that are perceived to be experts on a particular subject.

Having your articles published by other websites is not only a powerful form of marketing… the resulting traffic referrals are totally free. People thirst for knowledge and many websites and publications love having access to free articles to provide informative value to their users. Bottomline, promoting your products and services with well-written articles work. Educating your prospects to the benefit of using your products and services makes them more highly qualified prospects (leads).

Marketing Through Articles
A wealth of free publicity. First of all, write articles to appear in your own website. The key to creating effective articles is concentrating on educating the reader without “putting on the sell”. Focus upon providing useful information that provides solutions and answers in the reader’s area of interest. Capture respect. Create loyalty and trust via information value. And, subtly expose the advantages of applying the benefits of your solutions towards strengthening the reader’s business and personal success.

Create Viral Advantages
Many websites and print publications are always on the prowl for free articles that are compatible to its content. Give them what they desire because the ultimate result will cumulatively drive continuous streams of website traffic exposing leads to your specific products or services. Clearly indicate within your “authors block” the article may be freely published in part or whole providing the author’s block and authors name are left in place with all links to other sites left intact. The more times your articles are reprinted or republished, the more traffic you’ll attract to your website. The “viral marketing advantage” will continue to create brand new traffic (leads) that will self-perpetuate new traffic as more publishers reprint your articles. Continuously strive to get your articles placed where they will create the strongest lead-generating potential.

Preparing Your Articles
Write articles within your particular expertise and solicit placement where the content will provide informational value to the reader. Article length of 1000-1200 words is best. Try to use keyword anchor text in a few places linking to other articles or websites using your important keywords. This approach adds ranking strength. Include your name as author beneath the article title, with a company name linked to your website. Include an Author’s Block beneath the article referencing copyright ownership with brief bio highlights with another link to your website anchored with related keywords. Grant permission to republish the article providing all links are kept intact. Ideally you would hope your article would rank highly across the major engines which will create a greater volume of referrals to your website.

Typically, mirrored pages (same content) would not be credited with link popularity when other sites link to the article. Consider slightly editing the same article giving it a “non-mirrored” appearance when submitting the article to another website for re-publishing.

Link Popularity Value
Ideally you hope that other websites would link to your article. Inbound links pointing to your article would enhance its link popularity. The more links to the specific article, the greater its search engine ranking potential.