Desire to write + challenge = valuable marketing strategy

Three months ago, the Twitterverse came calling with an article-writing challenge, Hundred Articles Hundred Days. The goal was to use article writing to boost website traffic by submitting 100 articles in 100 days to EzineArticles.

Now I love to write and always wanted to use article writing as a marketing strategy, but just didn’t know where to start. So here was the Twitterverse calling me out to do something about it. I couldn’t refuse, even though it seemed daunting!

Below are the lessons I learned along the way:

1. Well-written articles with valuable content absolutely will make a difference in your marketing efforts. Period. In just this short amount of time I have received over 2,500 article views and have had many published.
2. Social media is very powerful. This challenge began on Twitter and then morphed into a community of over 1,000 people on a Ning network. It all started with a few people tweeting back and forth about creating the challenge and went viral from there.
3. Consistency is critical in any marketing effort. There are so many ways ways to market a solo professional business on the Internet, that it’s easy to get your attention drawn to the next latest-and-greatest program or strategy. This challenge helped me to focus on one area long enough to see positive results.
4. Imperfect action beats over-planning any day. I barely had an EzineArticles account set up when this challenge came my way. Like many solo professionals, I planned to take the tutorials and then write my articles in Word, perfecting them before posting them. Not in this challenge! It was quite alright to dive in and get started, learning lessons along the way.
5. It wasn’t really about getting to 100 articles. As of this writing, I have 47 articles completed, and I’ll get to 50. Now the perfectionista in me normally wouldn’t have signed up for the challenge if I knew I wouldn’t get to all 100 articles. But guess what? It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’ve developed a consistent article-writing habit that is getting results!