Writing for publicity - part 1

By David Callan

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

One of the most popular ways among the top 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 the reputation of your company becomes 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 the name of your company 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 of good quality and informative then ezine and website publishers will be interested in them and your work could end up being published in endless ezine editions and hundreds of websites.

Not only will this increase your credibility but it could also 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 that if lots of your articles are published on websites then your link popularity will improve drastically. This in turn will result in higher search engine rankings in Google and the other engines which use link popularity as a ranking factor, this of course means lots more visitors and profit.

Take AKA Marketing.com for example, we're 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've 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. Update - This article has since been published in Webpronews.

These publications have a lot of subscribers, easily well over a million between them. For our troubles we 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 www.akamarketing.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. Hence this article is your guide to getting published on the web.

First of all you've got to make sure your article is properly formatted. By this I 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've 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 its kind on the web with over 2000 members. Unfortunately Shelley Lowery the group moderator emailed me a while later saying my Yahoo submitting tips article was rejected. It turns out that the copy I sent to her was unformatted and all over the place. This is the same informative 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 though but I thought that there must be a quicker way and guess what there is.

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 Microsoft 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 whichever of the above programs you use for email then go to tools then options. The two programs differ from here. In Outlook Express next go to the Send tab and 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 whenever you send email.

You can leave it at that and just send your articles via your email program, lots of free content sites however only offer forms to people who want to submit articles. They'll 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 from. This time however they're formatted and by using message rules are put straight into a special folder all ready for me to copy and paste into any Internet form as I require.

Continue to Writing for publicity - part 2