Welcome to lesson 14.  

Imagine you have 1000 latest handphones that you have bought for a very cheap price. You decided to sell 2 phones for $100 and this is the lowest price in town. But how do you start selling the phones? Where do you get your first customer?  

Put the same concept into blogging. You have learnt how to write great content and it is time to showcase your work to the public. This is where marketing comes into play. Bloggers always wants more traffic. Traffic in internet means the amount of people visiting a particular website.

Why You Find Marketing Difficult

In layman terms, marketing means getting your blog expose to the public and letting people know the existence of your blog. However, marketing is the area where most bloggers have difficulties in. To me, bloggers failed in marketing their blog because of their eagerness to succeed in a short time. They expect great results from their marketing effort and are not satisfied seeing additional 1-5 readers for their blog daily.  

If you are thinking of getting 50-100 readers more per day from just one month of marketing, you can dream on. There isn’t a marketing technique that you can leverage on for that kind of results. You should be satisfied with getting 1-5 additional readers per day at the initial stage of blogging. 

All the marketing techniques are teaching you to take small steps to getting traffic. But how do you get as much attention as Problogger.net is getting? This is where your small steps will help you in reaching that goal.  

As more and more readers get to know your blog, you will notice that there will be more links to your articles. If you are lucky and your reader owns a medium sized blog and link to your article, you will see a massive amount of traffic which you could turn them into your regular readers.  

In the next few articles, I will be introducing to you the various marketing techniques you could use to build up your readership. You can choose 2-3 methods to market your blog and do it consistently for 1 month. You will be able to see the results by then.  

In this lesson, I will be discussing on the first method of marketing your blog – Article marketing.

What Is Article Marketing

Article marketing is a channel to showcase your content to its existing community. Contents are submitted to article directories to share information with its readers. Therefore, you are leveraging from its existing traffic using your submitted article.  

At the end of article, there is resource box in which you can include a couple of text and a link to your website. This is where you can market your blog using the submitted articles. My most recommended article directory is EzineArticles. Focus your energy on just submitting to this directory alone because it is the best place for article marketing.

Does Article Marketing Works?

There are many people in the world who have not come into contact with blogs and prefer to get information from article based. At the same time, there are many webmasters who turn to article directories to source for content to blog about. These are the groups of people you want to target and turn them into regular readers of your blog.

Article found in EzineArticles can be republished in any other websites by leaving the resource page untouched. If you have written a quality article, there is a chance that your article might be picked up by an individual and post it on their blog. Therefore, you have created for yourself another traffic source but results will vary depending on your niche.

Include This In Your Articles

1) 400-700 words

It is best to keep your articles within this range to keep the readers’ focus on it. People get distracted easily if there are too many words and there are cases where some might not even start reading. Therefore, keep it within this limit for maximum results.

2) Great headline

Make sure you give your article the best possible headline for the written content. Spent 5-10 mins reading my previous article on writing great headlines here. Do not neglect this process as this is the most essential part to get your readers to start reading on your article.

3) List article

Develop your article into list form. This makes it easy for readers to read and is proven to be most effective type of article. Elaborate on the numbered points and give a better overview on the topic that you are presenting.

Leveraging From Article Marketing

Submitting articles to EzineArticles can build up your creditability on your niche. This is important as it will determine how much your reader will trust your words. The more credible you are, the higher the potential of monetizing your blog. I will teach you more on this later in this blog. 

Secondly, it brings in quality traffic from your article. Readers who click your blog link on the resources page would mean that they are interested in the particular topic you are presenting. Therefore, it increases the chance of retaining them as loyal reader for your blog.  

Lastly, it increases the exposure of your blog. Article marketing creates another source for your blog to make known to the world. So why don’t make use of another channel to publicize your blog?  

Be consistent in article marketing if your want to see results. You can use your existing blog content to submit to EzineArticles but be sure to edit it. In this way, you get 2 times more exposure on the same article by publishing to 2 different places. The higher the quantity, the better the results you can get from it.  

Let me know of your effort in article marketing and the results you have gotten from it in the comments below. Share your experiences with the small community we have here in ABloggerBlog.

Tasks for lesson 14

1) Submit at least 1 article per week to EzineArticles.

2) Monitor your results over the month after your articles have been approved.

3) Do not neglect posting quality articles to your blog.  

Subscribed to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be introducing to you on forum marketing. Stay tune for it.  

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com