Free Website Promotion with Ezine Articles

The reason why you should use articles to promote your business is simple: it´s a powerful technique to get free publicity and attract highly targeted visitors to your website.

Think about this:

By distributing your articles and having them published in other people´s newsletters and on their websites you can brand yourself as an expert in your niche.

People who read your articles and visit your website are more motivated to subscribe to your newsletter or purchase your products because they already received useful information from you.

Today you will learn how you can add this website promotion technique to your online marketing strategies.

Step 1: How to write an article ?

In order to create an article that will get read and picked up by other ezine publishers, you need to follow some basic rules. And if you don´t have the time or ambition to write then you should hire a ghostwriter on Elance.

1) Magnetic Title

The title of your article must grap the attention of readers and publishers. One special tip I´d like to give you is to start your article´s title with a benefit or popular keyword within your niche instead of “how to …”, “X ways to …” or “discover the x best ways to …”.

Instead of “Discover 5 ways to get rid of common house pests” you could use “Pest Control! 5 ways to get rid of house pests”.

This makes it much easier for publishers and readers to see at the first glance what your article is about.

2) Interesting Content - Hot Topic

Write about a hot topic in your niche and deliver interesting and helpful content. With hot topic I don´t mean things that are in the general daily news but those topics that people in your niche are most interested in and the problems they have.

If you don´t know your niche well enough, visit some forums and check out which threads get the most attention ( i.e. a high number of views and replies ), spend some time reading the discussions to get an idea of the most burning questions and problems these people are having.

3) The purpose of your article

Sure, you want to get visitors to your website. But what are they supposed to do there ?
Subscribe to your newsletter or purchase a product ?

If the purpose of your article is generating subscribers, then you should use the “useful - but incomplete” approach. Your article should contain some useful information and advice but hold back the best for those who visit your site and subscribe to your newsletter.

If you have an information product (e-book, report, e-course) then you can also use the above approach, offering some useful tips and then say that many more (and the best) tips are only available in your product.

To promote other types of products like software or tangible products your article should be designed to create a desire for that product. In the case of a software tool, instead of holding back the most precious tips you would give readers the most valuable information in order to make them so exited that they want to use the techniques you are teaching. And to use these techniques they´ll need your software, of course.

4) Make your article easy to read, keeping the paragraphs short ( 2-3 sentences )

5) Write a powerful resource box

You should see your resource box (or author´s bio) as a classified ad that promotes your business. Many authors get that wrong. They talk about their experience and put part of their boring personal records in the resource box.

Don´t forget to include a call to action - tell people to visit your site, subscribe to your ezine, check out your product. Give them another benefit they get for visiting your site. Bribe them with free gifts like special reports, tutorials, e-books.

Write your resource box as if it was a classified ad for your website.

Article Distribution

Once you have your article written, the next step is to distribute it to get it published in ezines and on websites. Here are three ways to get your articles published.

1) Ezine article directories

I always submit my articles to a couple of ezine article directories first. Below are some of the most popular ones with a broad range of categories. There are other popular directories but many of these accept only business related articles. Once you get more involved with articles you could search for more directories, especially those that are focused on your niche.

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.articlecentral.com
http://www.articlehub.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.howtoadvice.com
http://www.articleemporium.com
http://www.articlecity.com

2) Article announcement lists

At Yahoo Groups and Topica, there are many article announcement lists to which you can submit your articles. You need to be subscribed to these lists before you can submit an article.

Examples of article announcement lists with a broad range of topics and thousands of members (publishers and authors):

Topica - Free Ezine Content
Yahoo - Article Announce
Yahoo - Free Content
Yahoo - Free Reprint Articles

3) Submit directly to publishers

Many ezine publishers accept article submissions. You should take the time and search for ezines in your niche that accept article submissions. Rather than just submitting your article the common way I would also subscribe to these publications, contact the publishers personally and offer them an incentive for publishing your articles.

It´s like finding a joint venture partner and very important to build a good relationship with these publishers, especially when they have big subscriber lists, because your future articles will be more likely picked up when the publishers already know you as an author who provides quality content.

Over time you should build your own article announcement list and invite publishers to subscribe to it to get your latest articles. Again, offering incentives for subscribing would be advisable. One incentive could be that you write a few articles that are designed to promote certain products or services in your niche and allow the publishers to include their affiliate links to these products.

Ease Up Your Article Promotions

If you are going to make big use of articles, then you´ll notice that keeping track of your article promotions / distribution ain´t that easy.

That´s why smart marketers have created software tools to save you time in your article promotions while others are offering article distribution services.

´Til now I haven´t used any distribution service yet, so I can´t recommend any. Sure, a distribution service is the easiest way to get your article out there, but you´ll need to pay for each article and this can sum up quickly.

Also, how can you be sure they carefully select the ezine publishers, article directories and announcement lists to which they submit your articles and don´t just send it to everybody.

And then, some of the most popular article directories (like ezinearticles.com) require that you create an author account with them, so you´ll still need to submit your articles to some places by yourself.

Another way to ease up your article distribution and to keep a detailed record of it is to use article submission software. Here are some of the tools available today:

Article Announcer - 400+ $
Article Submitter Pro - 169 $
Ezine Announcer - 69 $

Article Announcer actually is more than just the software, it´s a complete course that teaches you how to use articles to promote your business. Honestly I think this package is very much hyped-/made-up and way too expensive. It consists of 1 CD ROM with the software and videos that show how to use it and another 4 Audio CDs with Jason Potash interviewing John Reese (Traffic Secrets) on the secrets of writing good articles and resource boxes.

The software itself is quite ok and easy to use. However, many of the directory listings and ezine publishers listed here are business and marketing related, so if you are in a different niche you´ll still need to spend time adding resources to the software.

Another thing that I didn´t like is the high shipping cost and the long time it took for the package to arrive. If at least the software would be available for immediate download or if there was a “software only” version (without the additional audios) for 97 $, I would recommend it.

Article Submitter Pro is pretty much the same type of software like Article Announcer, you can currently get a demo version from the link above. Pretty easy interface, too. An extra feature of this tool is that it can grab articles from your website and prepare them for distribution.

Check out the demo before you buy it.

And last but not least - EzineAnnouncer - the cheapest in the list and the one which has more features and is loaded with more resources than the two software tools above.

In addition to storing the details about your ezine and using the software to submit your newsletter to ezine directories you can use it to store and distribute your articles and keep track of your submissions. The interface is similar to the one of Article Announcer but due to additional features it contains more fields to fill out and requires more time to get used to.

EzineAnnouncer comes with a full year money-back guarantee, so you have plenty of time to use it and see if it benefits your business enough.

Get Ezine Announcer.

Whishing you success with your articles !

Guido
TheJungleMarketer