-- Feature Article: Writing Articles for Worldwide Consumption

-- Note from the Author: Start Your Fall Publishing Campaign Today!

-- Special Message: How Big Is Your Bowl?

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Start Your Fall Publishing Campaign Today!

Autumn begins a balmy, colorful retreat from the very hot, arid summers we experience in the inland areas of the California Central Coast. Soon, the air will be crisp and clear -- and a wonderful stimulant for starting new projects and hatching powerful publishing campaigns.

Today's newsletter focuses on writing and publishing articles to convey compelling concepts to colleagues, clients, customers, students, prospects, and employers.

Do you need to apprise people of the breadth of your understanding of your subject matter? How about gaining visibility and marketing yourself when you start your own consulting business? You'll find this approach a potent way to inform your audiences of the value of your passions, interests, knowledge, and ideas.

You can begin publishing articles while still employed or in school, or otherwise quietly incubating your business or professional ideas. It costs nothing, yet this process can enable you to build a solid foundation of exposure to your expertise. By the time you are ready to act, you will be far ahead of the game of promoting your business focus or specialized credentials.

For these reasons, I hope you enjoy today's features, including "Writing Articles for Worldwide Consumption." I look forward to hearing your comments!

Here's to your business prosperity,

Adele Sommers, author of the "Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance" success program

P.S. If you missed any previous issue, visit the newsletter index!

How Big Is Your Bowl?

Did you know that a goldfish can grow in proportion to the size of the container it lives in? Its dimensions need not be limited to the size of the typical pet you used to keep in a gallon aquarium. In fact, the greater the bowl, the grander the fish. And when you think of the scale of a pond or a lake, imagine how large your goldfish can grow!

Similarly, article-writing campaigns can offer us an ocean of possibilities for extending our business or professional influences well beyond our local "bowls."

I recall the time when we placed published authors on a pedestal and most people couldn't imagine becoming widely published in their own right. Today, however, we have possibilities galore via the Internet, and information dissemination has not only become an option -- it's practically a business requirement!

Consider how much the tides are changing...at one time, most people I knew protectively hoarded their content and aimed to distribute it primarily via books or magazines. They also expected to be paid directly for their work, such as through royalties or article fees. Today, however, the purpose of publishing has expanded to include marketing. With marketing comes more indirect benefits, such as increased exposure. We can author articles to communicate our expertise and interests, and in so doing, build authority, credibility, and name recognition in our global community.

According to Parker J. Palmer, "Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts."

Your articles can help you, too, become a "big fish" authority in whatever pond you claim as your domain of interest. With that in mind, prepare to pick up your pen or keyboard, and read on for more ideas!

Writing Articles for Worldwide Consumption
by Adele Sommers

How do you demonstrate your wisdom, knowledge, passions, and interests to your clients, customers, or colleagues? What sets you apart from others in your field or industry? Do you have a way to keep your name and ideas in front of people?

If you desire to create a bond with your constituents, you will want to provide them with a means of getting to know, like, and trust you. This marketing approach leads to building a loyal audience. Providing no-cost articles, reports, white papers, and so on, helps people "snack" on your ideas to gradually learn more about you.

A systematic article-writing campaign is one way to accomplish this goal, as this article explains. You might be surprised to learn that you don't need a Web site or any funding whatsoever to start a viable, Internet-based, article publishing program.

What Are Three More Good Reasons for Authoring Articles?

1) The learning experience. Must you be an expert to author articles on a particular topic? Thankfully, not!

Researching and writing academic papers is a type of article writing. Journalists routinely investigate topics that are new to them. A well-researched paper or news story can be vitally important to people who need to know that information. For professionals, this ongoing process helps us refine our area of focus, learn more ways to explain it, organize it, and help our audiences benefit from it.

2) Creating an inventory for a newsletter. Many people I know would love to publish a newsletter; however, it requires discipline to produce content on a regular basis. Developing a modest stockpile of articles ahead of time, however, enables you to launch a newsletter with a "buffer zone" that can help fill any content voids.

3) Incrementally writing a book. What scares people most about authoring a book? Typically, it's the overwhelming prospect of writing 200+ pages on a given topic. Even writing an outline can seem daunting.

You can approach the challenge by aiming to write a series of articles over time that can each become chapters or sections of your book. That way, you not only greatly lessen the intimidation factor, but you also create individual products that are quite useful in their own right (and also can provide content for a newsletter). Eventually, you can sew the articles together into a logical flow that looks as if it had been perfectly planned as a book from the start.

Tips for Writing Your Articles

These are guidelines for the development process:

• Identify the topic, or a series of topics. If you've been receiving ideas from your clients, subscribers, or constituents, these topics might pertain to their "burning questions" or challenges in a particular area. "How-to" articles are extremely popular, and can span everything from training a pet to cultivating roses to hiring employees.

• Choose a voice or perspective for your articles. These can include:

Subject matter expert, where you can present your own knowledge on a particular topic. This role can be especially gratifying if you have years of experience in a profession or hobby.

Interviewer or researcher, where you are a student of the subject and are learning about it from others. For example, you can interview a series of experts to compare their viewpoints.

Repurposer or repackager of other people's material. This approach is ideal for people who don't know exactly where to start, or who feel more comfortable building on the ideas of others. A wealth of written material exists today in the public domain for which copyrights have expired that you can adapt for many uses. You can also do an Internet search for rebrandable articles, which you can publish as-is or modify as desired.

• Choose a framework. This could be sequential (as in explaining a series of events or stages of a process), problem/solution (as in a case study or a "how-to" article), an essay, or compare/contrast viewpoints, for example.

• Develop an outline or a mind map of ideas. Or, jot down your ideas on cards or sticky notes and organize them into topic groupings. You can always reorder as you write!

• Create a first draft. A conversational tone is ideal for most articles. If you can imagine having an informal discussion across the kitchen table from one of your constituents, you can explain even complex ideas in a clear and engaging way.

• Schedule a peer review. Depending on the size or complexity of your material, consider asking various trusted friends or colleagues to review it one or more times. Incorporate comments from each review pass and then save any testimonials. For longer works, I suggest sending out a short questionnaire to help reviewers focus on the types of feedback you need.

• Invent a compelling title for your article. After pouring energy into your article, brainstorm an unforgettable name for your creation. It's ideal to enlist your review team to help select the snappiest, most memorable title.

Prepare Your Articles for Submission

After writing each article, plan to submit it to a variety of online article directories. These directories make your content available for others to disseminate in their own publications. In so doing, they help circulate your name and material on dozens of Web sites and blogs worldwide. Some even do their own translations. Your articles retain full copyright under your byline, regardless of where they are reprinted.

Be certain to include a "resource box" for the end of each article. This box briefly describes you, your business, or profession; and contains a link back to your Web site if you have one. So, when people "snack on" your articles in these directories, their next impulse may be to follow the links back to your Web site, where they can consume a "full meal."

To locate article directories, do an Internet search. Select a few that relate to your subject and sign up as an author. Carefully follow the article formatting instructions. Most request 500-1,000-word articles, to be submitted with:

• Plain text formatting
• A short description or executive summary
• Keywords that apply to your content
• A resource box

A few examples include:

• EzineArticles.com (for a variety of topics)
• HowToDoThings.com (for "how-to" articles)
• BestManagementArticles.com (for business management articles)

The process of submitting articles can be time-consuming, however, so I use a very cost-effective submission service (SubmitYourArticle.com) to handle this for me.

In conclusion, writing articles for Internet publication can be a rewarding and lucrative experience that will reap benefits for months to come as your content circulates, your visibility builds, and interested visitors continuously follow your "resource box" links to back your Web site.

Copyright 2007 Adele Sommers

An Excellent Article Submission Service

I have been using SubmitYourArticle.com for over two years to publish articles and essays for my worldwide audiences. This low-cost service has done wonders for my outreach programs, so I highly recommend their time- and effort-saving system. Instead of individually submitting articles to dozens of directories, I simply provide the content one time, and let SubmitYourArticle.com selectively format and upload each article's components to dozens of repositories and RSS feeds.

Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is the author of "Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance" -- an award-winning Special Report and Workbook program.

If you liked today's issue, you'll love this down-to-earth overview of how 12 potent business-boosting strategies can reenergize the morale and productivity of your enterprise, tame unruly projects, and attract loyal, satisfied customers. It's accompanied by a step-by-step workbook designed to help you easily create your own success action plan. Browse the table of contents and reader reviews on the description page.

Adele also offers no-cost articles and resources to help small businesses and large organizations accelerate productivity and increase profitability. Learn more at LearnShareProsper.com.

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