This journey of Internet marketing is certain one of a thousand steps, and every now and then I reach a milestone that marks some of those footsteps. This week, I became "platinum" at Ezine. 

The hard part was not the actual writing. I know how to write. I had a previous career in writing and promotions. What was hard was maintaining consistent effort to meet this small goal I had set. My internet marketing efforts have been sporadic. I have many competing priorities, but the more I do it, the more my momentum and interest build, and the more I'm convinced that IM offers me the rare opportunity to create a life more on my terms. Yet, I have to keep repeating to myself, "just do it". Nothing gets done by thinking about it or staring at the screen. 

So, to complete my articles, what I had to do was to select the article topics/keywords. Then, I  had to find pockets of time each day, no more than 1/2 hour at the beginning of the day, 1/2 hour at lunch, and 1/2 hour at the end of the day. Word by word, sentence by sentence, I wrote each one. When I finished #10, and Ezine approved me that same day as Platinum. 

Here are a few more helpful hints: 

Be sure you understand their guidelines. I didn't know, for example, that if your article is under 500 words, that you can't use in-text links that are more than 3 words long. 

Check out the Ezine blog. The blog gives a list of different article templates for the type of informational article that Ezine loves (always keep in mind that despite the fact that you may have your own agenda for writing on Ezine, your articles have to be useful to Ezine readers). My favorite type is the "5 ways to do  X". The templates can take out the frustration for anyone who doesn't know how to structure an article

Try the Title Generator - Ezine's author's area, has a tool that will create a focused article title around the key word you pop in. I found this helpful to create a quick article.To promote cover -letter creator software, for example,  I wrote an article on "Five things you can do wrong in your cover letter" (created by the title generator). Once you have the title, the rest of the article practically writes itself. 

Make sure your article is clean - Make sure your article reads well and is devoid of errors. You can use Ezine's  preview/spell check tool that quickly flags problem areas in your work or write the article in Word and check for errors, then cut and paste. Better still, the more articles you write, the fewer mistakes you make. 

Now, it's rinse and repeat many more times for my future efforts.