Day 17 (Wednesday) - Submit your article and start researching forums

Lesson Objective:

To submit your ezine article to at least 50 ezine editors and start researching forums /
discussion boards.

Skills needed:
· Basic Surfing
· Basic Email



Welcome to Day 17 – today we’re going to work on getting some free publicity and free
traffic for your site.


To start with, we’re going to use the list of ezine editors you started working on and the
ezine article you should have finished yesterday.


Back on Day 14, I asked you make a note if the ezine editors accepted articles by creating
a field in your spreadsheet and indicating Yes or No for each one.

Take your list of editors that do accept articles and put them into a new spreadsheet. (One
simple way to do this is to do a ‘sort’ on the field that contains this information and then
cut and paste into a new spreadsheet.)

If you purchased Mail King or Group-Mail – both of these programs should easily
convert your spreadsheet into their database ready for emailing.


If you didn’t want to spend the money, you’ll have to manually send out emails to each of
these ezine editors (you should *not* use bcc or cc function for this).

When submitting, you need a good opening email that introduces your article and
yourself, give some personal contact details, and then I also like to give the number of
words in the article.

You then copy and paste your 65-character formatted article underneath inside the email.


*Do not send it as an email attachment.

People don’t like to open attachments because of possible viruses so they’ll just trash
your article.

Sample Opening to email:


Subject: <> — New Article For Your Consideration

Dear <>,

Here is a new article for your consideration. I’m sure
readers of <> will find the unique information
from “Sales Letter Secrets From The Man Who Sold Coal
By The Train Carload” extremely beneficial to them.



* * *

You’ll now want to send out your new article to every ezine editor you’ve identified as
accepting articles.

Also, you can post your new article on several web sites like:

Idea Marketers

Ezine Articles

Marketing Seek




Discussion Boards

Our next stop on the publicity bandwagon is to start using discussion boards and forums.


They’re a great way to get your name out there and develop good name recognition.


There are lots of discussion groups out there and you can search for some discussion
boards for your topic here Forum Directory

You can also find a number of forums by searching Yahoo or Google for your keywords
+ “forums” and / or “discussion boards”. You’ll actually get the best results doing it this
way.

Examples:

· Car forum
· Sportscar discussion forum
· Antique car discussion board




3 Types of Discussion Board Visitors

There are three types of people that go to discussion groups:

1. People who post questions

2. People who answer questions

3. People who lurk, or just read everyone else’s questions and answers.

You want to be the one that answers the questions because that establishes you as the
expert.


Keep in mind that you can’t just post to the board announcing your new product (unless
you have explicit permission from the board owner). And don’t put your URL unless
you’ve got something to contribute.


I always like to contribute something before I list my link. I won’t simply say something
like “I agree” and then give people my link.


I don’t think that makes you look very good to visitors of the board.

As you’re surfing around researching and keeping up with your topic – you’ll certainly
stumble onto different discussion boards and forums – be sure to bookmark these.


Also, to help get you started in the right direction you’ll get a free ebook with a listing of
500+ forums to visit.
Today’s Assignment:

1. Submit your ezine article to all the ezine editors you located.

2. Find 10-30 active forums and discussion boards related to your topic.

Today’s Resources:

One of the bonuses you received for purchasing this ebook is an ebook on “forums”.
Now would be an excellent time to review that.

If you misplaced it, here is a link to re-download the file.
www.33daystoonlineprofits.com/forumbook.shtml.

“Turn Words Into Traffic” – Jim Edwards’ guide to creating an avalanche of free
traffic to your website using the power of ezine articles. Recognized as the web’s leading
course on how to use articles for massive publicity and profits… all free!