Publishing Articles and Placing Ezine Advertising

As you probably already know, ezines are online electronic newsletters, delivered by email. It might surprise you to know that successful ezine publishers often have huge mailing lists, sometimes running into the tens of thousands of subscribers. Getting your site mentioned in a high-circulation ezine can often result in a surge of traffic and customers for your web site.

Ezine Advertising

So how do you do this? The first method is to pay to place an ad in an ezine whose theme is relevant to that of your website. Costs vary considerably, but you can often get these ads for less than $50. In addition, some publishers offer "solo ads" or "solo mailings", in which you pay the publisher to distribute your email advertisement as a "standalone" email sent to everyone on the subscriber list. These mailings, however, are much more expensive than simply having your ad appear in the regular issue of the ezine.

As with any form of advertising, this can get expensive, and you need some way to track your results, so that you know you are not paying for ineffective advertising. Some ezines have very responsive mailing lists, and others are duds. How you word your ad can also have a dramatic effect on response rates. In general, any techniques that would apply to placing pay-per-click ads would also apply to ezine advertising, so you can at least kill two birds with one stone simply by picking up a good text on either subject, and learning how to write effective advertising copy.

A simple way to track your ezine advertising results is to set up individual target pages on your website that are not listed on your site map or site menu. You then use the URL of a particular page as the one listed in the ezine ad that you run, and check your traffic logs to see how many people actually clicked through your ad and visited your site, subscribed to your mailing list, or bought your product.

If you plan to use either ezine advertising or pay-per-click advertising, you really should keep track of your results. You may want to subscribe to a service that provides sophisticated ad tracking. The cost of the service will save you as much or more than you will otherwise spend on useless ads.

If ezine ads and other forms of advertising interest you (as they should if you're serious about your business), you should consider a membership in a site that tracks and publishes the results of controlled research into the effectiveness of various advertising methods. The cost of your membership is quite nominal, especially when you consider the likelihood of saving hundreds or thousands that you might otherwise have spent on useless, ineffective ads. Learn about successful ezine advertising strategy.

Advertising by Publishing Your Articles

Another great way to get exposure for your site is to contribute articles to the many ezines and ezine directories on the internet. Most ezine editors and publishers are looking for quality content, and often are out of fresh ideas. If you write well, and have something of interest to the readers of an email newsletter, then by all means submit an article for consideration.

Getting your web site mentioned for free in newsletters can significantly improve your traffic, but there is a more important benefit. Every time you submit an article to an ezine that posts back issues on the web, or post to an article announcement site, you get to put your URL in the "resource box" at the end of the article, and you get a link back to your website.

In addition to submitting to individual editors, you can also post your articles on numerous "article announcement" sites. These are sites to which ezine editors belong, and to which authors submit content.

You often get a link back to your site when you post your article on the announcement site itself, and of course it is standard practice to give you a link when your article is published. Even a small number of really good articles distributed like this could result in tons of links back to your site. Not only do you get the boost in "link popularity", you will most likely get more traffic to your site from the newsletter editors and subscribers who like your articles and consequently visit your site.

Think you can't write? You'd be surprised. An excellent ebook exists that will lead you step-by-step through the entire process of learning to write effective internet marketing articles. Still unsure you can do it? You can always subscribe to a service that will provide articles for you.

How do you find ezines or directories to submit an article? There are a number of Ezine Directories on the Internet. Search for "ezine directory" in your favorite search engine, or try these:

• List-Resource.com
• The Free Directory of E-zines

You can also post your articles on an article announcement website. A number of these exist. Among the most prominent are

• E-Zine Articles.Com
• Idea Marketers.Com
• World Wide Information Outlet

I especially like the sites mentioned above, because in each case you get at least one link back to your site, and it generally gives you a bit of a page rank boost. These sites are also heavily visited by both ezine editors and web masters looking for articles to reprint.

In addition to manual article submissions, you might also want to consider automatic article submission. A handy piece of software exists to help you automate your internet marketing by distributing your articles.

This is a great tool, as it assists in the process of announcing your own newsletter, semi-automates submission of your articles to major article directories, and simplifies the process of submitting articles to individual ezine publishers. In addition, it helps you keep track of all of the articles that you've had published, and acts as a sort of "book keeper" for your articles. I use this tool myself, and consider it indispensable. You'll find an extensive list of article directories included in the software, as well as an ever-growing list of ezines that are looking for content.