Article Marketing For Blog Promotion

Following on from my post about article distribution, in this post I will discuss specifically how you can use the technique to promote your blog by re-using your existing blog content rather than having to come up with fresh content.

This post is the third in a series of several I have planned on the topic of article marketing. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get the rest in the series!

The Trouble With Article Marketing…

… is that you need to write articles! Now I don’t know about you but as a blogger I find that when I have an idea for a new topic that I want to write about I want to get that content out on my blog. Unique content is not in unlimited supply so when I have a new idea it feels like a bit of a waste to use it up on an article for the directories.

This is the single reason I have resisted doing article marketing to promote my blog before now. Many people will suggest that you outsource the job of article writing and I would certainly recommend that if you are marketing something generic such as a niche site. However when you are using article marketing to promote your own carefully crafted blog, those articles represent you, your writing and your blog so you need them to be top quality! For maximum effectiveness and authenticity you need to write them yourself.

Article Marketing With Recycled Content

In my first article I explained how I am using article marketing specifically to promote my blogging course by using the actual text of the lessons as the basis for the articles themselves. Rather than trying to come up with new content, I recycle what I have already produced.

You can use this same technique for any written material, including your blog posts. However, there are several things you need to consider. For most blogs, not every blog post will be a suitable candidate and you may need to do some editing before it can be submitted,  and of course you have to pay attention to the all important resource box.

Which Posts To Use As Article Content?

First of all, let’s rule out the ones that are no good. On your blog you can write whatever you like but when submitting to an article directory your article must provide genuine value. That means that link posts, ranting posts, time-sensitive announcements, personal posts etc all need to be ruled out.

What you are looking for here is your pillar content – your best work, the posts that provide something useful for the reader. Also, article directories are mostly text based which means that posts that rely on a large number of images or use multi-media such as audio or video posts are no good either. Hopefully we’ll start to see article directories embrace new forms of media in the future but for now, stick to text.

Turning a Post Into An Article

As a blogger you will often write your blog posts directly to your audience and over time and as you develop a relationship with them you may find yourself talking about your own personal experiences, and referring back to previous work and so on. This is fine on a blog and it can help your readers get to know and trust you but it is entirely unsuitable for an article.

Readers of an article at a directory such as EzineArticles do not know who you are. Here are a few rules:

• Don’t talk about yourself
• Don’t talk about your blog, or any of your projects
• Don’t talk about other people or their projects
• Don’t talk about anything that only regular readers would know

Somebody who has never heard of you before needs to be able to read your article and absorb it fully without having to wade through any kind of personal references.

Also, in a blog post you will want to include links often – internal links to your previous posts, external links to fellow bloggers, affiliate links and so on. Whilst there are one or two directories that allow links inside the articles the vast majority do not and so you need to remove them all. You will have an opportunity to link in your resource box and I shall discuss that separately.

Lastly, your article needs to be completely stand-alone. This post I am writing right now is part of a series and I link to other posts in the series but that won’t work for an article directory. I could use this post as an article but I would need to remove the references to the series. Creating a series of posts on a specific topic can be a very powerful piece of content for a blog but if used as article content, each individual post needs to be able to stand on it’s own.

Your Resource Box

This is the most important part because it is in here that we get to promote something. Now once again each article directory will have different rules about how many links they will accept but a rule of thumb is that all of the ones I have encountered allow 2 or more. I would suggest promoting two pages – your home page and an internal page.

So, what page on your blog should you promote for your second link? That will depend on what the goals of your blog are. If you are blogging to make money then you will want to promote your ‘money pages’. Here are some examples of what I mean by money pages:

• A page that sells your own product
• A page that captures an email address
• A page that offers a monetized freebie
• A page that has a strong affiliate offer

A resource box serves two purposes – it gives a backlink to the target page but if that article gets traffic on it’s own then the resource box is also being seen by real people. For the purposes of the backlink the most important element is the anchor text – pick keywords that you want to help your target page rank for in the serps. But for real people you need to encourage them to click your links.

Here is an example of a resource box that I have used to promote the Bloggers Bible:

Caroline Middlebrook has been blogging since 2007 and makes 4-figures a month from her blog. You can learn how she makes money blogging and download her free guides & courses.

Note I am breaking my own rule here – I don’t promote my home page. I actually have thousands of links pointing to my home page and feel it is more valuable to promote a second internal page. In this case it is the page that shows all of my products, most of which make me money.

Now if you are not trying to make money and instead are using article marketing to grow your readership you will want to focus on promoting your very best posts – the ones that show your writing at its best. This can actually be slightly more difficult as you are not necessarily offering an incentive to click. One possibility here is to pick your best posts, use a cut down version as the article content and then in the resource box write, something like:

‘… John writes about <fish tank cleaning> in far more depth on his <fish tank blog>. Be sure to stop by and take a look.’

The phrases in <> are what I would use as links. That line actually sounds a little lame but hopefully you can come up with something better!

Next In The Series

This post has shown you how to use your existing blog posts to promote the blog itself and now that you have some articles to use, the next subject to cover is that of article submission – where and how.

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