How to Write For Ezine to Drive Traffic to Your Websites

How to Write For Ezine

EzineArticles.om the largest article directory on the internet as compared to others like GoArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, ArticlesFactory.com etc .  If you still remember, I tried to participate in the HAHD (Hundred Articles in Hundred Days) organised by Ezine few months ago and had been rewarded for completing the challenge in time.

Writing articles for Ezine is the quickest, easiest, and one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website with just a bit of work; however, you have to do a good job of it otherwise you’ll be ignored.

Let’s start by looking at your writing.

• Ezine has fairly high standards so far as readability goes.  Make sure that your article is in English, is grammatically correct and spelling error free, and is well researched.  You won’t get far if you try to make stuff up, so check your statistics and facts.
• Make sure that your content is in some way relevant to your website.  If you’re selling clothing, write about clothing; if you’re selling books, write about books and so on.  You can of course write the very occasional article about something else, but if you want to make sure you’re driving the right people to your site (i.e. the traffic who will buy something) you have to make sure that your articles will appeal to those buyers.
• Your tone should be conversational and friendly, but not casual.  No texting language, no run-on sentences and limit the exclamation points.  However, feel free to use bullet points and headings-online readers love to read things that are in a compact form.

All right! Champing at the bit?  Wait up a minute! There are some things you should know first.

Ezine has four levels of membership: Basic, Basic plus, platinum and premium and all of them except Premium are free.  You’ll start out as a Basic writer.  Basic writers can only submit ten articles and it can take up to a week for an article to be approved by the Ezine staff who moderate all of the incoming articles and make sure that they are up to snuff.

You don’t want to stay a basic writer.  You want to upgrade to Basic Plus or Platinum by writing good quality articles.  Basic Plus is given if you’ve had ten good, but not great articles and none of your articles are ‘problem’ articles (that is, articles that are flagged as problematic for things like plagiarism, inappropriate content, or just poorly written).  Basic Plus lets you submit up to twenty five more articles, but you still may have to wait up to a week to have articles published.

Platinum is the gold if you want a free membership.  Platinum is granted if you’ve had at least ten high quality articles with no flagged articles at the time of review.  You get unlimited submissions and articles are reviewed and published within two work days instead of five or more.  Plus you get a neat little star beside your name.

Finally you have Premium membership status which you have to pay for.  Premium membership does give a few neat benefits such as being able to say when an article will be published which means you can let your readers know when to expect a new one.

So, before submitting that article, make sure that it’s well written, original, not a sales pitch or promotional, and that it’s all correct and gives information that would be useful to read.

Ok, got your writing cap on?  Next up: the daily routine!

Content is King in the internet business world and writing to Ezine is a great way to get your voice out there.  This means that you need a routine and a habit to get into so you keep up the content. Figure out what days of the week you want to write and how many articles per day you want to submit and STICK WITH IT!  If you really want to get into a habit rut, pick a time of day to start writing and stick with that too.  It’ll be hard for a week or so, but after a while it will be so ingrained that when you don’t do it for some reason, you’ll feel anxious.  Getting a routine down will make it much easier to do the work.

If you’re new to the writing game, just try to do one article a day.  Ezine articles have to be between two fifty and five thousand words and two hundred and fifty words isn’t much at all, so start with that and build up.  Once you get used to writing, you’ll be able to do more articles a day in less time.  The more articles you do, the more people will come and visit you and the more likely people will view your profile. From there you direct people to go to your website.

Finally, SUBMISSION!

Submitting your article is very easy-you’re going to be filling out a form.  The directory will ask you the following:

- Category and sub categories with drop menus.  This organizes your articles into the system for others to find.

- Title.  Make sure it’s a compelling title that encompasses your content!

- Excerpt/Description.  A short description of your article, around two to five sentences.  You can cut/paste bits of your article in here if you can’t think of anything to say. But it would be nice if you can be a bit teasing.

- Article.  The main body of your article.  Once you’re past basic membership, you’ll be able to clean up your article when you paste it.  This lets Ezine format it in the best way without you doing anything more than Pasting it into the pop-up box and hitting ‘Ok’.

- Keywords. Ezine will suggest what keywords are best suited for your article.  Click on the ones that seem suitable.  BUT BE CAREFUL!  Ezine has a limit to keyword density which is 2% and if you have more than that, you’ll have to remove some.  Fortunately, this will be flagged before the article goes to the editors, so you don’t have to worry about being red flagged.

Then agree to the Terms of Services and Conditions and hit Submit!

Presto!  You can track the progress of your article on your dashboard and you’ll be notified when it goes through and live.

Now, before you go dashing off expecting the world to come to you, here are some things to keep in mind:

• You may get thousands of readers and less than a hundred URL clicks.  Yeah, it sucks, doesn’t it?  Take it as a sign that a) you need to keep the writing up and b) you need to write more interesting things.  It’s a learning experience.  Also keep in mind that a lot of Ezine readers do it for research on something else, not just shopping around-you may be getting researchers, not buyers.
• Ezine is the biggest article directory out there, but it’s by no means the only way you should be advertising yourself.  It should be a piece of the pie, not the pie, so make sure you have your writing fingers in other places. Sometimes you can submit the same article to other article directories to build more links and traffic back to your website.
• If you have problem articles flagged, deal with them swiftly.  Sometimes they need editing, sometimes they need to be taken down.  Flagged articles that are left for too long look bad and they also teach you bad habits if you keep it up.  Fix it or take it down and clean up your dashboard!  If you have flags and you’re not platinum or premium, fix it because you’re damaging your chances of getting upgraded.

All right!  Writing for Ezine is a great way to make yourself known to the larger world of the internet and it’s very easy to do once you get used to it.  Writing articles is arguably one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site and once the articles are up, you don’t have to do anything else but write more, making them very efficient.

One Final Tip for you. At the bottom of every article, there are few comparisons:

1. Most Recent EzineArticles from the Category
2. More Related EzineArticles
3. Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Category
4. Most Published EzineArticles in the Category

You will see certain articles in Ezine having more readers than others in the same niche or category. If you want your articles to be popular as well, then try to write the same thing as what the most popular article is saying- similar content and title! There must be a reason why public like that particular article. So instead of creating your very own article with new title, why don’t write something similar that has been proven to be popular and most sought after by public.