Free And Easy Traffic Building Strategy

By Ruth Duda

Did you know, you can get free publicity by contributing free
articles to e-zine publishers?

There are literally thousands of e-zine publishers looking for
fresh, new material for their readers. There is a tremendous
demand for well written articles.

If only a few e-zine publishers ran your article, thousands of
people would see your article. Think about the traffic that
could generate to your site! Your article may also be
displayed in e-zine archives or on high traffic sites that have
article libraries.

If you've been online for awhile, I'm sure you have subscribed
to several e-zines. Most e-zines include a guest article. At the
end of these articles is what is referred to as a resource box.
This resource box contains information about the author, their
site, and copyright notice.

You should keep your resource box reasonably small ...usually
5 to 6 lines. This is basically a free advertisement which can
result in a great deal of traffic to your site.

Most e-zine publishers prefer articles that fall within the 450 to
700 word range. Shorter tip articles are also very popular
with publishers.

Your first few articles may seem a bit difficult, but after you've
written a few articles, it gets much easier. You'll soon be
writing like a pro.

Choose a subject that you know about or are interested in.
Research your subject so that your article is factual.

Proper formatting will significantly increase the chances of
your article being published. Format your articles from 60 to
65 characters per line including spaces. Use spaces between
paragraphs ...this makes reading much easier.

Use proper grammar and spelling.

Proofread your article several times and have an impartial party
re-check it for you as well. This will help you to avoid mistakes.

Once your article is written, you'll need to find places to submit
your article.

I highly recommend Marketing-Seek.com: Where Writers,
Publishers, and Online Entrepreneurs Connect!
http://www.marketing-seek.com/index.shtml

You may also check e-zine directories. These directories list
publishers that accept articles and list the topics which they
prefer. Visit the following sites to help you locate e-zine
publishers.

Send your article to these publishers. Make sure to include
your resource box at the end of your article.
* The Free Directory of Ezines
http://www.freezineweb.com/

* Ezine-Universe.com
http://ezine-universe.com/

* Free Ezine Directory
http://www.freezinesite.cjb.net

* EzineArticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com/

This traffic building strategy is one of the best ways to get the
word out about your site. Your articles may bring you free
publicity for years. So, what are you waiting for? Start writing.
------------------------------------------------

Ruth publishes the "Wealth Connection Marketing Ezine."
Visit: http://www.wealth-connection.com/ezine.html
to subscribe. New subscribers receive a Free Ad.

This article may be freely distributed as long as it's
contents are not changed including this signature.

Web Site Design: Getting Feedback From Your Visitors

By Gunter Gerdenitsch

Through your web site you will usually want to have not only a one-way presentation but also an automatic email-dialog with your visitors. How can you create such a connection between your web site and your visitors' email? And what can you achieve by it?


By your web site usually you don't want only present yourself, your products or services. (Well, there are also some web sites that seem to be good only for the ego of the owner.) Normally you will want to incite your visitors to take any action. And you will want to get a message of it. Or you will need to know some details in order to respond appropriately. Anyway, all that should be handled automatically.

Apparently, there is only one way to get that information: your web site has to send an EMAIL to your account. For checking your email you can set up filters so that your email software categorizes all your incoming emails automatically, all the feedback emails from your web site being stowed away in a special mailbox. Or, even better, you can set up your autoresponder such that it handles all the feedback-emails automatically.

Many article announcement lists do not accept angle brackets in an article. Therefore in the following code examples I replaced them by square brackets. If you want to use the code of an example copy/paste it into your web site code, replacing '[' by an opening angle bracket and ']' by a closing angle bracket.

There are basically two ways how you can make your web site send an email:

1. Direct Email

Frequently you will want your visitors to enter a certain information, click a button, and receive any value in return. This value could be, say, getting access to restricted part of your web site. Or it could be any download.

If your visitors are not so net-savvy, they will not even get aware having sent an email to you when they've clicked the submit-button.

You can implement that by having a form on your web site whose contents is prompting the visitor for all the information you want to have before the action in return:

[FORM METHOD="post" ACTION=...../formmail.pl]
:
: (form contents)
:
[input type="submit" ...]
[/form]

FormMail is a CGI-script that you will have available through your web site host, if it's a good one. Otherwise you can download it for free from:

Matt's Script Archive: http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/
ASP FormMail Script: http://support.acmeinternet.com/powerfaqs/scripting/formmail.htm
CGI-Script Download http://www.raubfische.de/Traffic1.htm

However, you will still need to inform your ISP once you uploaded FormMail. That's necessary because your ISP's system administrator has to integrate the CGI-script into the operating system of the web server (e.g. by a command "chmod", if it's a UNIX-server). You don't have the access rights to do that.

For details refer to FormMail's documentation that will come along with its CGI-code when you download it.

2. Indirect Email

You can get emails by your visitors also without taking so much effort. The email will be prepared according to your code, the visitor just needs to send it explicitly. A slight drawback of this method might be that the visitor is aware of an email and can modify or even suppress it. Therefore, if you want to have unlimited control over your visitors' emails, you will better use a direct email.

All you need to do is providing a link in the HTML-code of your web site:

[A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com"]

You can have the email prepared with a certain subject text by adding "?subject=xxx" ("xxx" being the text you want to have written in the subject line).

So, the following is the complete code of a link by which your visitor can have an email prepared:

[A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com?subject=xxx"]

That's useful if you want to have control over the exact wording of your visitors' emails. So you can equip your own email software by some filters by which incoming emails are assigned to different mail boxes. As well, you can set up your autoresponder to take different actions depending on the presence of some keywords in the subject line of your visitors' emails.

Similarly, you can have a certain body text written in your visitors' emails. To get it, simply add "?body=yyy" ("yyy" being the text you want to have written in the body).

So the complete code looks like this:

[A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com?body=yyy"]

You can even combine both:

[A HREF="mailto:name@yourdomain.com?subject=xxx?body=yyy"]

If part of your body text ("yyy") is a link, it is automatically converted by most modern email software. You can use that, for example, if you want to offer your visitors a link by which they can email their friends inviting them to visit your site:

[A HREF="mailto:?subject=Visit ... web site!?body=Great downloads,
at: http://www.yourdomain.com/"]

So the friend who is invited to visit your web site just has to click the link in your visitor's email to arrive automatically at your web site.

-----------------------------------------------------
Article by Gunter Gerdenitsch, owner of '1st Components Design'
( http://www.1st-components.com, mailto:gunter@1st-components.com ).
Free articles and software for you and your web site! Many tools ready for professional use of computers. Or make it yourself from our components, with minimal programming!
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This article is free to be re-printed, if complete with this resource box. It can be included in a web site if the URL mentioned above is linked to www.1st-components.com.

Articles Courtesy Of Marketing-Seek.com