Article Marketing Strategy: Producing a "Class Schedule" For Your Article Topics

"Bricks and mortar" businesses make a serious financial investment in an attempt to lure customers to their shops.

Companies like this take on marketing specialists, graphic designers and copywriters. They'll put on special sales and give away free gifts. They'll invest a huge amount of money to have colourful ads designed to place in people's mailboxes and newspapers.

The interesting thing is that these businesses go to so much trouble when there's a simple, sure-fire and inexpensive way to entice potential customers to a business:

Teach a free class.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when an announcement was posted through my letterbox telling me about some gardening classes being provided free by my local nursery.

Actually, it was a schedule for the entire year that listed the class topics and gave a brief description, as well as the date and time. I enjoyed reading through the list of offerings and selected a few classes I was interested in. I put the dates in my diary and started to get excited about some fun days of learning about those specific topics related to gardening.

I feel pretty sure that once the class is over the staff who work at the nursery will not hesitate in helping me pick the plants or tools I will be needing for my new found skills.

Everyone's a winner! The nursery gets my business, and I get the knowledge I want.

This is just what article marketing is like. The articles that you write are like free classes. You teach your target audience something helpful in your article. Your resource box then says, "If you enjoyed reading this article you can visit my website and apply what you have learned."

Your reader gets the knowledge that he wants, and you get a new customer. That is a very appropriate perspective to keep in mind when producing articles.

I was so impressed with that nursery—they came up with a whole year's class schedule ahead of time! What if you and I were this organized?

Wouldn't that one burst of focused organizational effort take a burden off of you for the entire year, so you will not have to worry or wonder what to write your next article about?

I am convinced that it will, as a result I have started coming up with a "class schedule" for my articles.

You could think about creating some seasonal topics. Even if your niche has nothing at all to do with nature, there is very likely a seasonal element that will help inspire some article topics.

For example, the first few months of the year are months when people are focused on setting goals, improving, and learning new skills. A huge number of people take on new challenges at the start of the year, so it might be appropriate to have more articles geared towards beginners.

The end of the year is a time of reflection, looking back on the past year and learning from successes and mistakes. This is also a time of planning and gearing up for next year. Articles focused on these angles might be particularly helpful.

Now, this idea of "seasonal" topics is just to help you get some ideas flowing for article topics. A free reprint article will be visible year round, so you want to be sure that your article is appropriate no matter what time of the year it is read. It's normally best that your articles do not mention anything that specifically pin them down to a certain month or season. That said, thinking about what your readers would be most interested in at a particular time of the year can be a great help when creating a year long "class schedule" (article topic schedule).

Your Homework:

Planning an entire year might be too much for you, so why not just start with the upcoming month?

Write down the dates when you are planning to do your article submissions, then come up with a topic for your article, give it a title and write a short description. When you start writing you will be able to utilise this pre-planned article topic list, which will save you a huge amount of time!


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Steve Shaw is a content syndication specialist. Do you own a blog? Need content? Join thousands of other blogs and get free high-quality, niche-focused, human-reviewed content from quality authors sent on auto-pilot - and it's all 100% free! Find out more about automated blog posting now.