Effective Reprint Statements For Reprintable Articles

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Saturday, 11 October 2008

Home / Business / Marketing

By:Eric Koshinsky

Publishing articles that you allow others to freely use and republish is an effective business strategy for online business. It is a practice that has its roots in offline business promotion. It has been particularly prominant in financial and real-estate circles. Offline, a real estate agent, for example, would write a short tip-sheet explaining the top 10 things to do before you sell your home. This would then be sent out to media outlets for for possible publication. They always included by-lines and resource boxes so that readers would know where to go for further information (and where to hire a qualified real-estate agent).

It works very much the same online. You write an article relevant to an issue in your market area and then submit it to free article directories (like reprint-content.com) for distribution. Included with the article is your by-line, a resource box, and a copyright/reprint-rights statement.

While the resource box and by-line are very important, this article focuses on the reprint statement. This little statement is a very important part of your article. Sadly I see it used incorrectly or ineffectively all too often. This happens because people confuse the purpose of reprintable articles.

Simply put, articles you produce for distribution should be seen as indirect profit builders only. Their purpose is to produce leads for your business, to drive qualified traffic to your website that you then convert into income. In order to get the maximum result from your articles you need them to be distributed as widely as possible.

To get that wide distribution you need it to be as simple as possible for someone to use your article. There should be as few restrictions on use as is humanly possible, and access to the article in a variety of formats should be simple.

The first step in this is to use very a clear reprint permission statement that is as unrestricted as possible. Putting restrictions on the use of your articles, results in fewer people actually using them. Since you want maximum distribution, make it very clear and very simple to use your articles. Your statement should be up-front at the start of the article, and not part of your resource box (that has other purposes).

A simple statement like the following is enough: "You have permission to use this article freely in any publication as long as the resource box and byline are included as-is and any weblinks are made 'live' when published on websites".

Some people also like to ask to be contacted if an article is used. Do that if you wish. It can be a good way to build a list of publishers to contact directly with future articles. However don't expect to get hordes of people writing you back; most publishers don't contact writers before they publish - even if asked.

You should also make a point to distribute your articles in directories that provide publishers with your article in different formats. For example, reprint-content.com gives publishers access to your articles in plain text (for ezines), in basic html (for websites) and RSS format (for syndication and website publishing) all from one place.

This makes it much easier for you, the writer, to simply write one version of your article, but have it available to publishers in a variety of popular formats.

Article Source: http://www.dailynewarticles.com

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