By Michael Angelo Caruso

Here’s a great way to sell without seeming like a salesperson.  It’s called “article marketing.”

The first syllable of “article” is “art” and there is an art to creating useful content.  Article marketing is certainly more time consuming than posting a status update on your Facebook business page, but the payback can be huge.

If you can write, it’s best to create original content, but here’s how you can reconstitute info from articles written by others.

Copy/paste the content from one or two well-written articles into Notepad on your PC.  You can open the Notepad program by clicking Start/Programs/Accessories.  Notepad will strip out all the hidden code.

Copy/paste the content from Notepad into a fresh Word document.  Then, start rewriting by moving paragraphs around, reversing sentence order, and doing word substitution.  You want to change about 75% of the article to make the article your own and avoid plagiarizing.

Sometimes, it’s a good idea to retain some brilliant quote or well-turned phrase from the article you have not written.  It’s okay to do this if you provide attribution by including the author’s name, title and company or location.

Finally, it’s important to identify and include your favorite key words in in the article.  Key words, of course, will help people find your article when they search the Internet.  Make sure these key words are in three
places:

a)    The title of the article
b)    The first paragraph-ideally the first sentence-of the article.
c)    The last paragraph-ideally the last sentence-of the article.

Here are 5 ways to re-purpose the content of your new article and get the most from your online marketing efforts:

1)    Post the article on your Web site.
2)    Post a version of the article as a Facebook Note.
3)    Use a 140 character excerpt of the article as a status update or Tweet.
4)    Post the article on a free article depot site, such as www.EzineArticles.com
5)    Create a pdf of the article and post it on your LinkedIn page.

Articles that are written in an “evergreen” format can be re-posted and re-shared, if they don’t contain dated information.

Article marketing is a fantastic way to sell without selling.

Michael Angelo Caruso is the author of the “5 Cool Ideas” books and the FastLearnerAudio series.  To receive his complimentary “5 Cool Ideas” newsletter, simply send an e-mail to [email protected].