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Get published. Indulge in shameless self promotion. Contribute articles to ezines, newsletters, and others. Promote your web site and business. Get noticed on the internet for free.

Sharing information is what the internet does best. One of the ways it does this is with electronic magazine web sites or ezines. Classics of the genre include Time Magazine Online Edition (www.time.com) and NASCAR (www.nascar.com). There are thousands more. They have a huge appetite for content. And many of them would like articles from you.

There are two reasons you would want to contribute content to an ezine. The first is to promote your site and sell something. The second is to improve your search engine ranking.

In the first instance, imagine you sell yellow stripes � the kind people put on asphalt in parking lots. If you can't imagine the yellow line biz imagine your are in computer systems for parking garages, or construction and build parking garages, or are a real estate developer. What ever you are, you want to connect to the parking lot industry. How do you do it with ezines?

First, you find web sites devoted to parking and parking lots that accept content from people like you. Believe it or not, there really are web sites for parking that will accept your articles to use as their content. To find such a site, go to your search engine, Yahoo was used for this example, and search for:

�submit article� +parking

The quotes mean the words "submit article" must be together in the search listing. The plus means the word parking must be someplace in the search result. This search produced 308 results including:

Guidelines for Articles - ... Style Rules. The Parking Professional's style guidelines ensure that its articles re uniform and accurate. ... Submit Article Online Now. ...

Everything you need to know about submitting your article to the official web site of International Parking Professionals is there for you. This technique can be used to connect you to any industry.

Web sites that accept articles love well written, timely, focused content,

generally of less than a thousand words. They prefer articles that are informative rather than merely blatant self promotions. Surveys always make for good articles (�Yellow Paint Forecast - Survey of Municipal Parking Lot Managers' would be a hit) and how-to articles are popular. But the best advise is to read the web site's article guide lines to learn what their market wants.

The second reason to put content on web sites is to get higher search engine rankings. Search engines, as part of their methodology for deciding which sites to present first, often determine how many others link to your site. They figure the site with the most links must be the most popular place to go and therefore should be listed first. Some engines rank alphabetically, and some don�t think at all so more links won't get your site ranked higher on those sites. That can't be helped. But for those that will move you up the list based on popularity, this is a good way of telling them how popular you are. If you want to know yourself how popular you are on the internet, visit the I Need Hits free popularity link at http://www.ineedhits.com/free/popularity/. Type in your url and they�ll tell you how many sites link to yours.

One note on this. Web sites that generate content dynamically � keep articles in data bases and assemble pages only on request � don�t get indexed by search engines as well. The data is in the database � not in text on a web page. The point is you might try, after you have built a reputation, to get your name and url on a real text page at the ezine�s web site � not just in the data base. That will give you the best of both worlds - more promotion and better search engine rankings.



Comments on this article? Contact me!

Jeff Gilman

jgilman@marketingforidiots.com

www.marketingforidiots.com

About the Author

Mr. Gilman is the President of Galileo Consulting and Marketing for Idiots. He brings over twenty years of diversified business experience to his businesses from government, private sector and international consulting.

Written by: Jeff Gilman

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