So, you have a blog set up. You are outfitting it with tools that make it easier for people to take part in your discussions. Now, all you need is the people. Here are a few way to drive traffic to your blog using articles.

The biggest part of blogging is writing. In essence, it is an online journal. But, blogging has evolved from simply writing your thoughts to informing the public about different subjects that you are interested in.

Each one of your posts is a new article for readers to see and digest. But, who is going to see all of those amazing posts if you don’t have any traffic besides your cousin Phil and your mom?

Article Marketing

One way to get the traffic you need is by getting your name in the open. Article marketing is the act of submitting articles to directories where others can find you. They may even decide to post some of your work on their sites.

There are many benefits to article marketing:

• Build credibility and visibility
• Build your brand
• Increase traffic to your blog (the basis of this article)
• Advertising for your products

Use that expert knowledge to let others know what you can do for them. Each article marketing site is different in their submission guidelines so read them all carefully. Getting published on some of the more popular sites (ezinearticles.com, ehow.com, buzzle.com and others) is like instant credibility with the readers.

So, what will you submit? If your blog has been up for some time, you can submit archived posts. Change the titles to be more catching. This way even if no one saw your posts on your blog, they get a second chance and so do you.

Consider rewriting your posts. Rewriting turns one article into several. By tweaking what you have already written, you can create two new articles from that one. Each can be submitted to a different article directory.

While you are prepping your articles for submission, don’t forget about optimizing your content for the search engines. Using keywords in your articles that search engines will pick up increases your page rankings for those words.

Since you are writing anyway, create some articles to market in other places. Each of those articles can be rewritten to create more articles to use as a marketing tool to drive traffic to your blog. Once they are there, it is up to you to keep them wowed so they stay.

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