Product Review : Ezine Announcer

Recently I started a new email newsletter, and decided to give Ezine Announcer a try. For those who don't know, this piece of software semi-automates the process of submitting your ezine or newsletter to various ezine directories and announcement sites. It also does the same for your articles that you wish to distribute, and helps to automate the process of submitting ezine advertising.

Many experts have pointed out that writing articles for distribution and posting them on the various article announcement sites is a great way to "brand" yourself, get free publicity, and free links and traffic. Ezine Announcer makes the job of submitting your articles a breeze. You can submit directly by email to ezine editors, or post your articles on the announcement sites, or both.

While Ezine Announcer won't teach you how to write articles, it does make submitting them a snap. You fill in some basic information about your newsletter and the individual articles, select the sites you want to submit to, and with a mouse click, you're on your way.

It took me only a few minutes to get up and running with Ezine Announcer. The software comes with a built-in manual that is concise and to-the-point. To make things even simpler, the author also provides a download link for a series of instructional videos that lead you step-by-step through setting up and configuring your software, and using it to submit your ezines and articles. Both the written documentation and the videos are great!

For starters, I wanted to submit my ezine to as many directories as possible. With a couple of mouse clicks, I had a list of ezine directories, which I could sort according to a variety of criteria. I chose to sort them according to their "rating", which is the software author's subjective opinion as to their importance.

Having done a quick sort, I filled in all of the fields on the appropriate form for my new newsletter, and started right-clicking the list of directories. What a pleasure! The software's built-in browser took me to the submission page of each directory, and automatically filled in as much of the online submission form as possible. All I had to do was tweak a few things, pick a category to list my ezine in and click the "submit" or similar button at the directory site.

Not only was I able to submit to a ton of directories, Ezine Announcer even helps me keep track of which ones my newsletter has been submitted to, so I won't duplicate those submissions in the future. It does the same when I submit articles. I just fill in the "autoform", submit the article to the sites I've chosen, and click a button to keep track of those submissions.

Simply put, Ezine Announcer is a huge time saver, that also helps to keep me organized. Do I expect to profit from using it? Absolutely!

The latter, profiting from use of this software is a point that I suspect many people may miss initially. As some know, publishing and distributing articles is one of the best ways to promote your website. Why? Simply put, every time you post an article, you get a chance to post a "resource box" with a description of yourself, your products, and your websites.

As your articles and/or your newsletter gain readership, you begin to "brand" yourself. People begin to notice and recognize your name, and if you write well, it establishes you as a credible expert. That eventually adds to your bottom line, since we all prefer to buy from people we feel we "know" and whom we trust as credible.

In many cases, article publication sites also give you a link back to your site. Those links back to your site are valuable! They increase your exposure to the search engines as well as to potential customers. They bring traffic to your site. Simply put, more exposure and more traffic should lead to more sales and more profits.

Many people think that publishing articles is a much more efficient and potentially productive way to spend your time than fooling around too much with search engine optimization, email marketing, or even PPC advertising. If you subscribe to this theory (as I now do) then Ezine Announcer is a product you should seriously take a look at.

For everything this software does, the price is amazingly low. In addition to the software, you get several pdf and zip documents that will help you get started, free software to help you format your ezine articles, and the instructional videos. Personally, I consider this tool a tremendous bargain, and expect to recoup the cost of my purchase through increased traffic, sales, and website exposure, in a short time.

Highly Recommended as one of my Top Picks among useful Webmaster Tools!