Blunder Number 1: Not including an author's resource box/ezine advertisement

Yes, there are really authors who don't remember to include an author's resource box (the biography/advertisement at the end of the article). That box is the whole point of distributing content in the first place. Even if the body of your article has a link to your website, you'll be losing all the clicks from dedicated ezine readers who look for that box at the end of articles they like.

Blunder Number 2: Not including a link in your ezine article's author's resource box

There are a shocking number of author's who use an author's resource box to include their email address, telephone number, street address, gym locker combination, and everything else but a link to their website. This is a big waste for two reasons:

1. Few people will contact you directly without seeing your web page first. At that point, people just aren't motivated enough. All they know about you is that they liked an article you wrote.

2. Search engines rank web pages in part based on "link popularity" i.e., the number, quality, and relevance of links to a website. You may not care about search engines now, but if you ever do in the future you will be pretty upset at having wasted all these opportunities for link popularity.

Blunder Number 3: Not including an HTML-formatted link with "anchor text" in your ezine article's author's resource box

As much as reasonably possible, you want to encourage publishers to publish your author's resource box with the link in HTML, using your chosen anchor text (i.e., the text you click on to follow the link, traditionally displayed in blue and underlined), if it's going to be shown in a web page or HTML newsletter. If the article is being distributed as plain text, you can include a link to an HTML-formatted version on your website. There are three reasons for this:

* A link that says "discover widgets" is going to get more clicks than a link that just says "http://www.widgets.com" Your call to action (e.g., "discover widgets") is much more powerful when the reader can read it and act upon it in one split second, since there is not that crucial extra split-second of pause while moving the mouse. In that split-second pause your reader might get second thoughts. With advertising (and the author's resource box is an advertisement), impulse is everything.

* Anchor text, like bulleted lists, boldface text, headlines and subheadings, has a higher chance of being read than the rest of the text. People tend to scan computer screens rather than read text word for word. Eyes will be much more likely to slow down from scan mode and actually read anything that stands out from the page, especially hyperlinks.

* A web page will rank higher for a keyword in search engine results if the anchor text of links to that page has that keyword.

Blunder Number 4: Only including an HTML-formatted link with "anchor text"

You really want that anchor-text link, but it is foolish only to provide that link. No matter what you do, a substantial number of publishers will reformat your article as plain text, and your link will simply disappear. That's why you need to have both an HTML link with anchor text and a URL written out in this format: http://www.yoururl.com/page

"But I'm only interested in getting my article on web pages so I can gain link popularity," you say. Well, a large number of plain-text email newsletters will be archived on the website of the newsletter publisher. These newsletter-publisher webmasters won't usually remember at that point to get your HTML version to post online. The standard approach is just to automatically convert the URL to a link using special software.

Remember: the publisher may be operating dozens of ezines and websites, so this whole step will be partially or completely automated, without anyone stopping to check for an HTML version. If you don't have a URL written out in your article, that link will simply be lost.

Besides, think of all the traffic you might have gotten from plain-text newsletter readers. Who would say no to free targeted traffic--isn't that why you want to rank high in search engines in the first place?

In fact, with paid online advertising going for more than a dollar a click on average, you really are throwing money away if you make any of these ezine article marketing and advertising blunders.