Article Marketing: How to Promote Yourself As The Expert
Professional people have been writing off-line articles to promote themselves and their practises for many years because in many cases they could not advertise.
Generally, professional people may now advertise and they still write off-line articles.
However, they have been slow to embrace the power of online article marketing to establish their expertise and to differentiate themselves from others in their field.
One reason for this may lie in the tradition of writing academic articles for professional journals where their efforts are subject to peer group review.
Writing short general articles for mass consumption is something professional people are not generally used to doing.
The benefits of article marketing are cumulative and accrue over the medium to long-term.
This is particularly useful for professional people for several reasons.
- Firstly, in the main they are not interested in driving high volumes of traffic to their website in a short time.
Article marketing is not suitable for this. - Secondly, they take pride in their professional reputation.
Such reputations take time to establish.
Writing and regularly submitting free reprint articles over an extended period can greatly assist building a good reputation. - Thirdly, the more articles they have published, the more they will appear in search engine results.
That can bring in new clients that were previously unavailable to them through their off-line advertising.
This is particularly so if they have built a reputation for writing educational and informative articles.
Webmasters, e-zine editors and even off-line editors tend to look first for new articles from authors whose work they know and trust.
This is not restricted to print and computer based media.
Local radio and television stations are constantly on the lookout for interesting and informative content to fill their schedules.
I know of one professional person who started out writing a blog aimed at his fellow professionals.
Off-line publishers picked up his blog and commissioned him to write a book on his area of expertise, which led to him being a regular presenter on training courses and regularly interviews on local radio.
He makes audio recordings of his interviews available from his website.
He has become the expert in his field.
Imagine what that has done for his professional practice! Getting started Getting started is not difficult.
In your first few articles, you can write about the types of questions your clients ask you most often.
Because your clients ask those questions of you, there is obviously a demand for the answers.
You should aim to write general articles of between 550 and 1200 words in length.
Many article websites may reject your article if it is any shorter.
If it is too long, the reader will become bored before the end.
Many editors prefer articles of about 700 words including your resource box.
That is long enough to enable you to make your point.
You will need to submit your articles to several article websites to ensure maximum exposure.
Some article directories will review your article within a few hours; others will take between a few days and a month to review your article.
To establish your expertise in your field and to raise your profile by writing and submitting free reprint articles, you will need to do this regularly.
As a minimum, you should write and submit one article a week over a period of several months.
You will then be on your way to becoming the expert in your field.