Online Articles – Why Give Away Your Expertise?

If you’re new to marketing your products or services online, one of the hurdles you will have to face is why you should give away your expertise for free? After all, isn’t your expertise what you are expecting clients to pay for? Now I’m not talking about giving away huge chunks of time for face to face consultations, or distributing products by the truck load. What I am talking about is giving away snippets of information that prove that YOU are the expert in your particular field. What we are talking about here are articles.

As you can probably imagine, there are thousands upon thousands of email newsletters or ezines, blogs, Twitter posts and web sites being produced every week, all of which need content. Most of these publishers don’t write all their own content as they couldn’t possible produce enough to keep their readers ‘fed’ on such a prolific basis. So why should you let them reproduce yours free of charge?

First of all you can demonstrate your expertise in your particular area, giving anyone who reads your article the impression that you are the expert in that particular field. This is because at the bottom of your article you can (and should) add your ‘Author Tag’ which is a short paragraph about you and your business. In this information you should include a call to action and a link to your web site, for example: “For more free Hints and Tips like these, sign up for our free monthly ezine at http://www.my-va.com/html/news.html

Now comes the clever part. Once you have written your article, you can of course just add it to your web site to increase the amount of content available to your readers and also hope that someone picks it up and reruns the article. However, if you then syndicate these articles to the online article directories, the benefits are two fold. Firstly, because these directories have new fresh content added to them all day every day (in the form of new articles), the search engines crawl them constantly and add the information to their search results. Ergo, your article will become indexed and will be out there for the world to see, along with your link to your web site, which in turn the search engine may follow and therefore crawl (or re-crawl) your web site.

The second benefit is that all those content hungry ezine, blog and Twitter posters also visit these sites looking for articles to reproduce. A condition of use is that your Author Tag is left intact, so again you are established as the expert to their audience, and again the search engines may index your article on their blog or web site and end up at your web site as a result of your link.

And finally, but by no means the least important of all the reasons to syndicate you articles, is that journalists often visit these sites looking for experts they can quote or interview. So how much would the free publicity be worth if you were to be quoted or have your article published in your industries top publication? Or what would it mean to your business if you were asked your opinion on your particular area of expertise on national tv?

At My Virtual Assistant, we provide an Article Distribution service that includes the syndication of your articles to online article directory web sites. All you have to do is write about your favourite topic, and we can distribute the articles across the internet providing you with lots of ongoing free publicity for years to come.

For detailed information about the latest pricing, services and packages available, please download our latest My Virtual Assistant information pack.

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