Ezinearticles? should I be using this?

Yes - it's a very, very minor downside and usually easily handled, though.

It can happen.

That won't stop them; no.

I just send them a DMCA notice, mentioning to them that this is one of the two emails I send out when people republish my articles, and that the other one, sent to people who have included the resource-box, is a "thank you" email offering them new content for their sites which hasn't yet been published on EZA.

That does stop them.

Good question! It isn't actually a "box" at all. It's called that because when you submit your article, the last bit actually goes in a separate box on the screen.

But your question underlines the important fact that readers don't know it's a "resource-box" at all. And the author gets to decide where the "article" ends and the "resource-box" begins (subject only to EZA's 'house rules' as explained in their editorial guidelines), and this is something you can turn to your advantage.

Absolutely. Definitely. Categorically. Don't link back to EZA's site: as observed in post #2 above, there can be a tempting short-term gain from doing this, which leads so many people astray, but in the longer term, it's just shooting your own site in the (elegantly high-heeled) foot!

Look at it this way: whose property do you want to develop, yours or theirs? Whose site do you want to rank highly, in the long run, for your keywords, yours or theirs? Their page-rank will give them a temporary boost (and bring you some temporary traffic) but as long as you publish first on your site, and build all the backlinks to your site, and do all your off-page SEO for your site, then in the long run (which is all that matters when you're building a business, right?) you'll easily outrank them for your carefully researched, convenient, non-competitive, long-ass keywords.

Many "article marketing guidebooks" teach the exact opposite. Call me a skepchick but I think it's because some of their authors (to varying extents) have found it easier to make a living giving people "advice" than doing article marketing themselves, and have moved on from being article marketers to being IM-guidebook sellers. Some of them simply don't know what they're talking about and are just repeating widespread misapprehensions which are all part and parcel of the urban myths of internet marketing. :rolleyes:

Unfortunately, some people posting in forums also do the same thing, simply repeating stuff they've seen others saying elsewhere. These tend to be mostly people who (a) haven't quite thought it through, and (b) have little real, successful experience of it themselves. This is why there's so much bad advice about, and so many people end up starting threads saying "Article marketing doesn't really work any more". That's their experience, because they've followed a system that doesn't really work. (Ok, it works for a few people, but it's terribly hard work, terribly repetitive, and never produces any genuine, walk-away, residual income at all.)

They do. It says so in the terms of service of the article directory from which they re-publish them (EZA, in this case).

That doesn't mean that they all will, but it's usually easily enough handled when they don't.