Article Marketing For Blog Promotion, Quality, Quantity Or Something Between?

Promoting your blog with articles published somewhere off of your blog is a great way to develop exposure to new readers. It allows you to showcase your writing in places outside your normal promotion channels and bring in new readers who would not have been exposed to your usual blog promotions.

Marketing Your Blog With Articles

You can use article marketing to promote your blog very simply by writing new articles related to your blog's subject and submitting them to publishers, other blogs and article directories. Each of these sources offer their benefits and you should carefully consider which is the best fit with your blog and your marketing strategy.

• Article Directories are the most common source of outside publication for your articles. They offer many benefits and are used to great effect by straight article marketers, who use this method to gain back links to their websites, traffic to affiliate programs (also known as Bum Marketing and to establish their positions as experts in their niches. An additional benefit with these sites is that often other webmasters will pick up your articles and run them on their sites. because these site require that the publishers retain your links this can create dozens or even hundreds of back links to your blog from each article.
• Direct Publishers run online publications and often accept contributed articles. These are informational websites, online magazines, portal sites and even ezines and newsletters. While these publishers are not likely to disperse your article to other publishers and generate more back links, they can be even more valuable to you in terms of exposure to new readers. Because you will often have to write a unique new article for these publishers, the content will be more fresh. Also because these publishers have often invested a lot of energy and resources into developing a relationship with their readers, some of that trust can carry over to your blog because they selected your article to share with their readers.
• Other Blogs should not be overlooked when seeking other publication venues. Because the readers are predisposed to reading a blog, they are already open to your format. Also, because blogs are personal in nature, allowing another author to publish an article on your blog is really a personal endorsement of that author. So you are receiving a personal recommendation from that blogger for your blog, simply by having your article on their blog. This can carry a lot of weight in establishing a relationship with those readers who visit your blog from the article. Also because of the nature of RSS feeds and syndication, it is highly likely that the article will result in several further back links to your blog from aggregation services.

Whether you try just one of these methods or a combination of the three, you really should set aside some time to explore this option for generating traffic to your blog.

Quality Or Quantity

A lot of Article marketing is closely associated with an attitude of generating a lot of articles and sacrificing the quality of the writing in the interest of speed. While it isn't popular or palatable to admit, there are valid reasons for this approach. The more promotional articles one has out there in circulation, the more opportunities there are for a search engine to stumble over them. Also it means more back links, which some SEO types estimate at upwards of 40% of the overall equation to getting a good ranking. And of course if you are promoting an affiliate link, the more times you put it out there, the more chances there are of some one clicking through to the order page.

All of this means that marketing with Articles is often approached as a strict numbers game, and fast is more highly prized than good. But is this the attitude you should adopt to market your blog with articles?

A Different Attitude For Blog promoters.

Since your goal is to get traffic to your blog, I'm going to assume you want that traffic to convert into a loyal readership base. That means you are going to need to adopt a different attitude toward the quality of the articles you use for marketing your blog.

You can't write poor, haphazard articles to sell people on the idea of clicking through to your blog to read more articles. What will they really expect to find there? Right, more poorly written articles. Even if they do click through at that point, they are not predisposed to consider what you write seriously. This will put your efforts to build a relationship with them as readers at a serious disadvantage and undermine the entire reason for promoting your blog with articles.

The downside to this is that it means you won't be able to churn out articles to publish the way a traditional Article Marketer or Bum Marketer can. So it will take you longer to publish the articles you will be promoting your blog with.

The solution to this problem is, first to make sure you are getting the maximum possible millage out of each article you publish, and second to use tools that help you rapidly write and deploy high quality promotional articles for your blog.

I will be discussing some of these tools and techniques in several upcoming posts over the next few days and weeks. Be sure to Subscribe to my feed so you don't miss any of these articles.

If you have any specific questions about marketing your blog with articles, now would be the time to ask them, so I can be sure to address them in my upcoming articles. Just post a comment here or use my contact form.