6 Ways to Leverage Technical ArticlesWritten by Christine Taylor
6 Ways to Leverage Technical Articles by Christine TaylorTechnology vendors often contribute bylined articles to trade journals. The articles are great exposure for these companies but they don't come cheap – trades rarely pay for these articles but vendors spend time and resources to assign pieces, write them, approve them and submit them. Your PR agency can help your clients leverage their investment by wringing top value out of these articles. Here are some possibilities: 1.Reprints 2.White papers 3.Product briefs 4.Booklets 5.Speech outline and handouts Reprints It's pretty galling to contribute a byline to a publication, only to turn around and spend major bucks for reprint rights. But reprints are good things: they significantly increase your client’s exposure to market. Make sure you use reprints anywhere you can, including press kits, presentation handouts and conference take-aways. Post them on your site too. Even if you haven’t paid for electronic rights you can probably link to publication’s URL, assuming they’ve posted your article online. (It doesn’t hurt to ask.) If you’ve got digital reprint rights and are posting article on your client’s site, avoid using a scanned hard copy of printed article – resolution is poor and not very readable. Create a .PDF file and use that for posting and downloading. White Paper Please don’t use published article as is for a white paper -- even if you retain all rights it's shamelessly self-plagiarizing, and if publication retains all rights it's rather criminal. However, you can use article text to form technology section of a white paper. Edit for length as necessary and re-work text to emphasize your client’s product and technology take. Then add white paper elements like a beginning executive summary and a problem statement. Follow these with your technology section, and then add details on how your client’s product will solve problem, a customer case study, and a conclusion on how great product is. (You can always switch order by writing a white paper first, then editing technology section into a bylined trade journal article.)
| | Dreading the Writing Assignment? Outlines to the RescueWritten by Christine Taylor
Dreading Writing Assignment? Outlines to Rescue By Christine TaylorWriting technical articles is a challenge. There you sit, surrounded by reams of research, notes and interviews. Where do you start? Remember 5th grade English? You start with an outline. Outlining has fallen on hard times lately. Mind mapping and brainstorming are much more fashionable. These techniques are great when generating ideas, but once you’ve got your ideas germinating you’ve got to outline them. Without an outline, your article will: 1.Be an unstructured mess. 2.Take three times as long to write. Don’t let this happen to you – outline. If it’s been a while since 5th grade – or if your “progressive” school didn’t stoop to teach you actual English skills – let me remind you why it’s important and how to do it. •Outlining keeps you from writing an unstructured mess. Readers, especially American readers, prefer distinct sections in their media. For example, look at American screenplays. Movies invariably have three acts, and anything that doesn’t have them is considered an art film. Effective speeches often contain three parts, and readers like three points because structure makes easier to retain information.
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