Drive Web Traffic and Raise Your Profile by Distributing Free Articles

One of the easiest and least expensive ways to generate online publicity for you and your information products is to write articles and give them away at no charge to other web sites and e-zine publishers.

What Articles Can Do For You
All over the world, there are web site and e-zine owners looking for good content. They can’t or don’t want to write it all themselves so they look to outside contributors -- that’s you! -- to fill the gaps in their publications.

When your article is picked up and republished online, your name is placed in front of hundreds, often thousands, of new eyeballs at no charge to you. At the end of your article is a “resource box,” a brief description of who you are and how people can contact you. Make sure your web site address is included in this resource box and people will click through from your article, bringing lots of new traffic to your site.

Once visitors are at your site, you can entice them to subscribe to your newsletter or upsell them to your info products. The article has given them a taste of your expertise and what you offer. If they click through, it’s because they’re interested in knowing more -- so give it to them!

Being published all over the web also means your name gets picked up on lots of search engines. If you Google “Jennifer Tribe” right now, you will turn up about 2,300 results. Many of the results are articles I’ve had published on other people’s sites.

What to Write About
If you write a regular newsletter for your subscribers, you’re already one step ahead of the game. You have ready-made content that can easily be repurposed for broader distribution.

If you’re not churning out articles regularly, don’t worry -- you can quickly write a handful of articles that you can use over and over again. If you don’t like writing, hire a ghostwriter to help you.

Choose topics that relate to the information products you have available and would like to promote. You might pull out snippets from a longer product to tempt readers with some helpful nuggets, then upsell at your site.

Where to Distribute Your Articles
There are dozens of web portals that collect articles from authors and offer them to publishers who need them. There are also email distribution groups to which you can post. Below, I’ve listed 9 article distribution sites and email groups. Though this list just scratches the surface of what’s out there, it’s enough to get you started.

http://www.ideamarketers.com

http://www.articlecity.com

http://www.sideroad.com

http://www.amazines.com

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.holisticjunction.com

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-Reprint-Articles

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network

If you don’t have time to submit to these places yourself, there are a couple of distribution services, such as the Phantom Writers, that will handle all of the work for you. So no excuses -- hire people to get things done if you need to, but get your articles out there.