Article Marketing vs. Blog Posts

[thewahwife]

Newbie here again. After staying up way too late reading Lynn's blog posts, then honestly dreaming about writing, keywords and competition all night I have another article marketing question.

I understand that everyone's niche is going to receive different results from article marketing. I've seen some people say don't bother and others say do it religiously. I'm the type of person that has to try it for myself, so my question is this:

When you find your perfect keywords, you've analyzed the competition and this would make both a great "expert" article and a blog post that includes affiliate links what do you do? Do you write your expert "unaffiliated" article, then rewrite it for a blog post with links for your site? Pick one or the other?

For some unknown reason this article marketing stuff is becoming the ONE thing I can't get a clear plan or understanding of the best way I want to approach it.

[wade_watson]

There are varying opinions on this, but I'd say write your blog post first. This is the one you can build traffic to over time and make money with. As long as you're the original author, you can repurpose the article later with Ezine Articles and others all or in part. Ezine has a rule that they don't want you submitting articles to them that have been on other article sites, but posts from your own blog are OK.

What a lot of people do is write a longer blog post and then an article or two derived from it, but with out all the content. That way you can deep link to the blog post from your article and offer more to read on the topic.

While mass-article writers can generate steady income from articles (in certain very popular niches), the vast majority of articles published at sites like EZA receive very low view counts-- like a few hundred a year. Some people spend time backlinking them just as they do a website, but I think your time is better spent getting traffic to your website. I think the real strength of article sites are for backlinks, thus traffic from the article is less important.

Wade Watson

[thewahwife]

Thanks, Wade. I think maybe that's why I'm having such a hard time grasping article marketing. It's my stuff, so I want it on my site. lol

Maybe if I start thinking of it along the lines of a "teaser" or a guest post, I can get a better perspective of its value and how I want to work it.

[wade_watson]

I'm with you. Articles don't have to be very long or complex to serve their purpose. You do want to provide some value to the reader and justify the title. Some article marketing "experts" used to suggest keeping articles to 300 words or so, but after EZA did kind of "crackdown" a few months ago in response to spammy abusers, it's probably best to go 500 or more. I don't know about you, but I always find that easy (am I long winded?).

As Karo in 30DC said, article writing is about "giving". Make sure you give something so useful or compelling and they'll want more of what you have to offer.

Wade