What's an article anyway, and why would I want to submit one to an ezine? That was a two-fold question and will require two answers.
An ezine article is usually composed of approximately 500 words on a single subject that would be of interest to your target market. At the end of the article, you should include a "resource box." This box should provide such things as your name, the name of your company, your web site address, email address, and a small blurb about your product/service.
Writing an article is not hard work. All it requires is some research and note taking. Use any of multiple sources to find information about the topic that you choose to write about. Then write your article in your own words using the notes that you took during your research. It's not difficult and it's something that you learned to do early in school (grade school probably). Write in a conversational tone. Write like you are talking to your best friend.
Now, I'll answer the second question. The reasons to submit this article to an ezine are varied, but not difficult to understand. They all boost your bottom line.
1. The submission of the article will help identify your business (web site) in the Internet marketplace. This is normally called "branding."
2. Article submission provides publicity, virtually free.
3. Someone may like your writing style and hire you to write articles or ebooks for them.
4. The published article will drive traffic to your web site.
5. If the publisher of the ezine that you submit your article to maintains an archive, your article may be read many months later. Traffic may still be driven to your site this way.
6. People will come to know you as an expert on your subject.
7. You might get your article published in free ebooks that are distributed all over the web. This will drive more traffic to your web site.
8. This will help you become a trusted vendor of information.
9. If you allow anyone to publish your article or email it to a friend, you will gain further exposure for free.
10. Webmasters may read your article and display it on their web site. You get additional free exposure.
11. If you send out an ezine, you could offer to swap articles with other ezine publishers for free. This provides more publicity without expense.
So, there are quite a few benefits that you could receive from publishing small articles like this one. If that isn't enough reasons for publishing your own articles, I don't know what else you'd need. Don't forget to provide enough valuable information. The more knowledge you supply, the more valuable you become. Provide real value and you will always have people clamoring for more.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Monday, January 21, 2008
Dynamic Web Sites Necessary to Stay Competitive
It was not that long ago that becoming a web page authoring wizard required little more than an understanding of a few dozen Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags, and perhaps modest experience with a scanner and a graphics program to generate a corporate logo image file.
The stakes are much higher now. The hobby phase is over. The Internet is a big business. Competition for visitor “hits” is enormous, as it becomes more and more difficult to get your site noticed, much less bookmarked. Sensing that the authoring world wanted more out of HTML then a poor imitation of the printed page, the web browser makers and Internet standards bodies have been expending the capabilities of web pages at a feverish pace. These changes are allowing us to make our pages more “dynamic” – pages that can “think and do” on their own, without much help from the server once they have been loaded in the browser.
In websites, the most important thing that a user, editor or author looks for is the robustness and the maintainability of the site. In static approach for web page authoring, you simply write a different page for all the content in your site and connect these pages with hyperlinks or most probably by using a navigation bar in the main page. It seems like a simple and manageable idea. However, when it comes to add new content or change the general layout of the site, it is almost impossible for you to go through each and every page and edit the code. In the dynamic approach, you use a database as the foundation of your web site. What you put in this database totally depends on what you need to have for your pages; usernames and associated passwords, articles that you are going to use as your content, pictures, files, basically anything that you can think of. This database can be thought as your storage for the elements to build this site. However, it is not you who is building the pages, it is the PHP, ASP, PERL code that you have written or purchased. The only thing that is left for you is to draw a “plan” for the data driven code so that it knows where to put the building elements that are stored in your database. This plan is called the template for the site which is generally created using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Dynamic HTML (DHTML). Once the site is loaded into the browser, dynamic pages in a way “interacts” with the user and generates the HTML pages rather than taking the user from page to page with the help of the hyperlinks.
As one can see very easily, Dynamic Websites seem like the future of the Internet. It saves a lot of time and effort for the authors and also the user from frustration of waiting for the pages to load while visiting a simple site with an interesting article with a lot of pages.
The stakes are much higher now. The hobby phase is over. The Internet is a big business. Competition for visitor “hits” is enormous, as it becomes more and more difficult to get your site noticed, much less bookmarked. Sensing that the authoring world wanted more out of HTML then a poor imitation of the printed page, the web browser makers and Internet standards bodies have been expending the capabilities of web pages at a feverish pace. These changes are allowing us to make our pages more “dynamic” – pages that can “think and do” on their own, without much help from the server once they have been loaded in the browser.
In websites, the most important thing that a user, editor or author looks for is the robustness and the maintainability of the site. In static approach for web page authoring, you simply write a different page for all the content in your site and connect these pages with hyperlinks or most probably by using a navigation bar in the main page. It seems like a simple and manageable idea. However, when it comes to add new content or change the general layout of the site, it is almost impossible for you to go through each and every page and edit the code. In the dynamic approach, you use a database as the foundation of your web site. What you put in this database totally depends on what you need to have for your pages; usernames and associated passwords, articles that you are going to use as your content, pictures, files, basically anything that you can think of. This database can be thought as your storage for the elements to build this site. However, it is not you who is building the pages, it is the PHP, ASP, PERL code that you have written or purchased. The only thing that is left for you is to draw a “plan” for the data driven code so that it knows where to put the building elements that are stored in your database. This plan is called the template for the site which is generally created using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Dynamic HTML (DHTML). Once the site is loaded into the browser, dynamic pages in a way “interacts” with the user and generates the HTML pages rather than taking the user from page to page with the help of the hyperlinks.
As one can see very easily, Dynamic Websites seem like the future of the Internet. It saves a lot of time and effort for the authors and also the user from frustration of waiting for the pages to load while visiting a simple site with an interesting article with a lot of pages.
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