Very few marketers seem to do this, and that’s a mistake because it can bring you a lot of traffic and a lot of exposure. I’m talking about writing articles that are meant for reprint.
You write articles for yourself and your own purposes all the time. However, your influence only spreads so far – especially when you’re first starting out. Wouldn’t you love it if you could write an article and have dozens of marketers post it with a resource box pointing to your website? It would end up all over the web– in their newsletters, on their blog, off-line, in e-zines, in magazines, and more. This is basically free advertising, branding, and traffic that is mutually beneficial.
Consider writing these articles that are available for reprint, that include an author’s resource box. Anyone is free to use these articles as long as they leave your resource box intact.
Why would anyone use your article? For one thing, it offers their audience a different viewpoint– yours. They write a certain way and are limited by their own experience. They love being able to showcase content from others in their niche. For another thing, using reprint articles saves them a ton of time. Maybe they’re running behind and don’t have anything to post on their blog that day. So, they grab your reprint article and use it. They benefit and you benefit!
Tell people that they are allowed to share certain content, and they will. This content will spread wide and far, all over the web and even offline. Remember that you’ll get a lot further if you leverage the needs and wants of other people (in this case, people who want high quality content for their own business). Find ingenious ways to help others help you get more traffic, and you’ll win.
Turn Your Articles into Free Reports
You should always strive to use your content in more than one way. It’s always surprising when people spend a lot of time writing articles or another type of content and only use it once. If you’re writing high-quality content, you’re actually doing people a disservice by not using it multiple times over. People want and need to see your great content. You can save yourself a lot of time and energy by repurposing quality content.
One way you can repurpose content is to collect your very best articles into free reports. Let’s say you’ve written 10 phenomenal blog posts that you really consider being your key content. Gather those up and edit them into one report, saving it as a PDF.
After you have this longer report ready, you can sell it. You can earn some great money by publishing it on your own, offering for sale via Amazon Kindle, or even using it as a freebie bonus offer for something you’re selling or promoting.
Or, you can use the report is a list builder. You can offer it for free for those who sign up for your email list. People love to get great content for free, so it’s a no-brainer to go this route.
There are no limits to what you can do with these excellent reports. And the beautiful thing is it really doesn’t take that much more time and effort to gather articles you’ve already written. Putting these articles in the form of a report gives even more value for those who will receive them.
Create Rebrandable Reports
Have you ever wished you could just get other people to do your marketing for you? Well, that’s actually possible. You just have to give them a good reason to do it. Rebrandable reports give them that reason.
You can write reports (or gather previous articles in the form of a report) and allow people to put their own affiliate links in for your product, or even for other products. They don’t get to change the content or your branding, but they do get the chance to earn from your efforts. This gives them great incentive to post your report all over the web, email it to their list, offer it on their website, and so on.
Remember – many hands make light work. You can do a lot of marketing yourself to get some traffic, but your efforts will go a lot further if you focus on recruiting other people to do your marketing for you. You don’t have to pay for this to happen, which means it’s a workable plan for anyone.
When other people are incentivized to pass along your free report, your work will spread around, building your brand on autopilot. I’ve mentioned that your name and brand should show up everywhere for the people who are interested in your niche. Getting other people to spread the word is one way to make sure that happens.
How do you get people to do this for you? Email your list with the opportunity to rebrand your reports. Put a notice up on your blog or website that your report is available to use in any way they want, as long as they don’t change your content. You can even write a notice inside the book that those who download it are allowed to rebrand it and pass it around too.
You can manually rebrand reports for affiliates and others. There is also software available that can help you do this. The simplest way may be to offer a Word file if you don’t want to invest in a tool or manually rebrand the links for others.
Submit to Ebook Directories
If you have a free report or e-book, you want to get it into as many hands as possible. These ebooks will build your brand and help you get more traffic. There are ebook directories out there to which you can submit to help make this happen. Depending on the site, this can have dramatic effects on your traffic.
It takes just minutes to take advantage of their search engine power. The people who go to their site go to search for great content. Google scans and lists this content. Then, there’s the simple fact that you’ll be visible in more places, which builds your brand and gets you more traffic in a snowball effect.
Scribd.com and ebooks-directory.com are two choices you can start with.
Give Your Articles Away As Bonuses
I can’t repeat this enough – you have to use your articles in more than one way. One of the best ways to use great articles you’ve written is to give them away as bonuses. You can give them away as bonuses to promote your own products or other people’s products. This will help you get more notice in your niche, in the search engines, and so on.
There are many different ways you can use your articles as bonuses. You can turn them into reports, as we talked about earlier. You can also turn them into an e-course, to be delivered after opting in. Or, you can add them to an online membership site that people receive access to after purchase. The point is that using your articles as bonuses gives you an advantage over other people in your niche. The great thing is you don’t have to do any extra work because these articles have already been written.
People love to collect free stuff. They often search for “product name bonus” and similar keywords in the search engines. If there is a great launch you’re joining as an affiliate, or if you have your own great launch, you can create a page on your blog or website that caters to that keyword. This will get you additional traffic, since people will be searching and you will have a great bonus available.
Knowing that you have something for free, particularly when you attach it to a hot product people are buying anyway, can also get you a lot of notice on social media. The more attention and notice you get, the more traffic you’ll get.
Let Your Affiliates Use your Content
If you sell your products online (and you should be) then you can’t do any better for traffic than getting an army of affiliates on your side. Affiliates will spread your name wide and far because they get the benefit of earning a commission. They’ll email about your product to their list, post about it on their blogs and websites, and Tweet and post about it on social media.
Affiliate traffic is absolutely phenomenal. However, it can sometimes be difficult to get affiliates to promote for you and drive traffic to you because they are so busy with other offers. There are so many different things they can promote. They have to pick and choose what they are going to devote their time to. That’s why you should make it as easy as possible to promote for you so they’ll do it.
Let affiliates use your content! You can either write or create content specifically for this purpose, or you can simply repurpose content you already have. Give affiliates this content to use as is or to modify in any way that suits their needs, as long as it’s directly related to promoting your product. Even Amazon.com does this with their affiliate program. They allow their affiliates to use their images and content as long as it relates to promoting their products.
Affiliates are invaluable to your success. Treat them well and they will give you traffic hands off. They will help you grow your list, get traffic to your website, and become much better known than you could ever hope to become on your own. You’re going to grow much faster if you leverage the traffic other people can give you, which is something we’ll discuss in detail further on.
Share Your Articles on Slide Sharing Sites
We talked about the fact that your articles don’t have to stay articles. You can turn them into PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Keynote documents, YouTube videos, podcasts, or anything you like.
There are slide sharing websites out there that will allow you to upload your content, taking advantage of their traffic. For instance, Slideshare.com, Scribd.com, and issuu.com are all options.
When you upload your slides, focus on your keywords and titles. Pay attention to what kind of content is popular on these sites so you know how to submit your content the right way to net you the highest benefit. Remember– keep using your articles everywhere and anywhere you can, and in as many different ways as you can.
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