Article writing is a great way to showcase your talents and expertise. If you want to make a name for yourself and brand yourself as an expert in your niche, then articles are a great way to allow the reader to see just how much you know about your niche. Writing an article can get you some credibility, but writing a feature article puts you a bit higher on the credibility scale.



A feature article is an article that is showcased in a newsletter or on a website. A feature article is an article that goes into more depth than a typical 500 or so word article and tends to be considered more valuable to its readers. Featured articles can be anywhere from 650 to 1000 words long and are definitely high quality. Featured articles aren't sales letters, or a spammy keyword-stuffed stream of consciousness to get better search engine rankings. Articles that are featured in publications tend to solve a problem common in your niche, provide a different and unique way of approaching a common question, or answer a list of frequently asked questions.

The easiest way to create one of these types of articles in your target niche is to know the common issues people have. You can find these questions from going to a forum in your niche, one of the groups in Yahoo or Google, or you could even put up a survey form on your site and see what kinds of questions visitors leave on your site. The last way of getting questions is the most powerful because you can really target your feature article to your site in the resource box of the article ("for more answers to questions like these go to mysite.com").

Once you have your article, you will want to get it featured in some sort of online publication. You have a choice of having it featured on a website, or in a newsletter. If you want your article featured in a newsletter, you will have a better chance approaching the publisher of the newsletter that is targeted to the audience in your niche. You can find and approach other newsletter publishers from one of the several newsletter or ezine directories that are online. You will increase your chances if you sign up for their newsletter first so you can get a good understanding of how their newsletter is structured, and what kind of articles they publish in their newsletter. It will also give you something to talk to the publisher about in regards to their newsletter. What did you like about the article? What didn't you like? This will prove you are there for more than just a "what can you give me" mentality. You can also let the publisher that you have had some of your other articles published in other newsletters.

If you are looking to have your article featured on a website in your niche, a good way to find websites is to do a search for them in the search engines. Doing the following search string will give you a list of websites that publish featured articles: "<>" +"featured articles". You can then go to the websites and see if they publish articles from other authors. Once you find a website, you can take a similar approach of the Webmaster that you did with the publisher. You would share with them what you liked about their website and ask them if they would like to publish any of your articles. If you present your request in a way that will show the webmaster the benefit they will get out of publishing your article on their website, you will increase your chances of having your article published.

Having your articles featured on a website or in a newsletter, you give you additional credibility in your niche. Featured articles should be high quality and provide value to the visitor of the website or subscriber of the newsletter. The style of approach you take with the Webmaster or publisher also makes a difference in whether or not you can get your articles featured.