For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-zine.com/V1I22_090106.htm and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com.  

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Table of Contents for this issue.....

1.    Authors Comments

2.    How to Submit an Article to eZine Articles.com

3.    Set up a Custom Google Search on your own Site

Author's Comments

Linda and I are on vacation starting today, and we will not publish an issue of Boomer eZine on 9/15/06 .  We look forward to returning to you on 9/22/06 .

We purchased a lot near New Braunfels , Texas where we are going to build our retirement home.  We decided to vacation there for a week to learn “the lay of the land”.  Linda has been planning our schedule so I am not certain how much rest is involved.  I am looking forward to the time off.  Have a great week, and we will talk with you in two weeks.

Editor’s Note

Both of the articles in this issue contain step by step explanation of how to accomplish an activity on the Internet.  You will get the most from these articles if you print them so you can read them as you are performing the steps on your computer.

How to Submit an Article to eZine Articles.com

If you did not read last week’s article, “Write Articles and Multiply Your Marketing Results”, you can read it at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I21_090106.htm.

Last week, we promised you that if you wrote an article, we would lead you through how to submit it to eZine Articles.  We are making good on our side of the deal.  We assume that you have your article.  Let’s proceed.

Now if you did not write an article because “you’re not a writer”, think of all the reports that you have written in your business career.  Think of the long letters or emails that you have written.  These are the same as articles.  They are approximately 300 words long and in them you expressed yourself.  Use the same ability and write your first article.  The second one comes easier once you earn the title of author.

Go to the home page for ezinearticles.com at http://www.ezinearticles.com.  On the top left of the page click the link, “Submit Articles”.  This will load the Account Creation page.  Complete the input form and click the “Create My Account” button.

You will immediately be presented the Submit an Article page.  The first input to complete is the “Select a Category”.  Each article is given a category and unfortunately, you can only choose one category so spend some time with the drop down box and select from the many categories and subcategories.

Next, enter the title for your article.  You have 100 characters for this.  After the title, enter the keywords for your article that might be searched by a search engine.

The next input field is the article summary.  Take the main thought from your article and summarize it.  This is where you sell your article so that someone who reads the summary will be compelled to read the entire article.

Next comes the big moment, you get to enter your article into the input box.  I recommend that you compose your article using a word processor and when you like it and you are ready for the world to see it, copy the text and paste it into the input box.

There is an option that you can set under Account Manager / Account Preferences that you want to use the WYSIWYG editor.  This stands for “what you see is what you get”.  It can help you with your entry since you will see exactly what will be displayed in the article as you write it.  If you do not use this, you can write in text and use the limited HTML tags listed at the top of the input box to control some of the features of your article.  If you do not know HTML, I recommend the WYSIWYG editor.

The link to Account Manager is located on the link bar at the top of the page.

The final and probably most important step is to enter your bio information.  Ezine Articles will not allow you to blatantly promote yourself or your site in the article, but you can “get your licks in” in your bio.  Make yourself sound like the expert that you are.

Ezine Articles allows three resource boxes and a bio.  The resource boxes are in case you want to say something slightly different about yourself depending on the article subject.  This will allow you to vary the bio info slightly for the article type.  Once you enter the resource info, it will be saved for future use.

Note that this is not the full bio.  You can enter that under the Profile Manager / Enter Author Bio link.  I recommend that you do this as soon as you enter the article.  You can also enter the link to picture of yourself so it will appear in your bio.

Now you have finally reached the bottom.  Make certain that you check the “Yes I Agree” box.  Now you have the option to Preview Article, Submit this Article, or Save as Draft.  I recommend that you Preview Article with the “Spell Check on Preview” option checked.  This will open a new window for your viewing.  Close the window to return to the input page.

If you want to Save as Draft, you can do so and come back later and log back in.  You will find your draft in your account.  When you are ready to submit, click Submit this Article.  The article will be placed in the Pending Status and the wait begins.  Each article is reviewed by an editor and it can take up to a week.  You will be sent an email when the article has been read and action has been taken.

The status of an article on Ezine Articles is:

·        Live – approved and posted as a published article.

·        Pending – waiting for an editor to take action.

·        Problem – rejected by an editor.  You must rewrite and resubmit or delete article.

·        Draft – waiting for you to edit and submit.

·        Modified – previously published article has been modified and is waiting for editor approval.

I have had an article rejected because the editor felt that there was too much promotion in the article.  Linda helped me rewrite it to make it acceptable to the editor and it is now published.

Once an article has been published, you can edit it and change it.  If you do, the changed version will be placed in Modified Status and will be reviewed by an editor again.

The following section is a walk through the Ezine Articles site.  If you have no interest in publishing on the site, skip to the next article.  However, I cannot impress on you enough that you can write articles for publication on this site.  It will jump start your Internet business whatever it might be.

Now that you are a member of Ezine Articles, and you are logged into your account, you will see links across the top of the page as follows:

Article Manager

This area is where you manage your articles.  The first link in the dropdown is Article Home where you can see all your articles.  They fall into the following categories: Live, Pending, Modified, Problem, and Draft.  These titles were explained above.  I will leave it to you to read the explanation on the website.

Under Article Manager there is the selection to Submit a New Article and Edit an Article.  This is where you get started with submitting a new article and editing an article.

Account Manager

This section is where you can view your account status (Ezine Articles has three levels of membership based on the number of articles that you submit), change your account information (mailing address, etc.) change your password, and set your account preferences.

Profile Manager

Under Profile Manager you can add an alternate author name (This is if someone is managing your articles for you.  There are services that will do that on the Net), edit author resource box, edit author bio and edit author photo.  The author resource box and the author bio are very important.  Write a bio that sells you as an expert on your subject.

Author Tools

This dropdown contains View My Article Reports, View My Author Rankings, View My Article Feeds, Article Promotion, eZine Submission, Press Release Submission.  View My Article Reports will show you how many times your article has been viewed, etc.  View My Author Rankings compares you to the other authors in your categories.

The important one is View My Article Feeds.  This will allow you to build a feed that can be pasted into your website summarizing your articles and giving links back to your articles in Ezine Articles.com.  We have set this up for the Retirement Jobs Online (RJO) site.  Go there and select Articles on the navigation bar and you can see the results.  This creates a page of content on the RJO website with very little effort.  Again, this is multiplying your efforts.

eZine Submission - If you are publishing an ezine, you can register it on this site.  I recommend you do this to promote your ezine.  Once you are approved, you can copy a “Featured on Best Ezines” graphic and put it in your eZine.  We have placed one in the header of Boomer eZine.

Press Release Submission – you can create a press release for submission using this selection.

Author Resources

We are going to leave it to you to explore the Author Resources on your own.  It includes Editorial Guidelines which you must read to know how to write your article.

The one other link that you need to follow is the Featured Author Banners.  Now that you have published your first article, you can display these banners on your site.  We have placed one in the header of Boomer eZine.

In summary, this has been a long article, but we feel very strongly that it is an important part of being in business on the Internet.  Congratulations on being able to add “author” to your bio.  Don’t forget to go to Ezine Articles and update your bio for your new accomplishment.

There are services that will post articles on the various article sites for a fee.  One service in India will post an article on over 100 business article sites for $12 USD.  This gives you 100 sites on which someone can read your article and follow your link to find your website.  This is what is meant by “multiply your marketing effort”.

Set up a Custom Google Search on your own Site  

The other day I was searching through the past issues of the Boomer eZine for all the times I had referenced Site Build It.  As I searched, it occurred to me that the number of past issues of the newsletter had grown large enough that I could no longer instantly remember when I wrote about a given topic.  I found this a nice problem to have, but one that needed a solution.  

I remembered that Google offered the ability to download a Google search box to your website to search the content of the site and present it in the same format as the Google search engine results page.  I decided that this was what was needed on Boomer eZine.  

From my research on Google, I found there were two options.  

If you go to Google Free at http://www.google.com/services/free.html you can register to get the HTML code that will put the Google search on your site.  This requires that you fill in information that is requested and the site will be customized for you.  You can then preview the results, and if it is what you want, you copy the HTML code that Google gives to you and paste it into your web page where you want the search box to appear.  It is fairly easy to do.  

This will put the Boomer logo on the search engine results pages.  Click the following link to see the Boomer eZine example http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Boomer_eZine_Search.htm.  Once the search page loads, enter SBI in the search box and search.  The results will be all of the times SBI appears on the Boomer eZine site.  Notice the Boomer logo on the customized search engine results page.  

I personally like the look of the results page, but notice the Google Adwords ads on the right.  Since I am an affiliate of SBI, and I am selling Site Build It, I do not want competitor’s ads showing up on my website searches.  With this type of search, you do not have any control over what appears in the Google Adwords ads on the search engine results pages.  

The other option is to use Google Adsense for Search.  Since I am already a member of Adsense, I logged on my account and selected Adsense for Search.  This will create a customized Google search for your website, and this option has filters that you can set to exclude certain websites from being included in the Adsense ads on your site.  The other benefit is if someone clicks on an Adsense ad, and purchases an item, you get a fee for the transaction.  

If you want to sign up for Google Adsense, click the following link.  (For those of you reading this in text format or on the blog, I cannot put the link here since it is a script.  To access the link, please go to the Boomer eZine site and follow it from there.  Thanks.)  

ADSENSE LINK 

When you log on the Google Adsense site, you can choose to use Google Web search or Google Web search + Site Search.  Since I want to search the Boomer eZine site, I chose the Google Web search + Site Search.  

On the page that sets the options for the search function, enter the URL for your site and other set up information.  You will be given the chance to review what it will look like and you can come back and change parameters if you do not like it.  

At the bottom of the page, there are three options for how the search results are displayed.  

·        Open results on Google in the same window

·        Open results on Google in a new window

·        Open results within my own site

I chose the last option.  This will place the search results on a page with the Boomer eZine header and footer.  It holds the reader on your site.  Option one keeps them on your site, but they do not get that impression since all they see is a Google page.  Option two opens a new window and sends them to Google.  You might lose them at that point.  

Option three requires that you specify a web page for the search results, but that is easy if you have a template page built for your site.  At first, I built a page for the search input box and a separate page for the results and loaded them on the site.  This took about ten minutes with Front Page.  After I experimented with the search live on the website, I decided that I would put the search results on the same page as the search box.  This is very similar to the way Google designed its search page.  

On the next Adsense page you specify the color scheme for your ads, the country for the search, if you want to use Safe Search (keeps porn from coming up on the web search), and if you want to use a tracking channel.  I recommend that you use channels for each different use of Adsense so you can see where your revenue is coming from.  

On the next Adsense page, you will get two sets of HTML code.  One set goes on the page where you want the search box and the other goes on the page where the search results will be placed.  Copy the HTML from the box and paste it into the proper location on the web page.  I found that when I first viewed the results, they were left justified so I used the HTML center tags to center the search box and the frame on the page.  (<XMP> Center tags are <center> and the closing center tag is </center> </XMP.  Remember that the XMP tags tell the browser to ignore any HTML between the tags and treat it as text.)  

The code for the search box begins and ends with the comment <!-- SiteSearch Google -->.  After you have pasted the code into your page, insert the center tags just before and just after the beginning and ending comments.   

The code for the search results location begins and ends with <!-- Google Search Result Snippet Begins --> and ends with <!-- Google Search Result Snippet Ends -->.  Put the center tags before and after these comments.  

Upload your page to your site and it will work for you.  For the final results on the Boomer eZine site, go to the home page http://www.boomer-ezine.com and click Search on the navigation bar on the left.  This will take you to the search page.  Enter SBI as the search term and click the search button.  The results will be displayed under the search box along with the Adsense ads at the top and bottom of the search results.  

This is a handy tool to use.  It does not cost anything and you can make money with it if someone clicks on an Adsense ad on the search results page.  A real win, win deal!  

That wraps up our issue for this week.  Don’t forget that we are on vacation next week.  Until September 22, stay tuned.  

John and Linda Howe

www.boomer-ezine.com

www.boomer-entrepreneur.com

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