Syndicate Articles To Market Your Business

A good way to market your business is through writing articles with links through to your site or products. It’s also great for building credibility and presenting yourself as an expert in your area. Basically, you are providing free content for website owners to use on their own site and there are plenty of people who would rather use other people’s work than write their own articles.

You need to write relevant articles and syndicate them so that others will spread your articles around as free content on their own sites. You don’t get paid for your articles but it can be worth the effort to write good articles that people will want to use — it’s a long game but once you have written an article, there is the potential to spread your marketing message without any further effort on your part.

There are several sites that provide free content and it’s easy to open an account and upload your articles. There is usually information about the author and links to other articles, so this in itself is a good marketing strategy for you. If you build a portfolio of really good articles, you will be seen as someone who is knowledgeable about their area of business. This is all good in terms of marketing.

The only downside is that you have to trust that people who use your articles will keep in all the links you put in and will acknowledge you as the author. This can be difficult to police but you can regularly check where your articles are being used by running them through Copyscape, www.copyscape.com  a site which helps to stamp out plagiarism on the Internet. Just a few cents, you can see who is using your work and check whether they are keeping your links in.

So how do you write good articles for syndication? The following tips might help…

Tips for syndicating articles

All websites need good quality content these days to get up the rankings on search engines and many web owners are disinclined to write their own copy, preferring to use the free content that you can provide. Make sure you target your market quite tightly and write relevant articles chock-full of interesting material that people will actually want to read. How-to advice is always useful and since the Internet is largely used for seeking information, there is huge scope for writing articles. Look for unique aspects that nobody else is writing about.

Articles are generally short — anything from 500 to 2000 words, although this will depend on the article submission site. It is worth checking what they are looking for first.

Catchy titles will get your articles noticed and try to sum up what your article will be about in your title. Also try to break up longer articles with subheadings or bullet points as large expanses of text put people off reading the whole article. Article submission sites also usually require a short summary of your article — just a few sentences to draw the reader in.

Make sure you read over your finished article and edit out any spelling and grammatical errors — it’s easy to run a spellchecker over your work and makes a huge difference to the presentation of your article.

The idea is to establish yourself as a knowledgeable expert in your field with a portfolio of really good articles. If you are good, you will attract a following of people waiting to read what you’ve written and they will use your articles on their websites. You should not directly promote your products — you will be banned from submitting articles if you do this. You can advertise your website within the author’s bio information and provide your links so that people can find you but avoid placing links within the content of the article.

Choose your article submission sites carefully. There are some good ones which you should stick to but stay away from the tacky ones. Look for sites with high ranking and choose the ones which will cater to the market you are targeting. It may be better to have lots of articles on one or two good sites than spread them around on lots of different sites — you are more likely to be seen as an expert if you have a large portfolio of articles on a given subject.

Try RSS, which means Really Simple Syndication as this method will distribute your articles automatically and it’s possible that you could reach a larger audience than you could through article submission sites — the best thing is to use both methods.

Don’t forget other article marketing strategies such as online and paper edition magazines and newspapers as these mediums can reach huge potential markets of paying customers. Again, avoid outright promotion of your products but make sure you subtly point people in the right direction and have a link at the bottom of your article.

You can also market your articles through online blogs and forums — both yours and other people’s. You could even include on your blog the first paragraph or two with a link to the full article on your website as a way to induce people to your site.