Turn Your Articles Into Profitable E-mail Workshops
by Shery Ma Belle Arrieta
If you've written numerous articles, you can use them to further promote yourself and your business, e-zine or web site.
You can re-use your old articles by transforming them into another form of promotional tool.
And one way to re-use them is by turning them into an e-mail workshop. By doing so, you'll be able to offer a new product that will help you establish your credibility as a business owner, e-zine publisher or web site owner.
Even though you'll make use of old articles, you won't be offering a re-hash.
Why? Because once you transform your old articles and gather them together to form an e-mail workshop, you add a more focused learning dimension to them. For this, you're able to create a new and effective marketing tool.
So how do you do it? In a nutshell:
- Gather all your articles and find a common theme among them. If you've written a number of articles aimed for beginning online business owners, these articles can make up one e-mail workshop. Your e-mail workshop can be a short one (2-4 articles) or a long one (5 or more).
- When you've identified a common theme, arrange your articles in a way that provides some sort of logic or flow to them.
- Assign one article as one e-mail module. If you're using 4 articles, your e-mail workshop would consist of 4 modules.
- Take a good look at each article. Does it look like you can weave the activities within 'lessons' or will it require you to separate the 'lessons' from the 'assignments' -- information first (your re-written article) and then hands-on activities or tests after?
- Do your articles use the 'you' voice? If not, re-write as if you're telling your friend a story. Do your articles sound formal? Even though you're 'teaching' something, strive to keep it lighthearted. Be engaging and friendly, but never be too flippant or condescending.
- Include additional resources at the end of each module. These resources could be online references and researches, and even more intensive lessons.
- Proofread.
- Insert your promotional texts in the beginning, middle or end of each module. However, don't overdo this. People who will request your e-mail workshop are going to see through you once they find out that your promotional texts far outweigh the lessons and valuable instructions in your
e-mail workshop. Put value over the content of your e-mail workshop first and your workshop takers will trust you and believe in your expertise.
- Put your e-mail workshop on autoresponder and set the time each module will be sent. You can use free or fee-based autoresponders.
Before you announce your e-mail workshop, test and re-test it first. When you're certain everything is fine, go ahead and announce it.
Copyright © 2001, 2002 Shery Ma Belle Arrieta