Profitable Blogging

If you’re wanting to make money blogging, you need to have an article marketing strategy.  A what?  Let’s talk about what article marketing is, and why you need it in  order to make your blog successful.

Article Marketing 101

First, what exactly is article marketing?  It’s writing short articles (300 to 500 words) in your niche, and then distributing it to other blogs and article directories.  In your article, you include one or two links back to your site.

Aren’t you just providing content for other people’s sites though?   What good does that do for you?

It does a great thing for you, because your articles provide two things for your site:  free backlinks and targeted traffic!

The article publishers love new content.  Google loves backlinks, and you love targeted traffic.  It’s a win-win-win.

Where Do You Submit Your Articles?

The granddaddy of article publishing is a place called Ezine Articles.  I always submit my articles there first, and I find it’s the absolute best for getting traffic to my sites.  Ezine Articles is free, but be aware — they have high standards for what they do accept.  It’s not enough to just put a few paragraphs together and call it good.  However, they provide excellent FAQs for submissions.

There are also hundreds of other article directories, with the quality ranging from excellent to so-so.  Virtually all of these article directories are free to submit your articles.

And of course, there are other blogs you can have your articles published on.  The trick is to get the attention of the blog owner and hope that they will accept your article along with your links intact.  Without it costing you anything.

The only problem is that all this takes time to do the submissions to all these directories (which takes time away from your blog-building and article-writing).  But the upside is that the backlinks grow and grow over time, which ends up paying you back with better search engine rankings and targeted traffic.

Creating an Article Marketing Strategy

It’s not enough to submit articles willy-nilly; you need an article marketing strategy.  The reason is that by doing so, you are getting the most bang for your articles.  Since it takes time to write and distribute the articles, you want to be sure it will pay you back!

Your first tip for creating and article marketing strategy:  find and choose good keywords in your niche.  If you have a blog on, for example, weight loss supplements, you’ll want to find the best keywords surrounding your niche and write articles based on those keywords.  Then point the links on those articles to related posts on your blog.  People who like your information are likely to click through to your blog where they can make you the money.

Don’t write articles on red widgets and then point your links to your weight loss site.  While you might end up getting backlinks, you are highly unlikely to get targeted traffic back to your site!

Three More Article Marketing Tips to Use

This has gotten to be a bit of a long post, so I’ll stop for now.  It’s quite a bit of information to digest, and there is still more to know.

Up next:  3 tips for putting your article marketing strategy to work for you, with the least amount of time and effort.