The short answer is “Yes! It works” and here’s 10 reasons why:

~ 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

~ 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.

~ 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.

~ 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?

~ 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!

~ 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!

~ 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.

~ 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!

~ 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!

~ 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!

As the owner of two article directories ( Links are in the footer ) I can tell you what I’m looking for when I review the articles submitted to my article directories.

First of all, please be sure you are submitting original content that you OWN. It’s perfectly fine to employ a ghost writer , but make sure that when you pay someone to write your articles that they are unique and that you own complete copyright to the article. If they are selling the same article to hundreds of people I do not want it submitted to my article directories.

ORIGINAL is the keyword that you should place in the front of your mind. There are tons of sites and pieces of software out there today that are scraping content and then using word replacement on someone else’s article. Let me be clear about this. It is plagiarism. It is STEALING. Any good copyright lawyer is going to sue you and win if you use these methods to generate articles.

You must actually produce original content to be successful in article marketing. Period.

Another big no-no in my book is ’cut and paste’ articles. Do not submit articles that are simply cut and pasted from some other source. I get submissions all the time that are obviously taken from wiki sites, dictionaries, and professional glossaries, and these articles are denied immediately. Every single day someone submits an article to me that contains a ’glossary of terms’ for a certain subject. Give me a break. Please submit an actual article.

Once again, produce and submit original content. Period.

Don’t try to be sneaky with your articles. This includes writing articles titled ‘My article, Part 7’ , in the hopes that the surfer will come to your site looking for the rest of the story. I now delete all ‘series’ titled articles unless the entire series has been submitted to me all at once. I even CREATED a special category for series articles.

Your title is important. Just like a newspaper headline, you are trying to quickly grab the reader’s attention. Be short and concise. Be sensational! Be creative! If you have a mile long boring paragraph for a title like “The Technical Wording Of Router Design As Designated By Cisco In Their Corporate Interoffice Memorandum Circa September 2004’ or some other long gibberish, I’m going to delete it. Title your article with something that is going to actually get them to read it. They actually have to read the article for your link back to drive traffic to your site. Plus, other webmasters are not going to reprint your article if you don’t keep it short and sweet.

There’s much, much more that you can consider when marketing your articles, but these are the basics. If you would like to learn more about ethical article marketing I have setup a forum where webmasters are discussing article marketing and more. You are more than welcome to join up and jump right in: http://www.affiliatewebdesign.com

In closing, if you get anything at all from this article, please let it be ethics. Anything you do in business should be moral and ethical. It’s you that has to face yourself in the mirror each morning. It’s you that has to look your children in the eye. Unethical marketing of any type may pay off in the short term, but will eventually kill your online business in the long run. Stay ethical and create original promotional content. It will take you to the top.

Till next time,

However, my favorite form of marketing is the free kind. Anything free I like, especially if it helps my websites make more money without increasing my advertising costs.

Here are three easy and quick ways to market your website at no additional cost.

1. Free Business Cards

Free business cards are a staple in my advertising arsenal. You can leave them everywhere and give them to anyone. The best part is, they are free! Use them where you want, when you want, and as often as possible. That is the motto I live by whenever I get a shipment of free business cards in the mail.

2. Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are a great way of spreading Page Rank, but also of sharing visitors. Most people who like a site will bookmark it. After they have read everything they want, they will read the site that you link to. You get the visitors, and share the visitor through a link exchange.

3. Business card networking

After you have received your free business cards, use them to network with other people. Everytime you meet someone, hand them one of your free business cards. After that, ask for one of their business cards in exchange. If they don’t have one, make sure you mention what you do, and the website address that is also listed on your free business card. Free business cards make a great networking tool if you will put them to use. Never forget, they are free, and should not be used sparingly. Use them in any situation you can think of. People will take them home and visit your site when they pull your business card out of their pocket.

With those three free website marketing ideas, your website will not only be more successful, but you won’t have to spend any of your hard earned money on marketing!

First of all, most of the SEO Gurus caught on to article marketing late in the game, then scrambled to create their own definitions of it at the last minute so it didn’t appear they were ever not aware of the power of article marketing.

In general, article marketing is where you write an article on a topic that is related to your website topic. Not a promotional article for your website, but an article about something that is informative to the reader. In the article you use keywords and phrases that relate to your topic as well, much like you would optimize a webpage. Your article when reprinted will be the text of a webpage or webpages.

In the author bio section at the bottom is some info about you and links to your website. It is suggested that you put in one link to your main page and one to an interior page that fits the article you are writing.

If your article is submitted to websites that take article submissions and offers free content to webmasters, then webmasters choose to repost your article on their websites, the links in the author bio section become links from their websites to your website.

Now lets go on to the myths and facts about article marketing.

MYTH: Article marketing doesn’t really help you all that much.

FACT: Article Marketing can help you increase your link popularity and be a source of some of the most targeted traffic you can get.

MYTH: Reprinted Articles only get indexed as supplemental pages, therefore it doesn’t help enough to make it worthwhile.

FACT: Depending on where the article gets submitted to, the article itself can get a top 10 listing in major search engines and not as a supplemental page.

MYTH: Submitting your article everywhere creates duplicate content and the search engines will punish or discount those pages as a result.

FACT: If search engines punished duplicate content in the way that myth suggests then all rss feeds that cause a post in a blog to be reproduced to be discounted or published and they are not. The New York Times articles and CNN stuff is blasted all over the web and are not punished or discounted.

Duplicate content is two webpages that are around 70% similar, not two webpages that have similar text on them.

MYTH: The only way article marketing works is you write an article then submit it to thousands of article submission websites.

FACT: There is more than one way to make article marketing work for you. The way mentioned above works okay if you are looking to get a lot of links back to your website whether they are related or not and can be effective if you currently have very little or no link popularity at all.

Another way is to hand submit your article to article submission websites that only accept articles related to your topic. This is more difficult but the links help you more just through the submissions and it’s more likely that the websites that pick up and repost your article will be also related to your topic which can help you with better links and targeted traffic.

Yet another way is to write a very high quality article that you really take your time on and research. You then choose a very high traffic website related to your topic. One that has great PR and a lot of visitors.

Email them your article and offer them an exclusive if they will print your article with your links included in the bio. If your article is of good quality and they get an exclusive you have a good chance they will post your article there.

This one posting of your article can be more powerful than the mass submitted article method if you choose the website you submit it to carefully.

Last but not least, posting your article exclusively on your own website is a great way to add fresh content and if the article is good, people will link directly to the article increasing both traffic and PR for your webpage where you posted the article. But for this to work you need to already have some traffic to work with.

MYTH: You should always post your article in your website first, then wait to get crawled by the search engines before submitting the article elsewhere.

FACT: Adding articles to your own website is called adding content. Submitting those articles to other websites is called article marketing. With article marketing you don’t want the article indexed on your website first.

Yes you read that right. You do not want the article indexed on your website first. You are or should already be doing SEO on your website and adding fresh content to your website for the search engines to get traffic from them.

Submitting articles to other websites and having the search engines find it there first gives another gateway that people can find your website through.

If the websites that you submitted your articles to get crawled often, then having your article appear there with the links intact will get your website crawled as well.

If the websites you submitted your article to are getting indexed well by the search engines, then your article being found on their website first might get it in the top 10 results.

Placing it into your own website with no or low PR might not have gotten the article indexed at all.

I hope this article will clear up some of the myths about article marketing and that it has helped you understand how and why it works.