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Are You An Aspiring Writer? Use Article Marketing To Your Advantage

January 19th, 2008 | by Scott

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I’m going to stray away from my normal topics today, because I had this conversation with a friend last night who is trying to create a career in writing for herself. She’s incredibly talented and has completed several full length novels, as well as numerous short stories and even a screenplay. Still, outside of her personal blog nobody knows about her or her writings.

Knowing what I do for a living she asked me for advice about promoting her writing online, and what follows is a summary of what I offered to her.

There’s two basic reasons people engage in article marketing. First, to promote (or market) their web sites and business. And second, to create a writing portfolio and readership following. This is widely underused by a lot of people, but there are many success stories–including pre-Internet times–that start with aspiring writers publishing articles to build their portfolios, reputations and readerships.

The Internet has just made this practice more accessible for unknown writers to carve out a niche for themselves, but with the new access and technologies comes additional responsibilities and requirements on the writer.

For example, many writers have developed their skills through rejections. Print editors often take the time to write a personal letter of rejection to an author they feel shows future promise, and include constructive criticisms that a smart writer can use to refine their talents.

With online publishing you don’t always have an editor between your writing and the public, and even when you do they rarely take time to offer more than a boiler-plate letter of acceptance or rejection. In other words, there’s less helpful rejection available to writers online and if something you create that really shouldn’t reach the public yet gets out there–there’s no taking it back.

Still, there’s ample opportunity for aspiring writers to use online publishing across platforms that accept free submissions, and even some that will pay small fees to authors for their works. And these platforms can build your reputation and readership following quickly.

As a brief example, some time back I was involved in a political project online and penned several articles about the current political climate in America. I published those articles as op-eds on a free, but trusted and respected platform.

Two of the pieces I wrote eventually reached the front page of Google news and resulted in thousands of visitors to our project web site, as well as hundreds of subscriptions to my personal author’s mailing list that the online publisher I used provided automatically to writers.

I never had any intentions of running a mailing list for this project and so never used that list, but imagine the power of gaining hundreds of mailing list subscriptions from just a few articles like that if political writings were my full time focus?

After a couple dozen quality articles I’d have had a huge, targeted mailing list where I could… sell my political book… promote my causes of choice… or just use the list numbers to convince publishers that they wanted to pay me to write for their brand. Any author who comes to a publisher’s door with an established following is not going to be turned away without a meeting.

I read the blogs of many talented people who want to make a career writing. Some writing fictional stories, some writing non-fiction and even some who are chasing the journalist bug. Unfortunately it seems a lot of them have focused strictly on their own blog as the only online publishing path to that goal.

I understand why that may seem viable, after all there are some pretty famous bloggers out there today who’ve seemingly done it this way. But they are the exceptions rather than the rule, and I bet if you did a little research you’d find most of them also published online in places other than just their blogs at some point.

I know the term, “Article Marketing” may conjure up images of online sleazy car salesmen for some. All I can say about that is the people I look at who’ve been successful all seem to get past that perception for themselves.

Writers are marketers, they always have been. That’s what those press junkets and book signings are all about. The bottom line is you could write the deepest, most inspirational prose to ever be composed but if nobody knows about it–nobody will read it. A writer has to market themselves, and online there’s no easier way for anyone to do that other than article marketing.

There are plenty of resources out there, many free to submit and some that will pay you a modest fee for submitting (never pay anyone to have your writings published!). Research them, find the ones that fit your genre and use them to your benefit. Provide your best efforts even though these aren’t going to be on your own web site or blog, because that’s what will bring you the best results.

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