Do you write articles to help promote your business? 

What do you do with them once they are written?  Leave them safely saved on your PC hard-drive, never to be seen again?

Well, the great thing about writing articles is when the hard work of writing is actually done, the easy bit can begin – over and over again.  An article shouldn’t be used once and once only.  An article can be used time and time again, attracting new web visitors to your website 24/7.

Here are 7 ways that you can use one article and make sure you get it working harder for your business – so you don’t have to!

1. Email Newsletter:  Send it out to your subscribed database and share it via email
2. Article Submission Site:  Upload it on to one of the hundreds of article submission sites out there for free.  There are stacks to choose from covering both horizontal and vertical markets so do your research if you want to attract your target clients.  But to make it is easy for you, the Big Daddy of them all is www.EzineArticles.com.  If you want to keep things simple, submit just to this site and you won’t go far wrong.
3. Blog it:  If your article is around 300 words or more, split it down to make 3 or 4 blog postings.  And if you don;t have a blog, find someone who does blog in your marketplace and offer yourself as a contributor for a link back to your site in exchange.
4. Create an e-book:  Add another 9 or 10 articles to it and hey presto – you have an e-book.  Offer it as a free give-away or sell it and make some income.
5. Offer it to other businesses to use:  If you send out an email newsletter, you know the work needed to come up with fresh content can be tough at times.  So if you know other businesses in your field who send out an email newsletter, offer them your content for free if you are able to get a link back to your site.
6. Publish it:  Just like the email newsletter example above, think about the publications in your marketplace.  Which magazines or newspapers would love to get some free content [or may even pay you for it!]?
7. Make an e-course:  If you don’t want to do an e-book, why not add the other articles and create a 7 part e-course.   Again whether you use this a free give-away or a product to sell, decide which is best to help you achieve your business objectives.

How else can you use an article?  Share your ideas or thoughts below and submit a comment.

When you go looking for something on the web, the first place you probably go to is good old Google.  Whether you want to find an answer to a burning question, a local website designer or the best cleaning product for that red wine stain on your carpet, Google tends to be the first point of call.

But have you ever used Twitter search?

Whether you use twitter or not, there is no doubt that Twitter is being used by millions of people across the world today tweeting about everything from what they had for lunch today to what their latest business tip are.

Those 140 character text-like webpages are being published by their thousands, every second of every day, giving anyone who wants to know the very latest thoughts, links and ideas of every conceivable topic you could think of.

But what does that mean to you?  How does all this information have an impact on you and your business?

What all this information means is an up to the second account of what is being said about, gossipped about, moaned about and raved about the very topic of what you are basing your business on. 

Let me give you an example:  A nutritional therapist specialises in helping people eat more healthily so they can lose weight and feel slimmer.  This person wants to put together a group coaching programme to help ladies get in to shape before their summer holidays [yup, you know what I mean don't you, ladies - that thought of getting in to a bikini can send shudders down your spine, can't it!!]. But before the programme gets put together and launched, the nutritional therapist needs to do a bit of market research to make sure the right content is included and there are potential clients who would buy this programme.

One easy and simple way of finding out what people are talking about right here and now is to go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in a key word or key phrase relating to what you want to find more about. 

For this particular nutritional therapist, they could try a range of phrases such as “fat day” or “lose weight + holiday” [you can see the results for this phrase here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=lose+weight+%2B+holiday ]

So, don’t just rely on Google for the latest search results – especially as Google only shows what has been indexed by Google, rather than what is actually published on the internet – check out what people are tweeting about.

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