How to Promote Your Articles

by: Johnson Philip

There are so many articles on the net on any given subject that any new article will be lost among them if you do not promote them. If you are not convinced, then run a search in any search engine for the topic on which you plan to write, or on which you already have an article. Any new article on a given topic would occupy something like the 50th or 100th position in the search result.

The biggest question is, would anyone look that far for an article. Think of your own unconscious search habits. Do you ever go beyond the first page of a search engine? Most people do not, and the second page is the maximum that a few go before they abandon the results. Clearly, your article should be on the first page, preferably among the first five, if it is ever to be discovered by potential readers.

The only solution is to bring people to your article, and keep bringing more people till some of them comment on the article and others decide to promote your article via linking or via recommendation. If you are serious about writing on the net, you should also aim at attaining a "critical mass" of readers to sustain your hobby. Once you are able to attract this critical mass, you can relax and give more energy to writing than promotion. However, you can never stop article-promotion altogether because the others who have written in the same subject continually compete with you to get a better position. Thus article-promotion is a long-term commitment for all serious net-writers.

How To Do It: There are as many ways as you wish if you keep thinking of ways to promote them. Here are some standard and well-tried methods that the experts use.

Place a signature file at the end of all your outgoing email that says something like "Do visit http://articlez.com/profile/Shastri/ today to see some of my life-changing articles". What you write in your sig file depends upon you, but if you do not do it, each email that you send is another loss for you (and for all of us who wish to see good articles promoted)

Place links to your articles at the end of every blog post that you make. If you do not have a personal blog so far, then I would say I am shocked. You are losing a great opportunity to create a market, a name, and a following and an independent platform for your writings.

If you give away your articles to websites that do not belong to you, for example the Factoidz site, then do reuse them on your personal site after allowing a gap if those websites allow you to do so.

Looks for Egroups, Ezines, news-sites, etc that allow announcement about your articles. (Search for these terms in any search engine, and you will find more sites than you can use).

Place links to good articles on the same subject at the end of your article, and do send a note to the writer of the other resource about what you have done. Many of them will reciprocate.

You need to establish your "authority" and "presence" on the net to promote your articles. These come only if you keep writing within the areas of your expertise, and also if you keep promoting them till you get a critical mass of readership.