Article Marketing Reprint Strategy – Pros and Cons

Article Marketing Reprint Strategy – Pros and Cons

By Karen Cioffi

Offering your articles/posts/e-books to be reprinted by others might be a valuable marketing practice.

While it seems most authors don’t allow their articles/posts to be reprinted by others as part of their article marketing practice, I have come across a couple of writers/marketers who generously do allow this practice. They allow their posts to be reprinted by other writers to be used on their blogs or in their FREE newsletter. Obviously, anything being offered to reprint should never be reprinted in something you are selling, such as an ebook or report.

I’m surprised that more writers don’t take advantage of this reprint strategy. The benefits seem obvious – let’s look at four of them.

Four Benefits of Allowing Reprints

1.    You have written something that someone else views as valuable.
2.    You increase your visibility.
3.    You increase traffic back to your site.
4.    You never know who will see that article/post or where it will end up.

What About Giving Your E-books Away?

I have also seen this reprint practice utilized with e-books, and it peaked my interest. These informational e-books plainly state in the beginning of the content that readers may freely pass it along. This technique generates additional visibility and is a great promotional tool and marketing opportunity.

In fact, I recently started taking advantage of this marketing practice with one of my e-books.

Article Marketing and Content Reprint Word of Caution Here
Please remember, it’s essential, when taking advantage of a writer’s reprint offer, to always keep the article or e-book intact. Be sure to use the author’s byline and/or any other text and links that they have as part of the bargain.

The reprint strategy is a win-win situation: the author increases his visibility and you get an article to use on your blog or in your newsletter, or you get a free e-book to offer on your site.

Reprint Strategy Drawbacks

Obviously, there are a couple of circumstances in which offering or using reprints isn’t advisable, such as: you wrote the article specifically for a magazine or ezine and publishing elsewhere is restricted, or you may not want to use an article with a byline that will send your reader to a site that offers the same services you do (a competitor’s site).

One other possible drawback to this particular article marketing practice is dilution. What this means is that if you have your article available on a number of sites, when someone does a search for the topic of your article, it may not be your site they end up going to.

In addition, search engines will usually only pick up and categorize the first print of an article, unless it’s revised to avoid this situation.

But, all-in-all, this is a practical online marketing plan.

Why not try this marketing practice. It will be a supplemental tool to be used along with your article directory postings. These two strategies combined will certainly generate and increase visibility and traffic back to your site.

Note: For any type of article marketing you do be sure to include at least one link in your bio/tag at the bottom of the article that leads back to your opt-in page.

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Need to build or increase visibility and traffic to your site? Check out:
Creating and Building Your Author Online Presence
http://www.karencioffi.com/author-online-presence-ecourse/

And, for more writing and marketing tips visit http://karencioffiwritingandmarketing.com

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