Sales Strategy

Write articles to promote your business

Publish articles in publications your prospective clients are likely to read to enhance your credibility while promoting your brand.

First, you’ll need to secure the opportunity to publish an article.  Contact editors of publications that your clients are likely to read with ideas for articles that the publication would find useful.  You should develop a “pitch letter” to send to interested editors – a one-page summary of the article with an introduction paragraph and an outline of the contents.  Get agreement on a submission date and find out what their authoring requirements are.

Next, write the article such that it speaks to the audience’s problems, in their language.   This is not an exercise in demonstrating your technical expertise, rather it’s a chance for you to position yourself as a solver of their problems.  Stick to the word count and writing guidelines provided by the publication.  Be sure to provide an “about the author” paragraph at the end with a link to your website and a photo.

Finally, leverage the published article so people see it.  Put a link on your website to the publication’s web site, mention the article in your e-newsletter, tweet about it, and frame a copy of the article for your office wall.  You might even want to order reprints from the publication and send them out to your network (either as printed or pdf reprints).

A couple of tips for writing articles to grow your business:

• Craft an article that is consistent with your professional style yet isn’t overly technical.  Remember, you are writing for the unsophisticated reader who may need your expertise, not your competition who knows your industry.
• Submit your article by the agreed-upon deadline.  Schedule your time to submit the article a week ahead, and plan for plenty of time for rewrites and edits.
• You can figure out what topics to write about and which publications to approach by asking your clients a few simple questions about their interests and reading habits.
• Be sure you don’t write about yourself and your services – write about your clients’ problems and how they resolve them.
• Include quotes from clients in your article to make it more interesting and make you more credible.