Interested in advertising and marketing your web business by
distributing ezine and website content? Make any of these
blunders and you may cut your response in half.

Blunder Number 1: Not including an author's resource box/ezine
advertisement

Yes, there are really authors who don't remember to include an
author's resource box (the biography/advertisement at the end
of the article). That box is the whole point of distributing
content in the first place. Even if the body of your article
has a link to your website, you'll be losing all the clicks
from dedicated ezine readers who look for that box at the end
of articles they like.

Blunder Number 2: Not including a link in your ezine article's
author's resource box

There are a shocking number of author's who use an author's
resource box to include their email address, telephone number,
street address, gym locker combination, and everything else but
a link to their website. This is a big waste for two reasons:

1. Few people will contact you directly without seeing your web
page first. At that point, people just aren't motivated enough.
All they know about you is that they liked an article you
wrote.

2. Search engines rank web pages in part based on "link
popularity" i.e., the number, quality, and relevance of links
to a website. You may not care about search engines now, but if
you ever do in the future you will be pretty upset at having
wasted all these opportunities for link popularity.

Blunder Number 3: Not including an HTML-formatted link with
"anchor text" in your ezine article's author's resource box

As much as reasonably possible, you want to encourage
publishers to publish your author's resource box with the link
in HTML, using your chosen anchor text (i.e., the text you
click on to follow the link, traditionally displayed in blue
and underlined), if it's going to be shown in a web page or
HTML newsletter. If the article is being distributed as plain
text, you can include a link to an HTML-formatted version on
your website. There are three reasons for this:

* A link that says "discover widgets" is going to get more
clicks than a link that just says "http://www.widgets.com" Your
call to action (e.g., "discover widgets") is much more powerful
when the reader can read it and act upon it in one split
second, since there is not that crucial extra split-second of
pause while moving the mouse. In that split-second pause your
reader might get second thoughts. With advertising (and the
author's resource box is an advertisement), impulse is
everything.

* Anchor text, like bulleted lists, boldface text, headlines
and subheadings, has a higher chance of being read than the
rest of the text. People tend to scan computer screens rather
than read text word for word. Eyes will be much more likely to
slow down from scan mode and actually read anything that stands
out from the page, especially hyperlinks.

* A web page will rank higher for a keyword in search engine
results if the anchor text of links to that page has that
keyword.

Blunder Number 4: Only including an HTML-formatted link with
"anchor text"

You really want that anchor-text link, but it is foolish only
to provide that link. No matter what you do, a substantial
number of publishers will reformat your article as plain text,
and your link will simply disappear. That's why you need to
have both an HTML link with anchor text and a URL written out
in this format: http://www.yoururl.com/page

"But I'm only interested in getting my article on web pages so
I can gain link popularity," you say. Well, a large number of
plain-text email newsletters will be archived on the website of
the newsletter publisher. These newsletter-publisher webmasters
won't usually remember at that point to get your HTML version
to post online. The standard approach is just to automatically
convert the URL to a link using special software.

Remember: the publisher may be operating dozens of ezines and
websites, so this whole step will be partially or completely
automated, without anyone stopping to check for an HTML
version. If you don't have a URL written out in your article,
that link will simply be lost.

Besides, think of all the traffic you might have gotten from
plain-text newsletter readers. Who would say no to free
targeted traffic--isn't that why you want to rank high in
search engines in the first place?

In fact, with paid online advertising going for more than a
dollar a click on average, you really are throwing money away
if you make any of these ezine article marketing and
advertising blunders.


About The Author:

Joel Walsh is the head writer of UpMarket Content,
specializing in content creation and distribution. Learn more
about website content promotion:
http://upmarketcontent.com/website-promotion-package.htm