From broad base of your business field try narrowing down several subjects that could be interesting to your prospective readers. Use those subjects and related materials as your article topics.

Step II: Gather materials

Once you have a topic to write about and ideas to focus on, brainstorm surrounding it and find several key phrases relevant to this topic. All of information needed for you to explore your ideas and illustrate your points you can get from Internet.

Here is process of retrieving information from Internet:

- Use Google and other search engines to find information on search terms you identified. One of best search engines for this purpose is www.vivisimo.com. Vivisimo’s clustering and meta-search method will help you finding many relevant information that you might not have thought of.

- Browse through directories to find relevant websites and get required information from there.

- Seek out specialized repositories of related information. www.bitpipe.com and www.knowledgestorm.com are two wonderful resources if you are doing research on business technology. If you are looking for articles on a topic, try Looksmart’s www.findarticles.com

- Once you collected enough information, now is time for you to jot down your ideas and related points. Note down you thoughts using some structuring systems like mind mapping, listing, etc.

Step III: Make an outline

Spend sometime on planning your article and develop an outline of article. Process of making an outline of your article will help you visualize your finished product. An outline is a visual and conceptual list of your ideas and their place in article. It should reflect your logical thinking process – way you want your readers to see it, a beginning and a culminating point.

Step IV: Write article

Write your article addressing your readers in second person. Try starting your article with something that will spur interest in your readers. Your article should consist of words within range of 600 to 900. This size for articles became a standard for ezines and, therefore, many ezine publishers simply don’t accept larger articles.

Step V: Edit your article

After finishing, read article loud. Work on sentences that don’t sound quite right. Stack article aside and come back to it in a day or two. Revise it. You will find many ways to improve it this time. Your friends and co-workers can help you too. Let them read article and make their suggestions.

Writing articles is a skill like any other you develop by practicing. Why not start doing it now, and at same time get targeted traffics to your website?

Improve customer service Ability to have constant interaction through emarketplace allows you to serve your customers better. You can track whole ordering process from payment to delivery and bring greater efficiency in customer service.

Efficient information sharing method When needed, you can instantly update your catalog and inform your customers about changes. Whether you are launching a new product or having a web seminar, through emarketplace you can share information more efficiently.

Reduce supply chain cost According to eMarketer, automated supply chain process through emarketplaces can reduce your overhead costs 20% to 40%.

You may ask, if participation in an emarketplace is so beneficial, why companies are not flocking to emarketplaces.

The slower adoption can be blamed on various inadvertent factors:

- Many companies had fall short to generate significant sales from their own websites and look at emarketplaces with a dose of skepticism. But as studies show ecommerce endeavors fail, mainly, due to lack of proper planning and marketing, as many site managers take attitude that build-it-and- they- will-come.

- Many conservative suppliers claim that their business depends on close relationship with local buyers. In reality, you can also get access to local untapped market through emarketplaces. Another aspect - you can bring efficiency to your business by co-adopting an emarketplace along with your buyers.

- Many elderly executives are not very tech-savvy and afraid of adopting new technologies considering them too complex. In reality, e-business is virtual implementation of real life business processes and not very difficult to embrace.

- Fear of price shopping by buyers is another factor, why suppliers are reluctant to use emarketplaces. The ability of emarketplace to emphasize all characteristics of product in product content and demonstrate buyer-specific pricing should eliminate this fear.

- Many, mistakenly, consider that participation cost in emarketplace is very high and will hurt their bottom line. The expenses related to emarketplace membership are, usually, a mere fraction of what you can save from use of its different features.

What to look in an Emarketplace?

As an online venue, where participants expect to conduct substantial part of their business processes, emarketplace has a large range of useful features:

- Product catalog based on an industry-standard classification system - Product search capability within marketplace and e-catalog - Buyers and sellers search capabilities - Supply chain process, i.e. request for quote, quotation, purchase order, billing system, etc. - Directory of members - Shipment tracking - Simple system of adding and editing products - Simple offer posting system - Ability to promote products with special offers, sales, and discount

Apart from these, some emarketplaces boast other interesting features like auction and reverse auction, new product listing notification, business forum, XML interface, Internal messaging system. Naturally, implementation of these features may vary significantly emarketplace to emarketplace.

Where to look for Emarketplace?

The best place to find an extensive list of emarketplaces is B2B directory site: http://www.bocat.com.

The open directory project DMOZ has a good list of emarketplaces. However, not all listings in both of these places are, in reality, emarketplaces. Some of them are simple trade boards. This list is located at http://dmoz.org/Business/E-Commerce/Marketplaces/

Yahoo! directory is not organized well enough to locate emarketplaces. They are scattered under subcategories: Vertical marketplace builders, Trade directories and even Trade.

Forbes magazine has a quality list of many B2B companies including some emarketplaces. You will find list at: http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2b/main.jhtml

To be continued in next issue: Selecting right Emarketplace.