Marketing Your Blog

Every online publisher needs traffic to their site, but how do you get a steady increase of traffic each month? How do you even get traffic started coming to your site?

Blogs automatically get traffic coming as soon as you make your first post. With a good ping list, each time you make a post to your blog dozens of sites are notified and traffic starts coming in. Therefore the first step in getting traffic to your blog is to post regularly. Posting once or twice a day is fantastic.

Article Syndication

Writing articles and syndicating them to article directories is a powerful technique to grow your traffic. Try to write at least one article a week (or have a unique article written for you), post it to your site, wait a week for the search engines to index it, and then submit the article to article directories. For a nominal fee SubmitYourArticle.com will submit it to hundreds of article directories, saving you a lot of time and effort.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is another very powerful tool. It takes less than a minute to submit your article to OnlyWire.com. Once submitted they take it and submit it to about fifteen other social bookmarking sites.

Imagine if you bookmarked one article a day and submitted each to fifteen social bookmarking sites for one year. That would add up to over 15,000 backlinks for your one site! Incredible! But there’s even more you can do.

Pay Pay Click and More

Pay per click, email marketing, viral marketing, and commenting in forums are all great ways to get more traffic. For instance, Answers.Yahoo.com is a site where people post questions and wait for an answer.

For instance, if you have a site about dogs and someone asks about what to feed their puppy, you can post an answer and include your URL in the signature. As people read the question and your answer, some will click on your URL to see what else you might say about taking care of dogs.

Tracking and Statistics

Track the visitors to your site by using tools such as MyBlogLong.com, Google Analytics, and the tracking tools found in your site’s cpanel under Stats. Google Analytics is a plugin for Wordpress. It takes a minute to set up and gives you vital information to help you focus on what your visitors want.

By looking at your stats a few minutes a week you can see what articles are most popular, what topics are most popular, how long people are staying at the site, and what links they click on to leave the site. You can use this information to make changes to your site, increase the number of posts you make on popular topics, and anything else that will encourage people to stay longer and to come back.

It is not hard to get traffic to a blog. Set aside some time each day to write an article or to post to your blog, submit it to the social bookmarking sites, and submit your articles to article directories. Follow these basic tips and traffic to your site should increase significantly each month.

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Whether you run a business totally online, or you operate a brick-and-mortar business and have a supplemental website, you need to implement article marketing. If you aren’t marketing your business with articles, you’re missing a huge chunk of the marketing pie. Let me give you a few reasons why.

Reason #1: Article marketing is free. Every business owner knows that advertising isn’t cheap. Every newspaper or magazine ad you run costs you dearly. By spending just a little extra time writing and submitting several articles each month, you’ll save quite a bit of money. Best yet, article marketing doesn’t cost you a dime–just a few hours every week.

Reason #2: Article marketing brands your business. Have you ever wondered how some businesses seem to become so well known in such a short amount of time? They’re getting their name out there. They’re giving away something of value for free to their potential customers. Your articles will brand your business and make it a well-known name.

Reason #3: Article marketing makes you an expert. If you write articles about the subjects you know well, you’ll quickly become known as an expert in your field. Do you run a website on bird watching? Writing and submitting fifty articles on bird watching will show people that you know what you’re talking about.

Reason #4: Article marketing teaches you how to relate to people. You can’t write a bunch of articles without learning how to communicate effectively. The more you write, the more you’ll learn how to get your message across in a friendly, personal tone.

Reason #5: Article marketing creates back links to your website. Without getting into the technical details of this, back links to your website are good and you’ll want lots of them. Back links help boost your rankings in the search engines, thus gaining more exposure for your website.

Remember that article marketing isn’t the cure-all answer to advertising your business; it’s one piece of the pie. You also can’t submit a handful of articles one time and expect to see results.

Article marketing requires persistence and patience. You should plan to spend a certain number of hours each week writing and submitting articles to promote your business. Pencil in this time faithfully and stick to it. Within a few months (maybe even a few short weeks!), you’ll begin to see the results of your hard work pay off.

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You’ve heard it time and time again: if you want to get your name out there, write articles and allow them to be freely reproduced (with a resource box pointing back to you, of course). Largely, that is true. A well-written article can:

- help you build your profile as an expert

- draw traffic to your site, and

- help you to build a database of potential clients through associated e-courses or a newsletter.

So far you probably haven’t heard anything you didn’t already know. What YOU are likely to be struggling with is the process of actually writing the article. Sure, you can come up with the content - but how do you really grab those readers? How do you keep their attention all the way through? And most importantly, how do you make them want to come back for more?

Let’s assume that you understand the basics of constructing and editing an article (it has a beginning, middle, and an end and you know how to check the grammar and spelling.) Most of us can manage that. But if you’re not content with simply “getting something out there” - if you want to WIN readers - then you need to start thinking about what they want to know, rather than what you want to tell them.

Put your readers first - every time. Give them what they want, and they’ll be queuing up to read anything you produce. Give them something bland (or worse, blatantly self-serving) and they’ll blast by you so fast you’ll be spinning in the back draft.

The following four steps will give you a blueprint for writing articles that captivate your readers - whatever the topic.

== 1. Find Out What Your Readers Really Want ==

Sometimes you’ll know what they want because you’re an expert in the field, and understand the problems. If you don’t know the subject area well, you’ll have to do more research. Look for forums on your topic and see what people are discussing. What are the problems that need solving? Can you provide an answer? (”If they have a headache, give them an aspirin.”)

== 2. Start With An Attention-Grabber ==

Spend time working on your opening. Try to avoid trite questions like “Have you ever wondered why so many people find it difficult to lose weight?” Firstly, it’s dull. Secondly, it’s not targeting the person reading the article - what do they care about the difficulties “many people” have with losing weight? They only care about THEIR weight problem!

Try to come up with an opening paragraph that gives the reader that warm “Hey, this is about me!” feeling right away. Better still; try to generate a rush of excitement - “This could be the answer I’ve been looking for…”

Example: “The diet gurus make it all sound so easy: to lose weight, all you have to do is expend more energy than you take in. Huh! If it were that simple, the “Big People” stores would be out of business in a heartbeat. Luckily for those of us who are tired of diets, gyms and dull group meetings, there is a back-to-basics way to tackle this. A way that won’t cost you a fortune or leave you feeling deprived.”

== 3. Write As You Speak… Then Edit! ==

The sample opening above also illustrates the importance of the tone you use in your article. You need ‘meat’ in each article, of course, to make it worth reading - but make sure it’s not indigestible!

You’re better off writing your article in a natural, relaxed style that’s akin to normal conversation. It doesn’t matter if the first draft is a little too informal - you can fix that when you edit. Naturally you don’t want to irritate your readers with a too-breezy style, but too-formal is worse. Readers may want facts, tips, and strategies, but they hope to be entertained, too! Let your personality shine through.

== 4. End On A High ==

What’s one of the biggest problems with most articles? They fizzle out! Writers often don’t know how to end on an upbeat note. They either just stop dead or they come up with a trite ending like: “So what are you waiting for? Get started today!”

The beginning and the end of your article are the two parts that make the biggest impression. Start by creating a feeling of anticipation… and leave them feeling satisfied (or excited) when you finish.

If you are offering advice to help them solve a problem (like obesity) gives your readers a reason to feel optimistic and good about them. Don’t make rash promises… but do offer hope. If you are giving hints on marketing or business, sum up the benefits of acting on your tips. You can also experiment with using a pithy/humorous quote, or giving readers a specific action to get them started. Be creative - and don’t rush it.

Here’s a final tip: create an article-writing cheat-sheet for yourself. Divide it into beginnings/middles/ends and add more useful strategies as you think of them. (For example, using the tips in this article, you might write: ENDINGS - end on a high, offer hope, use funny quote, suggest action to get started.)

Do this, and you’ll be steadily cranking out articles that everyone wants to publish!

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Keywords are an essential component of producing a web site. These are the words which the search engines use to help categorize and rank your pages. For instance, if your web site is about ‘writing articles’ then your keywords could include ‘writing’, ‘articles’, ‘article writing’ and so on.

The advice from many web designers and search engine optimizers has been to find as many keywords as you can. They advise you to search for keywords using a variety of online tools and software programs which can identify leading keywords. At first sight this seems attractive, but it actually defies logic.

Let’s take a look at the aim of a search engine. It’s job is to track down pages that meet the specific search term that a web surfer has typed in. The more closely the pages it serves up match the search term, the better it is for users. Search engines need to be as accurate as possible in delivering the right material to their users. Otherwise the web surfer goes elsewhere.

Now imagine you are a search engine algorithm - the mathematical program which calculates the probability of any web page matching the search term typed in. If the page has hundreds, or thousands of keywords you’ll be a bit confused. For instance, is this web page about ‘article writing’, or is it about ‘feature writing for journalists’. They are different things. You’ll end up knowing the page is relevant but not that relevant. So you rank it down the bottom.

But what if the page only has the keyword ‘article writing’ several times? You’re absolutely clear the page is about article writing and so you rank it highly.

Admittedly, it’s not quite as simple as this. But this is the principle of search engine technology. It is trying to find the most relevant pages that match the search term.

What this means for Internet marketers is that you need separate pages for each keyword. Focus each page on each individual keyword. Use the keyword in headings, sub-headings, the page text, the page title tag and in the meta tags. Avoid having pages which contain several keywords as that simply confuses the search engines and lowers your rankings.

So forget the advice to have hundreds or thousands of keywords. Go for single pages that match single keywords and you will find your page traffic increase.

This trick also works for Google AdWords. Each advert should apply to just a handful of keywords - you get much greater click through rates and therefore cheaper advertising when you only have a couple of keywords per advert. If you have hundreds of keywords you’ll find you’ll get greater results by having keyword specific ads, rather than one advert with hundreds of keywords.

So go against the advice of filling your pages and adverts with keywords. Go specific.

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