By now, most internet marketers have been convinced of the value of writing and distributing ezine articles. You write articles on your area of expertise then allow others to reproduce them in their newsletters, print publications, and ebooks, or post them on their websites. The benefits of doing this are:
- They are publicizing you and increasing your credibility and name recognition.
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- By including a link back to your site and/or autoresponder in your resource box they are sending you new visitors and customers.
- Aside from the time involved, it's free or nearly free publicity that is more effective than most paid advertising.
However, there are some things you need to know in order to super-charge your ezine article writing. That is, if you want your articles to drive more than a trickle of traffic your way there are insider techniques that you need to understand.
There are little things about article writing that significantly increase your return on the resources you invest.
First, you need to acknowledge that many people you will submit your material to have tons of articles to choose from. I use to get 30 - 50 articles per week, and I only used 2 a week at the time. Now I rarely run guest articles in my ezine.
Knowing that you contend with many competing writers, you can gain an advantage by incentivizing publishers. After you make sure that your article contains information of genuine value to their readers, add something that directly benefits the publisher...
I sometimes do this by allowing publishers to replace the URL in my resource box with an affiliate URL for one of my products. This allows them to earn extra money directly from running my articles.
Other times, I offer some special gift that is personalized for subscribers to a particular ezine. That allows them to make their subscribers feel special. I'm sure that if you use your imagination you can come up with many similar ideas.
Next, try to put some bounceback offer in your articles. This is what drives them to your website. This bounceback could be a free gift or report that they can collect by visiting your website.
If you don't want to force the visitor to your site in order to collect the gift you can also make it available via autoresponder.
You could also make the incentive available both from your site AND autoresponder. Either way, you capture their contact information and then follow-up offering them related information, products or services. If they are subscribed to an autoresponder series always include a way for them to unsubscribe themselves, and explain how they got on your list in the first place.
The biggest problem faced by many writers is how to get their articles in front of enough interested publishers. I do this two ways:
First, I submit articles through article submission lists. These are email lists that writers and publishers join. All members of the lists generally get all article submitted to the group, although you can also generally elect to read posting to the group online only. As a group member you can submit your articles and include your publication guidelines (generally you just want to require that the resource box be included and that the article be published unchanged.
My favorite such lists are those you can join freely through Yahoo Groups.
There is a whole SCIENCE to maximizing the results from the lists at Yahoo Groups and one of the best ebooks I've seen on the subject is "Yahoo Groups - the Free and Easy Way to promote your business and drive a boatload of traffic to your websites using Yahoo Groups!" You can download it with my compliments here: http://TheRealSecrets.com/YahooGroupPromotions.pdf
I also use several paid article submission services. These services allow you to submit your articles through an online form, and then they blast them out to their constantly updated list of publishers. They send your articles only to the category of publisher that your articles are appropriate for. Two of these services I use to send out articles practically every week are at:
http://www.ezinetrendz.com and
http://www.submityourarticle.com
Each time that I submit an article through either of the above services, I get emails from between 20 and 50 publishers and webmasters telling me that they have/will published my article or posted it to their websites. I've received as many as 700+ new subscribers in a day from having one of my articles published. This
article WAS the exception and was run in a very big ezine, but the others all produce results too.
Another thing I sometimes do is manually post my articles to websites that allow this. Since searching for website to manually do this on can be time and labor intensive, I do it the smart way. I keep all of my recent articles handy in text files. I also keep some posted to autoresponders and webpages. When I come across a site that invites you to post your articles, I post as many as appropriate all in one visit :-)
The reason that I keep article posted to autoresponders and on webpages is that many of these sites will also ask for your autoresponder and webpage addresses. They want their visitors to be able to quickly retrieve your articles in several formats... epending upon their needs. Also, you should post your articles to your site to allow the search engines to index these keyword rich pages.
There you have a brief summary of how to drive massive traffic, subscribers and sales to your site. It's the quick and easy way that I personally do it :-) Submit your articles to appropriate publishers and website. Publishers often post back issues in online archives. You get an immediate surge in traffic, and then a steady trickle of traffic for years to come. With enough articles in circulation, this traffic really can become MASSIVE!