Promoting Your Blog Like the Pros (Part 3): Article Marketing

I am continuing my blog series on how to market your blog effectively and get more traffic to your blog using special tactics that the pros use.
If you missed the previous posts, you can still read them now:
Part 1: Comments
Part 2: Social Media

Tactic 3: Article Marketing

Article marketing takes a little longer than my other tactics, but once you get the hang of writing articles quickly, you can easily write one in 20-30 minutes. Another 5-10 minutes to submit it to a couple of places and you have a fantastic source of blog traffic!
So what is article marketing, anyway?
Article marketing is the process of writing short articles of 300-600 words and submitting them to article directories. It’s quite simple, but a lot of people seem to misunderstand the purpose of article marketing.
Like blog commenting, article marketing has two main benefits:

1. It can improve SEO via backlinks.
2. It can get you direct traffic.

So many people focus only on the backlinks that they fail to optimize their articles for direct traffic. Don’t underestimate the amount of traffic a well-written article can send!
You can create an article quickly from any of your blog posts.  However, check the article marketing sites guidelines, you will have to tweak it. Here is what a popular site, ezinearticles.com, says,

“If you are submitting article content originally created as a blog post for your site, be sure to fully repurpose the content by removing any blog content language prior to submitting and ensuring the content provides informative value to the reader.”

Here are a few guidelines:

1. Create an interesting, exciting title. Something like “5 Quick and Easy Ways to Make Money Online” is much more interesting than “Make Money Online” and will usually get more views.
2. Your article should be between 300 and 600 words. Anything longer and readers will become bored and leave.
3. Craft a really enticing resource box. Make sure to give readers an incentive to click the link to visit your blog. Offer them a freebie or something really interesting!

One of the most popular sites is http://www.ezinearticles.com. However, there are many other article directories out there. Just search Google for “top article directories” and you’ll find plenty!
 
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