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6 Ways to Leverage Technical Articles by: Christine Taylor Technology vendors often contribute bylined articles to trade journals. The articles are great exposure for these companies but they don't come cheap '“ the trades rarely pay for these articles but the 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: Reprints White papers Product briefs Booklets 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 the market. Make sure you use the 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 the 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 the article on your client's site, avoid using a scanned hard copy of the printed article '“ the resolution is poor and not very readable. Create a .PDF file and use that for posting and downloading. White Paper Please don't use the published article as is for a white paper -- even if you retain all rights it's shamelessly self-plagiarizing, and if the publication retains all rights it's rather criminal. However, you can use the article text to form the technology section of a white paper. Edit for length as necessary and re-work the 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 the problem, a customer case study, and a conclusion on how great the product is. (You can always switch the order by writing a white paper first, then editing the technology section into a bylined trade journal article.) Product Briefs The article can serve as a great basis for expanded product briefs '“ say the front and back of an 8-1/2x'11
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