As you know a well written article can do wonders for your exposure and traffic. The article should contain good useful information. It should be of interest to the reader. A boring article could possibly brand your site as boring also. Although, someone might find it useful if they're having trouble sleeping. You might want to write about your tips and techniques and turn them into a series of articles for the newcomers that are starting out in this business. An article that solves someone’s particular problem or answers their questions is a good article. You will be amazed at the number of people that will read an informative and interesting article. Whatever it is you choose to write about, you will be starting from the headline; it should catch the people’s attention. It must make them read the next paragraph with eagerness to learn more. The title of your article can more or less determine the success of your articles exposure. Your chosen article topic must match the contents or theme of your website. If your expertise is about banner marketing and your website reflects this, then writing your article about the pros and cons of banner advertising or creation could be a good option. You article introduction should be powerful continuing from the headline. It must be compelling enough to keep the reader wanting more. The content must be interesting and informative. It must contain what the headline and introduction promises. If the content is written with the intention to help the reader solve their problem or answer their questions, then your reader will appreciate your information and continue reading to the end and hopefully clicking on your link for more satisfying advice. At this point the reader already likes your work and the chances of him or her buying your product has been fused with trust. As mentioned earlier the placement of your keywords is paramount to the success of your article reaching its target market. The keyword/s should exist in the headline of your article, in the introduction, and in the main body. They should not interfere with the flow of you message and they should look like they belong there. Your keyword density probably shouldn’t exceed 3% in your article. This would simply mean 3 keywords for every hundred words. Your article might be seen by thousands of potential customers, so it is important that you include a brief description of yourself or your product along with your name and website URL on the bottom. Your little ad here should entice the reader to visit the link. Example: W. B. Butler is the author of "The Ultimate Recipe to Making Money Online," a must read for increasing your sales, targeted traffic and web site ranking. Visit wealthybutler to grab your beautifully illustrated secret money making recipe now!

You've heard the buzz but still have some questions. Does Ezine Advertising really work? Yes, Ezine Advertising really does work and here are 10 reasons why this form of internet marketing is so powerful and effective: 1. An Ezine is an electronic magazine or newsletter. The electronic format makes it easy to respond to your ad. A simple mouse click is much more convenient than picking up the phone, mailing in a card, or driving to a physical store 2. The electronic format offers less potential for distraction before they arrive at your "store". Just think if you send a traditional sales flyer through the mail. The customer is eager to buy but needs to drive past several other retail establishments to arrive at your store and then walk past still more in the mall or shopping center. They might spend the money meant for your pocket before they ever arrive! In an Ezine they click right from the ad into your "store" so there is less potential for loss. 3. Subscribers have opted in. Opt In means they have voluntarily signed-up to receive the Ezine and were not added to the list without their knowledge or permission. Your ad is less likely to be tossed in the garbage like junk mail or deleted like spam. It is also likely to be "white listed" and so won't get caught up by spam filters. 4. Cheaper than most traditional forms of advertising. Priced television, radio, or print media lately? It is also cheaper than many other internet advertising options. Have you looked into the cost of PPC? 5. Easy to target ads and products to specific audience. No matter what your target audience there is an Ezine out there to serve it-and probably dozens to choose from! 6. No need to narrow your category like in traditional classified advertising. Classified listings restrict your placement so only people looking in that category see your ad. In an Ezine every reader sees it! 7. Most Ezine subscribers read for the free information they expect from their Ezine and will usually read each issue from top to bottom. Since most publishers only allow a limited number of ads, your ad will have greater visibility. 8. Most people buy when they least expect to, so as they are reading their Ezine they will be relaxed and more receptive to marketing. This contrasts sharply with many other advertising mediums (TV, radio, direct mailing) as then people are expecting a sales pitch! 9. Ezine subscribers feel comfortable acting on sales pitches because the electronic format makes it risk-free to respond to your ad. They don't have to risk getting trapped on the phone or in a store by an over-eager sales staff. They take comfort in knowing that one simple click can get them back out again! 10. The electronic format also makes it easy to capture more information about your prospect. You have the opportunity to at least get their name and e-mail address (if you are savvy about your offer) and potentially a whole lot more. Once you've got that then you can sell, sell, sell!

You’ve probably seen them advertised or subscribed to a few. E-zines seem to be sweeping the Internet and filling mailboxes. Maybe you’ve thought about creating your own for your site, but decided against it for any number of reasons. Maybe you didn’t see how e-zine marketing could help. Maybe you decided that maintaining an e-zine would be too much work. Maybe you didn’t think anyone would pay to subscribe, and why go through all that work for free? Well, here are some responses to your excuses. E-ZINE MARKETING WON’T BOOST SITE TRAFFIC. You’ve probably got repeat users on your site; those dedicated few who check up on you everyday to read any new posts no matter what. Obviously an e-zine won’t make them come back more frequently. They already visit every day! How much more do you want them to view your site? Then you’ve probably got those people who check you out once in awhile when they think of it. Those people might only visit the site once a month. What if they had subscribed to your e-zine because they liked your site so much and received it in their mailbox once a week? Wouldn’t that remind them to go visit the site more? And what about that one time user who came to your site, loved it, and then suffered from a minor head injury and partial amnesia and forgot all about your site. No traffic from this person. But what if they had subscribed to your e-zine? The reminder would be sitting in their mailbox, which they had stored the username and password for in case they did succumb to partial amnesia, and they would once again be able to visit your site. And who knows? Maybe visiting your site could trigger all of their memories to return. You’d be seen as the hero you are, all thanks to an e-zine. And if you simply mail out the password to subscribers and have the e-zine posted on your site, then every time a subscriber reads the e-zine, they add one more hit to the site. E-zines are a regular reminder to Internet users that your site is still around and worth checking out. AN E-ZINE WON’T MAKE ME ANY MONEY AND ISN’T WORTH MY TIME. Oh contraire. E-zine marketing can and does produce revenue. Ignore the fact that in the last section I showed you how e-zines increase site traffic and thus revenue. Think for a moment about affiliate marketing. What if you place some of your affiliate marketing links within the e-zine? By doing that you are sending your revenue generators directly to mailboxes instead of being forced to wait for consumers to come to you! Also, who said that the e-zine has to be free, or that you can’t have an upgraded e-zine available for a small fee? The upgraded version could have extra articles, more frequency or other nifty features that people would be dying to pay for. If people like what you have to say, then they will be willing to pay for it. AN E-ZINE WOULD BE TOO HARD TO PRODUCE As with so many things on the Internet, you have to remember that you’re not alone. There is an entire market out there of people whose job it is to help you market online, and e-zine marketing is no different. There are websites out there that you can buy articles from to post and sites devoted to writers trying to find freelance jobs just like writing for your e-zine. Programs can be downloaded to help you with your formatting, and contact lists in e-mail programs make mass mailing a cinch. I am not saying that creating an e-zine will be as easy as eating a sandwich, but it can be done without an obscene amount of work. The benefits are absolutely worth the cost in time or money. In today’s Internet, e-zine marketing is a tool that cannot be ignored.

QUESTION: Do you feel like giving me a reason for rejecting my article, considering all the other major article sites have published my article? ANSWER: There are a dozen of reasons why I could have chosen not to publish your article. Without knowing which of your articles I rejected, it is a hard call to make from memory. I own and manage more than 150 article distribution groups. I own and manager seven websites that are either article directories or websites that print reprint articles. I own and manage one article distribution service. Soon to be two services. I see tons of articles. Any and all article directory managers are free to make their own choices about what to publish and what not to publish. On my distribution groups, so long as you follow a few basic group rules, your articles will be permitted through the systems. 1. 2 posts per day maximum. 2. Not subscribed to the group in NO Mail mode. If you want other people to read your stuff, you should at least demonstrate the same courtesy to others. 3. No straight advertising. 4. No press releases. 5. Nothing that reads like a sales pitch. In my services, the only rules that apply: 1. Nothing that reads like an ad. 2. No press releases. 3. No foul language, or disreputable business practices. In my directories, I follow the same basic rules above. I also follow many other internal guides. * I don't want any of my sites to look just like all other sites. So I reject some at will, based on an urge or based on nothing. * I don't want to be a sheep who does exactly what everyone else does. * Bad formatting in article will get it rejected. * Perceived advertising in body of article could get it rejected. * Certain topics are generally always rejected. * If the website listed in your resource box consists mostly of information scraped from search engines, and if I catch it, I will usually reject your article --- no matter how good your article might be. I know other directory managers who have the same policy. * All acceptance and rejection decisions are made in just a split second. Chances are that your article has been published in 90% plus of the reprint article resources I own, primarily the reprint article distribution lists. Do you need 100% exposure across my networks? No. Do you want 100% exposure across my networks? Probably. If all article directory managers accept all of the same articles, then your article on their site will be nearly worthless. If there are five to six sites with exactly the same content on them, then chances are that the spiders will eventually figure that out, and then they will stop indexing the "mirror" sites. Your article 100% across the board is the worst thing that you can hope for. On the surface, it may seem good, because you have that many more links. But, these "mirror" sites with 100% the same content will come back to bite you in the arse. They will hurt your SEO rankings in the end, because these sites will be penalized by the search engines, AND the articles on those sites may be hurt as well. I am happy to reject articles "at will" on my free article directories, because I definitely do not want to be seen as exactly like another 30 article directories. Let's face it, few article directory websites are the same. Some are simply better than others and they are recognized as such by the general internet community. The site where you are complaining your article "was not included" is a new directory with little recognition in the marketplace. I set it up to test out and play with its article directory software. When we get to the end of the day, each article directory or website that hosts articles is part of a democracy. The webmaster can accept your articles or reject your articles. It is up to you to provide an article that the webmaster will want to use on his or her website. This business about expecting people to use your articles is totally off-base, and could net you the result of being forever barred from participation in the offended webmaster's website. Tread carefully and wisely.

Lately I've been hearing a lot of rumblings around the internet marketing community that say ezine advertising is dead and gone. I have to tell you that ezine advertising is alive and well -- and still one of the most effective and powerful forms of internet marketing available. There are several reasons this is true but I'll simply concentrate on three main points. Today's ezines and newsletters are permission-based which means subscribers want to receive these messages in their emailbox. Responsible publishers are proactive about giving subscribers total control over their subscription and working closely with their mailing service to ensure as close to 100 percent deliverability as possible. Ezines deliver because they have to do so or shut down. The experts in internet marketing and search engine optimization offer wide ranging and diverse opinions about what the best marketing technique may be, but they all agree on one point -- content is king on the internet. Content is attractive to search engines and visitors alike. It is content that makes a site sticky and successful. And content is one area where ezines and newsletters reign supreme. In today's permission-driven environment they need to deliver quality information or they'll quickly be out of business. Imagine your ad placed in a prominent position beside high-quality information that your target audience wants. That is what ezine advertising can deliver. If content is king then links are the lifeblood of the internet. Without links surfers could not navigate around the internet and without links search engines will not locate web sites and pages. Oneoften overlooked aspect of ezines and newsletters is the powerful text link benefits offered by ezine advertising. While most people are attracted by the immediate return of their message appearing before X number of subscribers, they do not realize that their ezine ad could work for them weeks, months and years after it was read via email. Almost all ezines and newsletters are archived on the web and because of the content they provide often those archives are crawled regularly and ranked high by search engines -- and provide you with valuable back links to help increase your search engine standing. You can dismiss ezine advertising as dead and gone and concentrate on other forms of internet marketing. Yes, you can dismiss ezine advertising, and you can miss out on immediate results from a targeted audience and you can miss out on valuable back links working for you long into the future.

I wrote my first ezine article in December 2001. I titled it 'The Power of Online Friendship'. It was five paragraphs long and contained 3 typos. I used it to promote 'The Free Promotion Tips Ezine', an ezine of mine that has long since faded into the Great Void of Cyberspace. I still think it's one of my most moving articles. I danced around the house, riverdance-style, for about 10 minutes when I read the email from Chuck Bowden, the editor of Your Ad Space Ezine, who promised to use my article. That was quite possibly one of the happiest days of my adult life. I'm aware that most of you have more thrilling lives than me and, therefore, would not find getting an article published online to be a crowning achievement in your life. I, however, live a life of loneliness and solitude and would thank you not to rub your lives in my face. I've written many more ezine articles since then and have had most of them used by various ezines and websites. Sometimes when I'm tired of sorting out spam or signing up for free promotional programs just to get 50 free visitors to my site, I like to type my name, followed by the word 'articles' into Yahoo or Google. I take a few moments to go throught the results and see where some of my articles have been used. Sometimes I find that my articles are being used in some very interesting places. For instance a few of my articles have turned up on religious websites, even though I have never written an article with a religious theme. I guess the Good Lord really does work in mysterious ways. I find that a lot of my articles get published on Work At Home Mom websites. I find this interesting (1) because as a male I cannot, technically, be a mom and (2) as a poor, blue collar, working class stiff I do not, technically, work at home. But my message still carries weight with all those housewives. They must be despaerate... My overall point is: Writing ezine articles is a great way to get your name, website, product, etc. plastered all over the World Wide Web. No matter how well you promote and advertise there are just some dark corners of Cyberspace that you will not reach. You articles, however, over time, can find their way to these nooks and crannies and illuminate them with your words. So my advice to everyone? Keep writing ezine articles! Not only do you get the satisfaction of writing them but you also get the joy of seeing your name (and you words) all over the Net. And then it'll be your turn to riverdance...

: Client newsletters do generate results. Yet, many business people who issue a newsletter find it frustrating to generate the results they want. This is why most newsletters are cancelled after a few issues. Many eventually conclude that newsletters just don’t work. Those not willing to give up on their newsletter need to get real about newsletter content. what newsletters do A good newsletter might never cause a spike in sales. However, if you watch other indicators over time – such as business per client, referrals from newsletter readers, and client retention – you would see how a newsletter performs as an investment in client relations. Newsletters shape market perception. Good newsletters help to build and maintain hundreds of business relationships with meaningful engagement. What to say? For many, a newsletter is demanding and time-consuming – especially when content that the issuer wants to communicate elicits difficult-to-measure results. Some report news to readers already swamped with news. Some offer persuasive articles or clever commentaries to readers who really don’t need to be sold. Some offer lists, tables, and graphs. These, too, come with the risk that readers might not care. So, if a newsletter is best used as a tool of brand management, with what content? the cost of off-the-shelf content In a lot of situations, it is tempting just to buy good content, if you can find it easily at a reasonable price. But what is the reputation-shaping effect? Your clients can tell when your message is not really yours. meaningful, brand aligned Because a client newsletter is a medium for business communication, and because it assumes a business relationship between the issuer and the reader, a newsletter is a medium for client relationship management. Your clients can tell when you’re involved in your newsletter. Hence the need for original, brand-aligned newsletter content. the cost of do-it-yourself content Some decide to keep the connection with clients alive by developing their own content. This entails a commitment to produce meaningful, well-written content on schedule. Many then face these basic assumptions: 1. You need to have talent and creativity. 2. You have to provide value in the newsletter, such as advice or insider tips or discounts. 3. You must educate readers on points related to your business. Put into practice, these basic assumptions stop some from issuing their own newsletters. These are worth considering, but are not must-haves. What readers really need from you is heart. survey says… Gallup research shows that the key to wooing customers isn't price or even product. It's emotion. Gallup developed an eleven-question survey to understand client engagement (CE 11). Eight of those questions (73%) probe emotional engagement. (Alec Applebaum: The Constant Customer, Gallup Management Journal 06/17/01) emotional engagement When you engage clients emotionally – which often follows from showing your own emotional engagement – that leads to more loyal, profitable business. People go out of their way to deal with businesses whose values they respect, whose style they like, and whose sincerity they like. When people believe in you, they demonstrate it with loyalty to you and bring more business to you. medium for meaningful contact When a newsletter makes people feel good about themselves in connection with the newsletter issuer (e. g. it validates their values) then it can create a feeling of connectedness. When that sense of connectedness is maintained through meaningful contact (e. g. a brand-aligned newsletter) then competitors’ attempts at wooing your clients have less effect. Why not… honor what your clients like about you? reflect their interests? celebrate your connection with them? declare the satisfaction you find dealing with them? measure engagement In addition to issuing an engaging business newsletter, also set reasonable performance expectations and measures. Rather than short-term sales increases, efforts to optimize newsletter performance should reflect long-term business goals, such as: stronger client loyalty or retention. more, higher-quality referrals. more business per client. get real sincerely Newsletters are naturally brand-management tools, and good brand management is good client relations. If you think in terms of client relations – maintaining the connection and managing the client experience – then you can improve your business with a client newsletter that shows your true colors. That’s getting real. - Glenn Harrington

As a publisher of ezines and newsletters, you know that customers always want more from your services. One way to provide customers a good service while increasing your search engine rankings is to place your ezine archives online. By placing these online, you are giving your readers a value-added service that will set you apart from other ezines and newsletters. Not only will this provide value to your customers, but also by placing your archives online, the search engine spiders are able to "see" your unique combination of content. Ultimately, having your ezine archives online will give you higher search rankings and additional keyword phrase variations that everyone so desperately wants. There are some things to consider when making the decision to put your newsletter archives online. The first consideration is whether or not your ezine model is a paid subscription or a free subscription. If your ezine is a pay subscription, you probably do not want to place all of your archives online where someone can access them for free. If you were to do this there would be no need for readers to actually pay for a subscription. However, you may want to consider placing a couple of archived issues on a website, so that potential customers and advertisers can see what it is your publication has to offer them. Then, you can keep your remaining archives in a member's only website that is only accessible to your paying subscribers. If you offer a free ezine or newsletter, there is little reason not to offer all of your archives for free online. The reason that people will want to go ahead and subscribe to your ezine or newsletter is that they can get the issue as soon as it comes out. You may want to consider only offering archives online that are at least a few months old. In other words, do not offer this month's issue in the archive for a few more months, so that people will still want to subscribe to your publication to see it when it is first made available. Search engine spiders love content on websites. Not only do spiders like the generic content, but they really like valuable content such as articles. Quality content is one of the primary things that search engines look for when providing rankings and the level of importance of a website. The articles that are included in your archive will boost your search engine ranking. Having a higher search engine ranking means that potential subscribers are able to find you much easier. Being easy to find and offering a service such as free ezine with archives gives potential subscribers many reasons to choose your ezine or newsletter to land in their email box over your competitors. Having your publications placed in an online archive will automatically provide you with a good amount of keyword optimization. For example, if you are publishing an ezine that mainly talks about home improvement, there is a high likelihood that many of the articles in your publication will contain the words "home improvement". Now when a potential subscriber searches on the Internet for "home improvement," they are much more likely to be directed to your website and learn that you provide a valuable subscription on this very topic. If you do not have your archives online, chances of picking up these new visitors and subscribers are greatly diminished. Simply put, having your newsletter archives online is probably the easiest way to increase your exposure in the search engines and the easiest way to increase your ezine's subscriber base for free. It is very inexpensive to provide your archives online, and it can improve your subscriber's experience, letting him or her feel good about the service that you are providing to them. People may have a desire to read your publication, but your ezine can easily get overlooked due to the excessive number of publications currently arriving in the subscriber's email box. A day will come when an individual feels overwhelmed by the number of publications arriving in their mailbox each day or week. When this starts to happen, they start canceling subscriptions because it is simply too much hassle to go through and delete these newsletters and ezines every week or every month. I have found myself in that position, so I eliminated the ones that bored me and only kept one or two subscriptions that really seemed to offer me the quality content that I wanted in an easy-to-read format. It was getting to be annoying to go through my email on a regular basis to filter out the excess ezines and newsletters that I did not read anyway. So if you want to set yourself apart from your competitors and offer this value-added service to your customers, you seriously need to consider placing your archives online. It is likely that you will be surprised at the change in your search engine rankings as well. Again, if you provide a pay subscription do consider offering a few issues in a free archive, so that you can at least show potential subscribers and advertisers the quality of the product you provide. Follow my advice, and down the road, you will be able to generate more income from your newsletter, because you will have a much larger list of subscribers to count as your own.