BLOGS - Why should you want to write a blog when articles are better? I find myself as a writer wanting to say, write blogs. Blogs are personal. You get to give your personal views on life, on your life as a person and as a writer. You get to be chatty. You get to show off your writing skills, tell stories about yourself and your friends. You get to include pictures of friends and describe trips you have taken.

EZINE ARTICLES - Do you want free outreach on the web? However, as a writer, write Ezine articles instead! Why? Not that they are boring. It's actually more true that blogs are boring. The best blogs have a name tag to them but the fact is that the most popular blogs are written by professional writers hired to research the web and write in that particular blog style.

BLOGS - What is wrong with blogs? Popular blogs are not written and kept up to date by you, a lone writer. It's a team effort, a major publishing effort. Can you as a writer really afford to do this, even if you are good enough? Prove it, of course.

Why waste energy and time writing your blog when no one but no one is coming to your site? How many writer blogs have I browsed recently, all trying to give good information on how to write, and at the same time also push their own books, published and unpublished? I don't see that there is much success in what these blogs do for their writers.

How do I know this? I'm tired frankly about reading any more entries about taking the cat to the vet, describing what the hubby thinks about something, reading one more interview with another writer. It's all hogwash. It's all boring. Why? Because it is repeat stuff, thousands of times over, only with the names changed. There is no new information here in most, if not all, writer blogs.

So as a writer, my experience says: DON'T WRITE BLOGS. WRITE EZINE ARTICLES. Here is the difference. We shall assume you are a good writer in the use of language, and you can research well and create information reports that are interesting and full of information. You write books as well. Even if you write novels they must be researched and full of information to sell, right? An Ezine article is a short article on a piece of a specific subject, like this article is making the case for writing Ezine articles and not blogs. I have done both, but I have had to choose one over the other. Here is a list of why I choose to write Ezine articles now.

EZINE ARTICLES - What is so great about Ezine articles?

Ezine articles give me focus for my research, ideas and insights, experience, and writing skills.
Ezine articles bring visitors to my home sites because Ezine articles are widely distributed.
Ezine articles have directories, collections of articles, that people go to to read on specific subjects.
Blogs have directories, but how can you classify what is written about in blogs?
Many blogs are just about whatever the blog writer wants to put in. There are some well-attended blogs that have reviews in a narrow subject area, like Technorati. Are these blogs, even if they say they are, or are they directories in a subject area? Whatever you call where your short writing ends up, in a blog, in a directory, in an Ezine article, at least know what you are doing and what you intend as the effect.

Build a system, a chain of cause and effect so that your end results that you want come through for you. EZINE ARTICLES - What do the marketers say are the benefits? Ezine people who are also marketing people say that the purpose of writing a lot of free, short Ezine articles is to get your name and thought easily and freely distributed on the web. At the bottom of every Ezine article you put also your web sites or how to contact you.

Thus with Ezine articles you are getting your thought distributed in a large network of information outreach, and then out of your article readers you expect some of them to click on your link and come to your home site for more information on the subject you write about.

Thus, if you are a writer who has written a book, published in paper or not, non-fiction or fiction, you want people to buy that book from you, don't you?

THE WEB - What do you need to do as a writer to become effective on the web? The best way on the Web is to create a home site about your book and its subject matter, fiction or non-fiction.

Next, you want people to come to your site in large numbers, because maybe one or two percent of your visitors will buy your book from you as a download electronic e-book, or also as a print-on-demand paper book. But before you can sell strangers your book you have to get them to your selling pages where you describe your book and its benefits.

SEARCH ENGINES SEO - What's wrong with search engines? To get people to your site you can rely on the search engines. But this is way overplayed. Research shows that people only look at the top ten entries usually and click on those sites in a search.

How then are you going to get your carefully constructed web site into the search engines? There is a body of knowledge called SEO to show you how to do this.

However, these people will be trying to make money off of you as they advise you. They have a monetary interest in you, so you cannot trust them or their information. They are out there selling you a job in how to be successful and get rich, while they themselves try to get rich off of you. So, be careful of the search engine people, telling you how to manipulate Google to get a flow of visitors to your sites who will buy your books and information reports in large numbers.

Yes, learn to make or have made for you, web pages that are focused on a single subject so that the search engines are more likely to put you eventually in their top ten for your subject niche. Get search engine flow to your site, if you can.

Some marketing gurus say the competition out there is so fierce that you can only keep up with the latest strategies if you work full time at marketing. So is it worth it becoming also a marketing expert, or trying to copy someone else who is. And how would you ever know truth from falsity when dealing with high hype sales people.

Now look again at writing lots of short but informative free articles and having these distributed by Ezine article directories.

WRITING EZINE ARTICLES - Why? Why? Why?

they do bring people back to your site who are specifically interested in your information. These are people who may be more willing to buy your book. The trick is to not give readers enough free information so they don't buy your book, or give them too little free information so they don't see that you really are an expert in your niche field.
you write a lot of Ezine articles in your field to give the impression to strangers that you are an expert. As a novelist you know how to evoke suspense if you are a thriller novelist. Or, if you write non-fiction books on Love, Sex and Intimacy, you give your readers condensed free versions of your chapters but also write in such a way that you leave your Ezine article readers panting for more. After all, relationships are terribly important, right? But why should they listen to you? You must be better than the competition. Thus, if you have such a book, as I have, you write a lot of free Ezine articles, as I am doing, that give really good information but not all of it.
BUYING YOUR BOOK - How do you motivate people to buy your book?

-So, you use Ezine articles to get visitors to your home web site when you must then try to sell them the whole book at a price they and you can afford. You are writing up each chapter as a short, easy-to-understand Ezine article, and in those articles you have the links back to your main site.

Now, you have to write your web pages in a way that people will be motivated to pay their money to buy your book. How do you do this? At least one caution here.

SEO people have influenced me to put on the web an expert site. On this site: Creative Writing and Writers.com, I put a lot of good information on creativity, writing, and on my product: The Writer's Interface. It was an expert site but we ceased development of it.

Why? It takes tons of time to develop an expert site. The purpose of developing an expert site with lots of free information, as well as information to buy in books, e-courses, and reports is to become dominant in your niche, which is then supposed to translate into being near the top in the search engine results page for your subject area. Such a thing could happen over time. Yet on the down side is that people will browse your rich, expert site and never buy a report or book or course from you.

THE SELLING SITE - Why do certain web sites sell well, while other web sites do not sell well your books and information? Now we have switched to a narrow focus selling site called The Writer's Interface.com. We have a single subject on this site with a wonderful product, the best in its field, to sell.

This is The Writer's Interface, of course, with over 2000 writing craft tools and structures to aid you the writer in actually writing a professional novel. This is our essence, our service to writers, to give them the writing craft knowledge to really write their novel. But how do you convince strangers like yourself that you have something that will benefit them best of anything out there?

first, you find writers currently with a problem that is how to write a damn good novel and improve their writing style.
you find currently interested people who are searching through, first, Ezine article outreach, and second, in the search engines eventually, if they like your site for its information and focus.
once you have a good information and selling site up you can also buy little ads, like Google Adsense, which are supposed to get new people to your home site, but this way can demonstrate success or failure, and so is not used by us yet until we have some success in what we are currently doing, and have the time and money to study if click-through ads on other sites really works.
THE WRITER'S INTERFACE - What is good about it? -For now in the rest of 2007 our efforts go into getting new people to our The Writer's Interface selling site by writing at least one free Ezine article a week on some aspect of what The Writer's Interface does best in showing writers how to write better books, especially novels, and including screen plays as well, which are really visual novels.

SUMMARY - What is your Action Plan? We suggest based on limited experience that writing many free Ezine articles on the subject area of your book or novel is they way to get visitors to a well-constructed home site for your book. It must be a focused, selling style site which combines information and choices to buy or not buy to gain the benefits that happen for readers when they buy and experience your book.

Don't waste time and money on elaborate SEO expert sites, certainly not on personal writer blogs, nor on using Google ads.

Instead, start with writing free Ezine articles because these enjoy wide and free distribution on the World Wide Web in 2007. We don't guarantee anything said here, though it does come from our personal experience. We give what we think because we are doing it ourselves.

COMMENT - What is your experience? What is your purpose? If you are a writer entering the web, or already on it, to market your books and expert information, what then is your strategy? If you have a writer and web strategy, what is it? If you don't, what do you commit to now to develop a Web strategy for marketing your work? What do you need to do also to become a super effective writer who sells lots of books?

Strephon Kaplan-Williams is a fairly well-known writer whose books so far have sold over 350,000 copies. He has had one best seller: The Dream Cards at 110,000 copies in eight languages around the world. His current efforts going into writing a big novel and in also developing writing craft tools. His current book is a down-load product, The Writer's Interface which either is an interactive file with the wonderful WriteItNow software or is also a stand-alone PDF file for download. You can explore further information and get a free demo by going to the home site, where you can also buy The Writer's Interface and short reports on keys to writing the novel.

http://www.thewritersinterface.com/