From My Desk to Yours – 17th Edition
YOUR REAL JOB AS AN EXPERT AUTHOR
By: Penny, EzineArticles Managing Editor
There are probably several reasons why you’re involved in article writing and marketing, including branding yourself as an expert, generating business leads, expanding online promotion or optimizing search engine rankings.
However, chief among the reasons should be to share your unique knowledge with your readers. If you write and submit an article without sharing any of your knowledge, you may lose out on all of the benefits of writing the article in the first place. An article that’s more focused on promoting your product or yourself than providing quality content will probably not get read.
Remember, your real job as an Expert Author is to share your unique knowledge and expertise.
Informing Readers
If you don’t provide great information, it’s difficult to brand yourself as an expert, generate any new business or improve your search engine rankings. Let’s face it, readers can spot a fake. As an author, it takes research and additional writing time to turn a short, information-thin article into something with great content, but that extra effort really pays off. Taking those extra few steps and making great content is what being an Expert Author is all about.
It may seem okay to only use article writing and marketing platforms to promote your own product and just get a few links back to your site, but we won’t accept this strategy and neither should you. Each article is checked by two human editors to help ensure only quality articles are approved. This is in every best effort to help you succeed and build on your credibility as an expert in your field. The knowledge you deliver in your content should be your selling tactic, not a sales pitch.
Success in your job as an Expert Author depends on your ability to do the following:
- Understand the Guidelines – They’re your friend. We have these in place to guide you in the right direction. If you don’t understand them, we can clarify them. You’ll find that the most common article mishaps occur because these guidelines were not read.
- Write Articles That Are Worth Sharing – Great article content increases the likelihood of distribution. Increase the word count to 400-600 and deliver quality. Be careful to not rehash the same message over and over.
- Thinking About A Purpose – Most articles help you work toward one goal or another in your article writing and marketing plan. If you’re interested in generating leads, you can make your articles targeted at solving a single, definitive problem. Show off your expertise by writing on a broad range of topics. The value you provide can help others make better decisions in their lives while also generating business for you.
- Provide Value Outside Promoting a Product – Deliver quality content first and then use the Resource Box to provide more information about yourself or your company. The trouble with promotional content is that it doesn’t automatically build credibility. Articles of value provide original tips, techniques, analysis and opinions.
- Push Yourself – Use writing challenges, like the 100 Articles in 100 Days Marathon Challenge (#HAHD), to push yourself as a writer. You’ll surprise yourself with the quality and quantity of articles you can produce in a short amount of time.
- Stay Up-To-Date on Article Writing and Marketing Trends – The EzineArticles Blog shares the latest news, tips, training and resources that’ll help you turbo-charge your efforts and increase your return on investment. We want to make writing and submitting articles a breeze for you, so we love sharing new ideas and features that’ll save you time and effort. Our Email Newsletter makes it even easier by delivering insights right to your mailbox.
Becoming an Expert Author takes hard work and dedication, but once you find the right formula for you, the benefits of doing your job well as an Expert Author are endless. Now go use these tips to submit your next set of high-quality, original articles. Also, leave a comment to share your own thoughts on your job as an Expert Author.
Great tip Angela, always important to do that. Social media works well with that, particularly with the many applications which makes automation a breeze, it’s worth spending time understanding these apps, something I want to believe a lot of marketers find daunting.
I quite like social bookmarking, bookmark with google, yahoo, technorati and there is a whole lot more out there, bt the few I mentioned got spiders, they are search engines – so you can see the picture.
September 22, 2010 at 5:02 AM[Reply]