Writing Articles For Profit

As you know, articles can be a powerful way to get great publicity for your company.

But one of the main questions I get is "where do I get ideas for articles to write?"

One of my favorite sources is what I call "The Cosmo Method" This method involves grabbing the last 10 issues of the magazines that your customer reads, tearing out their table of contents, and studying them.

This practice shows you several powerful things:

1. What the marketplace is thinking about (especially true if you see multiple magazine running similarly themed articles)

2. How those themes are being positioned in the marketplace (giving you a great opportunity to provide a contrarian point of view)

3. What headlines are being used to pitch this information (a powerful exercise that I recommend you do at least once every quarter to keep your headline-writing machine well lubricated.)

Since I don't have access to your particular industry's publications, let's look at Cosmopolitan. Here are just a few of the headlines from a sample issue (in creating this list, I'm leaving out most of the articles that have to do with sex)

- Once upon a time, there was a thing called sex

- What men don't tell women

- Say goodbye to cellulite

- Thoughts on thighs

- 10 Dietary steps to prevent cancer

- Classic accessories that seem costly - but maybe they aren't

- The risky business of bisexu al love

- Prenuptial agreements: to sign or not to sign?

- How to write a love letter

- What to do when you're about to be fired

- What our dreams are trying to tell us

- Do compulsions rule your life?

- Dazzling bathroom makeovers

Interesting list, isn't it? It's exactly the kind of thing that many of Cosmo's readers (young, single, trendy women) are drawn to read, plus a few other articles thrown in to increase the "edge" factor.

There's a reason for this - Cosmo has years and years of data, showing exactly which headlines and articles sell magazines and which don't. They're a great barometer of where that target market mentally and emotionally "lives."

(By the way, to reference our earlier article on systemization - Cosmo has a system for creating magazines that sells - and it works!)

And what's even more interesting about this list of headlines is that it is exactly 15 years old. Yes, I just went to my swipe file (you do have one, right?) and compiled this list from Cosmopolitan's table of contents from October 1989. (A current one would be much more blatant in the sex department.)

Now isn't that interesting? Change is all around us, but many things never change. We add more technology, throw a trend or two into the midst, but the core things that draw attention work year after year after year.

What lessons should we learn from this?

1. You need to learn to differentiate between trends and long-term issues.
People will always want to feel healthier, look better, make more money, deliver this quarters numbers, increase productivity, improve employee morale, etc. How they go about delivering those objectives oftentimes involves trends (low carb diets), but in the end, the underlying issue still remains.

While it's often incredibly powerful to jump onto trends in your PR, it's just as important to ground your promotions on the long term underlying issues.

2. You need to keep a swipe file.
In it keep articles, direct mailings, media releases, tables of contents, emails, website screenshots, sales letters, great headlines, pay per click ads, whatever hits your mind as examples of good marketing or which could serve as an idea source at some future point in time.

We'll have to talk about this more in the future...

3. You need to read what your customers are reading, so that you can know where their minds are located.
Great promotions don't try to create from scratch, they take the consumer's current mindset and twist it to where they want it to go - it's lots easier and cheaper!

4. You need to have an ongoing campaign to deliver articles to your target media.
They love them because you're eliminating work they would otherwise have to do, and will tend to run them provided that they contain solid, useful, interesting information, presented well, and without blatant pitches.

Don't have the time or talent to write like that? Hire someone to write them for you. There are tons of great writers out there who prefer to work for a fraction of what they're worth to getting a real job.

Just get it done, now!

Do you have some excellent examples of articles that you've used for PR purposes? We'd like to see them and may use them in future newsletters. Drop us a note.

Need help writing articles? Check out our audio CD How To Write How-To Articles For Newspapers, Magazines, and Trade Publications
and here's a really powerful CD for today's media world: How To Submit Online Articles That Pull Traffic To Your Website

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Tags: Writing Articles