The Real Value of Free Reprint Articles

by Trey Pennewell

Published on this site: August 16th, 2005 - See more articles from this month

Free reprint articles can dramatically increase traffic to your website by way of inbound links. Free reprint articles are articles that have either been written by you or by a ghostwriter and are given away to publishers so that you can get free exposure.

Your articles should deal with topics in your area of expertise and the general topic that your website covers. Free reprint articles are generally informative and helpful to the reader. Once you or the ghostwriter have completed your article, you will want to get it distributed to publishers who will print it in their ezines and newsletters or on their websites. When a publisher uses your free reprint article, the publisher agrees to attach a textbox that contains the authors name and information, and a link back to your website. This is where your increased web traffic comes from.

Is it worth it for you to go to the trouble of writing an informative, good quality article that can increase your web traffic? Is it worth it to hire a ghostwriter to do it for you? Are you willing to pay a distributor to get your article out to the publishers? These are all questions that you must answer for yourself. Keep in mind that writing a single article and getting it published in niche ezines and newsletters that reach your target audiences can be extremely valuable.

If you did not use a free reprint article, how would you reach these targeted audiences? By targeted audiences, I mean that the readers are interested enough in the topic that you deal with to subscribe to ezines and newsletters that provide information on those topics. Many would say that they would simply pay to advertise in the ezines and newsletters that reach their target market. This is an effective, but expensive method of reaching your target audiences. Consider that on average, the CPM (cost per thousand subscribers) advertising rate for ezines and newsletters is $8 CPM. Now if an ezine has 10,000 subscribers, you will be paying $80.00 for an advertisement in that single publication.

Conversely, if you use free reprint articles to promote your business, you can possibly reach this ezine and ten others just like it. With some articles, you might be able to reach one hundred more ezines with the same size subscriber base, and some with an even larger subscriber base. I have been published in ezines reaching as many as 750,000 subscribers per issue. This is the beauty of using free reprint articles for business promotion; one article written and distributed one time could reach 10 thousand readers, 100 thousand readers, and possibly even millions of readers.

Suppose for example, you spend $600 to have an article written for you, and suppose you spend $200 to have that article distributed for you. In many cases, you can get a ghostwriter and a distributor for much less money. For the sake of our example, if you spend $800 to have an article written and distributed for you, and your article reaches 100,000 readers, then you will have spent 0.008 cents per reader to have your sales message delivered to your targeted market. This is the equivalent of the $8 CPM advertising we were talking about previously.

Now, what if you can buy a ghost written article and have it distributed for half or even a third this amount, and what if perhaps you can reach even more readers than the 100,000? Whenever you can spend less or you can increase the reach of your message, then you will have lowered the CPM cost of your sales message.

For the average businessperson, a free reprint article will be much cheaper than straight paid advertising, and the free reprint article will show the readers that you are indeed an expert in your field. Whether you sell services or products, the reader can see that you know your stuff by reading your article.

A free reprint article that is sent to targeted publishers by an experienced distribution service can reach thousands of potential publishers that have thousands or tens of thousands of readers. The cost of doing this varies, but the cost of distributing one article is almost always far cheaper than buying one advertisement in one ezine or newsletter. The distributors send the article, with the textbox and link back to your site, to the appropriate publishers. The publishers have generally developed an appreciation for the distributors and are often more trusting of material sent by the distribution services. Therefore, publishers may be more likely to use your article in their publications if you use a distribution service to get it to them.

Writing and distributing free reprint articles is definitely an effective and inexpensive method to generate traffic to your website and to gain new customers. If you do not feel that writing is your specialty, consider hiring a ghostwriter to write the article for you. When using a ghostwriter there is almost always a written agreement that you can use your own name as the author of the article. This way you become known as the expert and as one who offers the valuable information to potential customers.

A simple advertisement in a publication offers little real value to the reader. A free reprint article does offer value, because it gives the reader some real and useful information. For example, if you are running a website that deals with home improvements, then you may want to write an article that tells the readers how to make a certain home improvement. Give away some of your knowledge, and the readers will be more likely to visit your website. An advertisement simply shows the services that you offer, not that you actually know what you are talking about.

Free reprint articles are cost effective and can save you time, trouble and money. You can literally reach tens or hundreds of thousands of possible customers in a very short period of time.

I would encourage you to track several pieces of data in connection with your free reprint articles.

First, you should track where you have been published, how many readers you were able to reach, and the average cost of advertising in the ezines and newsletters where you were published. This allows you to gain an appreciation for the monetary value of the advertising you were able to acquire using your free reprint article. It also allows you the luxury of making an accurate determination as to whether the money you had spent to write and distribute your article matched up with the advertising value you received.

Secondly, you should track how much traffic you were able to have delivered to your website as a result of the publication of your article, how much of that traffic you were able to convert into buyers, and how many dollars those visitors spent at your site. This will allow you to determine how effective your advertising is against the cost of the advertising received. The reality is that some ezines charge $4 CPM and will not deliver that much value, while other ezines charge $50 CPM and they are worth every penny spent.

The actual numbers can vary widely from article to article. But, when you compare the results from a free reprint article to the results from a regular advertisement, the cost per visitor gained from a free reprint article will be much cheaper and your return on investment (ROI) will be much more long-term, than traffic gained from traditional advertising.

Trey Pennewell is one of several ghost writers making his work available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com. thePhantomWriters is known for their ability to get your reprint articles distributed to 17,000+ publishers and webmasters looking for quality content. Now, they have a program available that allows you to purchase the rights to use an article for the promotion of your online business, from their Catalog of Pre-Written Ghost Articles. http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/forsale/articles/index.html