Can You Build A Business On Article Writing Alone?

Imagine you were to start up an Internet-based business.

And told that to promote your business, you would not be allowed to do any affiliate marketing. Or joint ventures. Or any external publicity. No Twitter, no Facebook, no social media. No pay-per-click advertising. No goo gaa search engine optimisation.

All you had was one weapon: The ability to promote your business through article writing—and article writing alone. Would that be possible? Is it actually possible to create not just a profitable, but an extreeeeeemely profitable business with article-writing alone?

You guessed the answer, didn’t you?

You instantly knew that it is indeed possible to drop all of the possible strategies you see online, and still generate enormous traffic—and revenues—through article writing alone. And you get that weird feeling of “this makes sense, but makes no sense at all”.

Everyone will give you the idea that you need ten or twenty methods to get traffic to your website, and you don’t. You can use just one method—article writing—and have more than enough customers to keep you very comfortable.

But it’s not going to happen tomorrow…

Blogging or writing articles for a year probably isn’t enough to begin with. It’s like having a baby for a year, and saying “Why can’t this baby walk, talk and dance?” It usually takes more than two-three years for a business to really be walking, talking and dancing.

And then the walking, talking and dancing depends on how good you get at your writing. If you continue to write crummy headlines and just run of the mill articles, then you can’t expect any one to pay attention. But once you start to write well, your ideas come alive.

And so do strategic alliances…

When we began our business way back in 2001, we had no customers. No subscribers. Nothing. Besides I was a cartoonist, not even a writer. But I sharpened my writing to the point where others started to take notice. And if they didn’t take notice, I’d, um, write to them and make them take notice.

So who were these “others”? They were other websites (blogs didn’t exist in such a big way then) that were publishing good content. They’d publish my articles. I’d open my inbox and there would be 50, 60 even 200 subscribers. Can you imagine going to bed and waking up to find 200 emails in your inbox that are not spam?

But that was 2002, what about today?

Back then there wasn’t so much distraction as you have today, but even so, if your article is outstanding, and it gets published elsewhere you can get 20, 30 or even 50 subscribers from a single article. These aren’t visitors. They’re subscribers. People who come to your site or blog. People who investigate it before parting with their email address.

We’re talking about skeptical folk here. And these subscribers, eventually turn to clients if you get them through a sequence—but you already know that.

What you may not know is the power of a single article.

A great article has amazing endurance. An article is not an article is not an article. It’s the starting point to an incredible journey. If you write a series of articles on a topic, it’s even more incredible. If done right, you can leverage an article almost infinitely.

But infinite is a big word. So let’s look at a finite universe of why articles (and the ability to write articles) is so darned important. First let’s take the leverage tour, shall we?

How far can one article go?

Let’s take where I can possibly put a single article that I write.

• In the newsletter at Psychotactics.
• In someone else’s newsletter.

• On the Psychotactics website and/or on your blog.

• On someone else’s website and/or blog.

• In our membership site at 5000bc.

• In someone else’s membership site.

• As material at your event, or as part of training.

• As material at someone else’s event (even if you’re not showing up).

• I use it for my newspaper column.

• I can make it a report (e.g. The Headline Report is a single article).

• If I add more articles to it, it can be sold (as this report will be).

• I can use the report as a bonus to sell something else.

• I can use it as an award or prize (when packaged correctly).

• I could then make an audio out of the article.

• And a presentation.

• And a video.

A single article has enormous potential
When combined with several articles, it becomes a report. But don’t underestimate the power of a single article. Our article on headlines was made into a report. It has been downloaded several tens of thousand times and that one article has been the root cause of easily well over tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But there are no shortcuts

You can’t just submit to some article or ezine site and hope to get these kind of results. If you look around you, you’ll find that those who succeed aren’t lazy bums. They’re hard working, and work smart too. And they don’t take shortcuts. They find a medium that works, and they work it like crazy.

Which brings us full circle to the question: Can you build a business on article-writing alone?

The answer is yes.

We’ve been in business all these years with no affiliates, no joint ventures, no fancy publicity, no ga ga search engine positioning, no ad words—nothing. Yes, we’ve done the odd thing here and there, and yes we do have a so-so social media presence, but as you’ve worked out, the main strategy has been article writing.

All we’ve ever done is write good stuff and make sure that our customers pass it on. 
We write good stuff and attract other blogs and websites who value good stuff, to publish our material. We write good stuff and that good stuff then gets leveraged, making us not just a very sizeable income, but also allows us to take a “three-month vacation” every year since the year 2004.

Can you build a business on article-writing alone? I guess you know the answer, don’t you?

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