Webmasters and Entrepreneurs around the world are beginning to learn first-hand the long-term value of using Promotional Ezine Articles to promote their businesses in the online environment.

When you are promoting your website, there are five methods that clearly occupy the top five positions in the ratings for effectiveness. These methods are not listed in the order of effectiveness, but rather in the order needed to share my story:

• Search Engine Listings

• Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Listings

• Website Advertising

• Ezine Advertising

• Free-Reprint Promotional Articles

SEARCH ENGINE LISTINGS

To get listed in the search engines does not have to cost you money. I use Free Web Submission ( http://freewebsubmission.com )

for my own search engine submissions. This tool is provided for us by Jayde online, Inc.

Although their software submits o¬nly to the top 20 spider search engines, it does provide direct links to the top 50 spider search engines.

PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH ENGINE LISTINGS

Overture ( http://overture.com ) is the largest of all of thePay-Per-Click providers. Google Adwords is another o¬ne of the most powerful PPC providers ( https://adwords.google.com ).

With PPCSE's, you buy keywords or keyword phrases from the provider. When your purchased keywords are placed into the search engine query, your ad will appear in the paid listings next to the global results.

With all systems, you o¬nly pay a fee if someone clicks your link to visit your website. Google Adwords adds tougher criteria to the basic model. Their software determines your CTR (click through rate) to make sure your advertisement is living up to the Adwords Display-to-CTR recommended ratio.

In addition, with Google Adwords, your purchased keywords must be relevent to your offerings.

WEBSITE ADVERTISING

Most content driven websites offer advertising o¬n their site. Some sites offer their advertising at very reasonable rates, while others offer ad rates that make them viable advertising possibilities for o¬nly the largest businesses.

You should always select a website for your advertising where you suspect people in your potential marketplace actually visit.

For example, with my business, writers are the people who buy my services. So, I spend most of my advertising dollars to reach writers. o¬ne of my most effective advertising outlets I use is a site called Sell Writing o¬nline at: http://sellwritingonline.com/ Another site I advertise o¬n is Lyons International at: http://www.lyonsinternational.com/

EZINE ADVERTISING

When you advertise in ezines (online newsletters), you run into the same factors that you do with website advertising. Some have high ad rates, while others do not. Some have high readership, and some do not. And all of them target a certain segment of our population.

When shopping ezines to advertise in, you should always target the readers you hope to attract to your business. You should also make sure that the cost of advertising is within your budget and reaches the number of people that is needed to keep your advertising cost-effective.

Generally, ezine advertising rates run in the range of $8 to $18 per CPM. CPM is a publishers term that tells the Cost Per Thousand subscribers. If a e-zine charges $8 per CPM and has 700,000 subscribers, then your cost to have your advertisement sent to the whole list will run you a cool $5600 --- 700 x $8.

FREE-REPRINT PROMOTIONAL ARTICLES

Now, imagine if you could get your ad into dozens of ezines, and imagine that you could do so for far less than the $5600 in our example.

By using Free-Reprint Articles as a tool to promote your business you will begin to see your Classified Ad /Resource Box in the reading sections of ezines of all shapes and sizes... and all of your articles will appear in the ezines that most likely will target your potential customers.

With a free-reprint article, you are doing the publishers a favor by giving them quality reading materials that they can share with their readers. At the end of each article is what is called a "Resource Box". This resource box is like a short "About the Author" piece that resembles a short classified ad. As a general rule, the resource box should be limited to 6 lines by 65 characters. By limiting the size of the resource box, the writer is increasing his or her chance to see his or her article in print.

When you write articles that are consistent with the topics that your potential clientele will read, you are able to consistently target the people you need to reach with your advertising.

SAVE THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS WITH PROMOTIONAL ARTICLES

I have personally used Free-Reprint Promotional Articles for the promotion of my own business for the last two and a half years consistently, and for the past five years o¬n an intermitant basis.

My articles and the articles that I have distributed for my clients have appeared thousands of smaller ezines which offer inexpensive advertising and in hundreds of ezines which charge thousands of dollars for advertising. As a bonus, our articles are reprinted o¬n thousands of websites of all shapes and sizes.

With just my own articles, if you were to count up the advertising fees for the publications and the websites that

have published my articles, you would be able to see for yourself that I have gotten tens of thousands of dollars in

free advertising in exchange for the small amount of time I had invested in creating and distributing my articles.

Whether you write your own articles or pay a ghostwriter to write your articles for you, the combined cost of creating and distributing your article is far less than the value of advertising that you will receive in exchange for the reprint use of your article.

As a general rule, by using free-reprint articles to promote your business, you can expect to gain $100 worth of free advertising for every dollar you spend to create and distribute your articles.

IN CONCLUSION

No other form of web advertising offers so much bang for the buck as does using free reprint promotional articles. The value gained from free reprint articles is big, and it is long-term. I wrote my first promotional article in 1999 --- it is still being published today on a regular basis.

With all other forms of advertising, you pay o¬nce and get immediate results. o¬nce your dollar is spent, you will never earn any more value from that dollar --- it is long gone. With reprint articles, your dollar will deliver results to you time and time again.

The question I have for you is this. If you are not using free reprint articles to promote your business, then why aren't you?