Your blog is only as successful as the traffic it receives, so marketing and advertising your blog is a key factor to its success. There’s just one catch: marketing and advertising takes money. If you don’t have the money to promote your blog, it makes promoting a lot more difficult but not impossible. Article marketing is a free and often low-cost alternative to traditional advertising methods. The idea is to give publications what they want--quality content-- and in return, they will give you what you want--traffic.
Instructions
1. Choose blog-related topics. The topics for your articles should stay on track with the content you produce on your blog. The reason readers leave your article to visit your blog is that they want to know more about the topic you’ve written about. If they arrive at your blog only to discover that it has absolutely nothing to do with what they read on the other website, they’ll leave before you have a chance to capture their email address or sell them one of your products or services.
2. Select a keyword rich title. Every article you write needs to have a title that entices readers to click on your title to read the rest of the article. Think of your title as a five second sales pitch. Choosing keywords that match the theme of your blog may seem counterproductive since you’re helping other websites receive traffic but it’s quite the opposite. Without readers, your article won’t get read and if your article isn’t read then you cannot direct traffic back to your site through the byline.
3. Write your article. Your article should be between 400 and 500 words, as most article directories have chosen not to accept anything below 400 words. Your article should include an introduction, a body and a closing statement. Your article should focus on one idea and take the reader from beginning to end. If you jump around, your readers will become confused and stop reading the article. And if they stop reading the article, they won’t see your byline. And if they don’t see your byline, they won’t discover your blog.
4. Provide a catchy byline. Your byline is your payment. More often than not you will not receive monetary compensation from distributing your articles to other websites and/or blogs, so think of your byline as a free advertisement. What you include in your byline will depend on what you want readers to do: sign up for a newsletter, receive a free gift, hire you or buy one of your products. Just make sure there is a way for readers to contact you: email address, web address, or company name and phone number.
5. Distribute your articles. There are three ways you can distribute your articles: article directories, guest spots on similar blogs and individual online and offline publications. Article directories are the easiest way to get your articles out there. After completing Steps 1 through 4, you simply sign into an article directory’s website, upload your article, and wait for others to pick the article up. That is, place the article with your byline on their websites and blogs. Guest spots on blogs are a little more difficult to obtain as you will need to find blogs that are similar to yours and then contact the blogger to see if he is interested in sharing content written by third parties. Publications are even harder still since you must first query the editor, wait for an okay to write the piece, and then write the article according to the publication’s guidelines.
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