Ezine Articles Basics for Internet Network Marketers

Ezine articles are an excellent way to generate exposure for you in your attraction marketing activities. Ezine articles position you, the author, as an expert in your field and a leader. Ezine articles can rank very well in search engines. And ezine articles can provide free advertising for you, which is viral in nature, and generate links and traffic back to your main site or lead capture page. In this article I will step you through the basics of setting up your first ezine article with some tips regarding dos and don'ts. My comments will be specific to EzineArticles.com as I use them and know what their policies are.

What are ezine articles?

Ezine articles are articles that you submit that are made available to be distributed by ezine owners. Ezine owners have newsletters which they provide to their readership vial email or other electronic means and these ezines require content. By submitting your articles, you agree to let the ezine owners publish your article in their ezine in exchange for them agreeing to not changing anything in your article and also allowing you to have a short author biography at the bottom (or top) of the article. The author biography is where you can say a little bit about yourself and promote yourself (to some extent). You can provide your website address and any other contact information. As these ezines are published, your name and your URL are getting out there. And when the initial ezine subscriber forward the ezine to somebody else, your name and URL go with it. You can see what I mean by it being viral.

How are you going to benefit from ezine articles?

With the great content that you are going to provide in your ezine articles, you are going to create interest and attraction and people will seek you out via your URL. This traffic can be sent to a lead capture page to populate your email list and then you can keep in touch with these people through regular emails sent out by your autoresponder. As you build this list and continue to provide email to the people on your list, you will have opportunities to market to the list with information products and ebooks and the products offered by your network marketing business. And eventually you will have people calling you up from your list asking to join you in your network marketing company. People are looking for leaders and writing ezine articles shows leadership. For some detailed examples of how to use ezine articles to help you promote your business, and in particular promoting the Renegade Network Marketer system, you can go here.

Getting started

The first thing you need to do is to go to EzineArticles.com and look for the section of the site on the top left hand side that says "Ezine Articles for Authors". Below that heading you will see a link marked "Submit Article". Click on it and it will take you to the page where you create your account. The rest of the account setup is pretty straight forward so I won't go into it here.

Before you go any further, now would be a good time to read the Terms of Service for Publishers and Editorial Guidelines. If you mess up, they can take down your article. If you really mess up, you will get banned.

Creating your first article

As in all of your attraction marketing activities, you need to keep in mind your target market and write for them. Now click on "Article Manager" and then "Submit a New Article". The page that opens up is where you enter your article. Now you will notice a bunch of boxes with descriptions. One of the cool things about EzineArticles.com is next to each of the headings is a red circle with an arrow in it. If you click on the red circle, and audio recording will play that explains what the heading and box are all about.

Select A Category: Subcategory

There is a drop-down box where you select the category and subcategory which most closely describes your topic.

Article Title

The title needs to be relevant to your topic. Make sure you have your keywords (for search engine optimization) in the title and especially the first 3 words of the title.

Keywords

Here you should put your top 5 - 10 keywords. Again the first 3 - 5 keywords will be weighted more heavily by the search engines. You can use a keyword research tool like Google's free Keyword Tool to fine tune your keyword selection.

Abstract/Article Summary/Teaser Copy

This is a short summary or teaser of the article's content. This is what the potential reader or ezine owner will see first when they go to EzineArticles.com to read an article or look for an article to publish. The way I write my articles, I usually make the first paragraph of the article like a summary and teaser so I just copy that first paragraph into the Abstract box.

Article Body

This is where your main content goes. This is where you provide and add value. This is where you give. This is not the area to sell and promote your opportunity. Leave that for a little later for the Author SIG - Resource Box. For your article body, as I mentioned earlier, make sure you have read the editorial guidelines as to your content. They are pretty common sense and reasonable but you want to make sure that you don't go offside. And remember that you are not allowed to have any self-promoting links in this section of the article.

You will have to figure out how you like to work but I find that the input box for your Article Body is so small that it isn't easy to type directly into the box. What I do is I do the initial draft in Word and then I copy and paste into the box. The formatting usually gets all messed up but EzineArticles.com has given you the option to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor so fixing the formatting is pretty easy. Just don't use any fancy formatting in Word - you will just waste time fixing it. With the WYSIWYG editor you can make you can bold, italicize, and underline your text. You can create bullet points and numbered lists. You can also create hyperlinks to other websites.

Author SIG - Resource Box

This is where you tell a little bit about yourself and provide a link to your website or lead capture page. This is your biography and your business card. You can promote yourself here but use restraint so that the ezines will carry your article. You can also put a picture of yourself here - always a good thing for developing that warm personal relation in cold cyberspace. You can actually set up pre-defined resource text in your preference page. This will save you from typing it up every time you write another article. You can have up to 3 pre-defined resource pages. I have set up one for my internet network marketing business and another one for my health and wellness business.

Two cautions here. EzineArticles.com does not allow you to have an affiliate link in your author biography. Therefore you can't use a URL such as JoeMarketer.AffiliateCompany.com. You have to use a URL like YourCompany.com. So make sure if you are providing a URL that you have purchased your own domain name. You can link to an affiliate site but the URL has to be yours. The second caution relates to providing an email address in the author biography. My advice - don't. You will get spammed.

Finishing up and submitting your article

Once you have finished all that, you should save your changes and then preview your article to make sure it looks right. You can check the "Spell Check On Preview" but you will have to make the corrections yourself. Once all that is squared away, check the "Yes I Agree" box which says you agree to the terms and your article is original and you wrote it or you have the exclusive rights to it. Then you can click the "Submit Article" button. Make sure you pay attention while the system submits your article. Sometimes you will get warning messages about mistakes you have made in your submission. You need to fix these and resubmit.

Once you have submitted your article, it will take as much as 7 - 10 days for the EzineArticles.com people to review your article. (The number of days will go down as you become a more established ezine article writer and have a few articles under your belt.) They have real live people reviewing your articles to make sure they are OK. You can see their progress if you go to the Article Home page. They will be in the Pending Articles section and there will be a little graph that tells you the status of your article. If there are any problems with your article, you will get an email indicating what the problem is. You wil have to fix and re-submit. Once your article is approved it will show up in the "Approved - Live" category and will be available for all to read and publish. You are now a published author!

I don't know about you but my self esteem needs a boost now and then. When I wrote my first ezine article, it was a review of a fitness book as my business is health and wellness related. What happened was that within 4 hours of my ezine article getting approval, the author of the book wrote me an email and thanked me for my review of his book! Now that made me feel good! A fellow author thanking me for my work!

I hope that you can see that writing ezines is pretty straight forward and can propel your leader and authority status in your field. Give it a shot and have fun with it.

C Doug Mah is an internet network marketing coach whose goal is to teach independent business owners how to use attraction marketing and Web 2.0+ technologies to grow their businesses profitably. Going beyond the old school techniques that are still being taught by some network marketing and MLM organizations, these techniques drive pre-qualified prospects to your business, allowing you to spend more time in business building and training instead of prospecting and recruiting.

If you are interested in learning more about internet network marketing please join me C Doug Mah at Renegade University. It's free to sign up.