How to Attract New Readers with Ezine Articles
21 Jan 2010
Agency author David Craig, shows how ezines can be used to sell and promote books. Three weeks ago, I stumbled into the wonderful world of ezine articles. I was doing some Googling research for my next book Would You Buy That? when I found out that a lot of the most up-to-date and useful information on the Internet came from ezine articles. I then started placing my articles on an ezine and discovered that whether you are a published writer or aspiring to be published, an ezine is the place to be. An ezine is an electronic magazine available on the Internet. There are ezines covering almost any topic under the sun to which you can submit articles. They will, of course, only publish articles which fit into their editorial programmes. But there is another much easier way of getting your articles out to potential readers and bringing readers in as buyers of your books. There are several websites which take articles on any topic. The largest seem to be www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com. You go onto their websites, sign up as a contributor and can start sending articles immediately. They check them for things like libel and plagiarism and usually get them online within about a week. This is completely free – I think they make most of their money from selling advertising which appears around your article when people click on it. Although the Internet is full of garbage and any Google search will turn up millions of items, ezine articles seem to come up quite near the top of Google searches. This is probably because the larger ezines will have over a million articles and so get picked up by Google more frequently and earlier than other information sources. Because most of Andrew’s writers are non-fiction, then their work is particularly suited to be adapted for ezine articles. Your article can usually be anything from 500 to 5,000 words, though my feeling is that the ideal ezine article should be about 800 words otherwise the reader will lose interest. In your article you can put links to your website (for me it’s www.snouts-in-the-trough.com) and links to your books on amazon (example http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fleeced-betrayed-politicians-bureaucrats-bankers-ebook/dp/B00DI7DUGS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441097321&sr=8-1&keywords=fleeced+betrayed+politicians). Also, every time someone reads your article, they get a profile of you where you can mention your books, any public speaking you do or anything else which markets you and your work. The ezine also provides you with loads of statistics about how many people read each article. I’ve published just over twenty articles so far and about 600 people have opened them and hopefully read them. At the moment I’m getting about 250 readers a week. These readers are interesting to me as a writer as, by clicking to open my articles, they have shown they are interested in precisely the subjects I write about. In addition, ten of my articles have been picked up and published on other websites. So far, only about 1%-2% of article readers are clicking through to my website. But I hope to increase this by improving my articles. Just to give an idea of the ezine’s potential, one article I found on negotiation skills had been read by more than 12,000 people over three years. If you’re a published writer, ezine articles can help alert new readers to your work. If you’re trying to get published, I imagine it would make your job selling your books to Andrew and his job selling them to a publisher an awful lot easier if you can say that a couple of thousand people have already read your work online. So the bottom line is – it’s easy, it’s free and it might work for you.
