A programmer\/marketer who’s really good at what he does sent out an email Thursday morning that I strongly disagree with. In fact, the word “strongly” doesn’t even come close to the way I feel.<\/p>\n
EzineArticles.com is having a contest starting Jan 1 — if you write (and publish on their site) 100 articles in 100 days you’ll win a hat, mousepad, certificate, etc. Nothing huge, I’ll admit. But this marketer says to participate in that contest is a waste of time.<\/p>\n
I understand his reasons, but I don’t think he’s looking at it with a long-term view. Following are his reasons (paraphrased) and my response.<\/p>\n
Writing 100 articles in 100 days is too much work in too little time. With that schedule you can’t even take a day off — everybody needs a day or two when they’re not working.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n
There’s nothing that says you have to write only 1 a day. Sometimes you get on a roll and do several in a single sitting. What if you got on a roll once a week and did 10 articles? In 10 weeks you’d be done and you’d have had quite a few days off. Or do 2 a day every other day — that doesn’t seem so hard, does it?<\/p>\n
Yes, 100 articles is a lot, there’s no getting around that. But we’re not talking about page after page — you have to write just 400 words per article to qualify for the contest.<\/p>\n
But that’s not the biggest problem I have with his advice…<\/p>\n
Why even write articles, all you’re doing is building EZA into a bigger site instead of working on your own stuff.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n
That’s like saying, “Why get your site spidered? All you’re doing is helping Google build a bigger search engine.”<\/p>\n
If all you do is submit articles to the EZA site then sure, all you’re doing is help build their site — except you’re still going to benefit from the traffic<\/b>.<\/p>\n
Plus, who said that’s all you should do with the articles? You can publish the articles on YOUR site first and then submit to EzineArticles — they don’t have a problem with that at all. And now you’re building your own site PLUS getting free traffic from the people who read your articles on EZA and beyond.<\/p>\n
But that’s still not the biggest problem I have with his advice…<\/p>\n
If you don’t have a product sales letter, etc., you shouldn’t be taking time to write articles.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n
Ah-hah, here it is — the big problem I have with what this guy is saying — and why I say he’s not looking at the big picture.<\/b><\/p>\n
Do you know what the main difference between an article and an ebook is? An ebook is longer, that’s all.<\/p>\n
And do you know that a lot of ebooks consist of different chapters? And those chapters are typically about the size of an article or two?<\/p>\n
See where I’m going with this? By writing articles on a specific subject you can cover many areas in depth — an article at a time. And by putting some of those articles together you can create a special report — and by putting even more together you can create an entire ebook<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Hold Your Horses Because I’m Just Getting Started!<\/b><\/p>\n
Fire up Audacity and record each of those articles — now you have content for a podcast<\/b> that can be used to promote that ebook for sale. Or, burn them to a CD and use as a bonus to get people on your list.<\/p>\n
Now take that audio, add some slides via PowerPoint or Keynote, and you have a series of videos<\/b> that can also be used to promote the ebook.<\/p>\n
Or added to a membership site, or whatever you want to do.<\/p>\n
Because now you have content — 100% original content<\/b> that’s all yours to do with whatever you want.<\/p>\n
To the guys at EzineArticles this contest may be all about building a bigger site, but to me it’s a way to crank out content that I’m going to use to make MY site bigger, to add new people to my list, and to turn into products that I can use for months to come.<\/p>\n
Creating content is never a mistake.<\/b><\/p>\n
And while you don’t need a “contest” to get it done, for some folks the structure of such a thing is helpful. If you’re that kind of person I recommend you join the 100 articles in 100 days contest and see how it can give YOUR business a big boost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A programmer\/marketer who’s really good at what he does sent out an email Thursday morning that I strongly disagree with. In fact, the word “strongly” doesn’t even come close to the way I feel. EzineArticles.com is having a contest starting Jan 1 — if you write (and publish on their site) 100 articles in 100 days you’ll win a hat, … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-marketing","no-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jayjennings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}